Today Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth announced that she would be tabling legislation to protect total compensation in Seattle, in favor of a stakeholder process.
In response, the Seattle Restaurant Alliance released the following statement.
Far from keeping faith with the 2014 agreement to raise Seattle’s minimum wage, the failure of leadership to address the unsustainable impacts of the ordinance today represents a betrayal of that agreement. The goal of the employer community’s participation in the deal was to avoid running small business owners off a fiscal cliff and to avoid forcing massive cost-cutting decisions onto their businesses, including cutting employee hours. Increasing labor costs by 20 percent overnight – which was not part of the agreement but will happen if no action is taken by the City – will do exactly that.
For a reminder, the wage schedules under Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance were meant to gradually increase each year by an average of 6.7 percent and harmonize in 2025 at $18.13 per hour – not jolt up by 20 percent in the final year to more than $20 per hour.
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No one could have anticipated the impacts of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, followed by the highest inflation in half a century – not small business owners, not labor leaders, not elected officials. Claiming that small businesses ‘failed to prepare’ ignores reality and the stated assumptions of the deal itself. Seattle’s restaurants would be content to pay the $18.13 minimum wage assumed in the 2014 deal. But no one was prepared for how wildly off the mark the deal’s 2.4 percent CPI assumption, reasonable at the time, would prove to be after the arrival of COVID.
In June of 2021, Seattle’s CPI increased to 5.5 percent, reaching as high as 10 percent in June of 2022, and has yet to return to under 4 percent since.
A policymaking environment that dealt in reality rather than ideology would address these facts, not try to argue them away. We’re disappointed but are eager to learn how the stakeholder process will substantively respond to these historic and unanticipated circumstances – which will carry real harm to Seattle’s small restaurants and the hardworking people they employ if they go unaddressed.
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