My annual November weekend in Seattle reminded me how different that city is from Vancouver.
A bus tour to the Boeing plant in Everett took me past Amazon’s dozen-or-so office buildings for Seattle workers. Then heads swiveled to see the $500 million headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest foundation in the world. World-beating corporations have a big footprint here – Microsoft has its own 53-bus fleet and Boeing’s 98-acre Everett factory is the biggest building (by volume) in the world.
But the most visceral difference was the experience of walking around downtown, where the numbers of down-and-out people are so much higher than we see (now) in Vancouver. That’s partly the result of the City of Vancouver frantically pushing street homeless people out of sight, some into social housing buildings where their preponderance is making life hell for other tenants.
But it’s also a reflection of the wider division between the top income earners and the people falling through the bottom in the U.S. The political pushback is having some major repercussions for businesses in Washington state.
In the November civic election, aside from approving a ward system for the 2015 election, Seattle voters elected the first avowedly socialist city councillor. Indian-born former software engineer Kshama Sawant, a leader in the Occupy Seattle movement, is vowing to make her first mark in politics by leading the push for a $15 minimum-wage ordinance. This attempt to shore up the bottom end of the income spectrum is not just a socialist fantasy. It’s backed by Seattle’s former mayor and new mayor and its entire city council. It is also now law in the suburban SeaTac municipality, where a close vote approving a $15 minimum wage is being contested in court. It would apply to around 6,300 workers at 72 non-union businesses in and around SeaTac International Airport, reflecting a similar initiative that raised the minimum wage of workers in Los Angeles International Airport to $10.91/hour or $15.67 without health benefits. The New York Times has calculated that if the hourly U.S. minimum wage had grown at the same rate as the wages of the top 1%, it would be at $22.62.
Because the majority of fast-food workers at the current minimum wage ($9.19 per hour in Washington, the highest in the U.S.) receive some form of public assistance, the $15-per-hour campaign was backed by Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer.
“It’s good for businesses. It’s good for the workers. And it’s good for taxpayers because now they don’t have to pick up the tab for government-funded poverty programs,” he told a Seattle newspaper.
While that debate rages on, a massive government-funded corporate welfare program for Boeing got strong approval in the state legislature: $8 billion in tax incentives to get the new Boeing 777X produced in Everett.
Even that might not be enough to keep 20,000 or so high-paying union jobs in Washington as Boeing talks about expanding in non-union jurisdictions. Boeing’s machinists union still hasn’t approved a new contract, and the company’s demand for a public multibillion-dollar transportation infrastructure upgrade is still unresolved. So Boeing is looking at 15 potential relocation sites as Sawant blasts its “terrorist” campaign. It was shocking to tour that massive airplane factory on a Saturday and see it idle on weekends. It was also shocking to me to learn that Boeing pays no income tax in Washington (nor does any business), and its employees pay no personal income taxes to the state (nor do any workers).
For those who find this all too much, mid-November marked the beginning of a 30-day period where newly legalized pot retailers could apply for a limited number of licences to set up shop around the city.
Seattle is taking a lot of deep breaths these days. •
