BossFeed Briefing for November 16, 2022. Last Saturday, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated far-right Republican Joe Kent in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. Last Monday, 48,000 graduate student workers at the University of California went on strike to demand higher wages, childcare subsidies, and expanded family leave. Yesterday, a federal judge struck down Title 42, an immigration rule used by both the Trump and Biden administrations to turn away asylum-seekers at the southern border. Today is National Fast Food Day, a good reminder that the WA minimum wage will increase to $15.74/hour in 2023. This Saturday is Trans Day of Remembrance, which honors trans people killed by acts of anti-trans violence.
Three things to know this week:
Service industry workers in Washington, D.C. won an end to the tipped minimum wage, ensuring customer tips are truly on top of wages. D.C joins eight states, including Washington, that have banned the so-called “tip credit.”
Workers in Nebraska won a statewide $15/hour minimum wage with 59% of the vote. Donald Trump carried Nebraska with 58% in the 2020 presidential election.
Four WA-based companies—Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Boeing—spent a combined $823,075 on midterm election races across the state. That amount doesn’t include unlimited and undisclosed donations to “Super PACS.”
Two things to ask:
Why not try it here? A large UK study of the four-day workweek showed promising results. In similar studies in Iceland, New Zealand, Belgium, and Japan, workers have reported improved sleep, job satisfaction, and overall happiness.
That’s the thing they’re apologizing for? On Twitter, a fake account for pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced that “insulin is free now”. The real company was quick to apologize to the people who encountered this “misleading message”, but not to the people it charges $300 for life-saving medicine that costs $10 to make.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
On election night, a stunning 82% of Tukwila voters approved a $3/hour increase to the city’s minimum wage, bringing it on par with the minimum wage in neighboring Seattle and SeaTac. In this piece for The Stranger, campaign coordinator Katie Wilson highlights an important lesson from this landslide victory: over the past decade, workers in our region have completely transformed the debate around raising the pay floor. Back in 2013, when workers in SeaTac and Seattle won the Fight for Fifteen, we faced massive opposition from giant corporations, claiming it was somehow unrealistic for people to be able to afford food and somehow disastrous for the economy for people to have more money to spend at local businesses. In contrast, Wilson notes, the Raise the Wage Tukwila campaign saw no organized opposition, and so an “unusual experiment” played out: “[We tested] the strength of public support for raising wages in the absence of well-funded fear mongering…[and] it turns out that requiring employers to pay something closer to a living wage is overwhelmingly popular.”
Read this far? Consider yourself briefed, boss.
Let us know what you think about this week's look at the world of work, wages, and inequality!