$15 Round 2: TKO
Our Victory Means Seattle Now Has the Highest Major-City Minimum Wage
January 26, 2025 by Logan Swan
Working people rally in Seattle in 2014 for the 15 NOW campaign launched by Kshama Sawant
To celebrate the ten-year mark of our movement’s victory on the first $15 minimum wage in a major city, Seattle Democrats attacked working people and tried to undermine the historic minimum wage law. This past July, Seattle City Council Democrat Joy Hollingsworth introduced legislation to create a permanent sub-minimum wage underclass and deny a more than $3/hour wage increase to 200,000 eligible workers across the city. We fought back – and won. As of January 1, the minimum wage for all workers in Seattle is now the highest in the country: $20.76 an hour.
While it was dressed up in all kinds of language including alleged “concern” for small businesses, the result of the legislation for workers is simple: employers could pay workers who receive tips or healthcare benefits $3.69 LESS an hour.
In 2014, labor leaders made a shameful (and unnecessary!) concession: to create a 10-year phase-in for the minimum wage for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. That phase-in was about to end, and the Democrats on the City Council were eager to not let the opportunity slip by to make it permanent. Local business owners made a racket about “not being able to afford” to pay their employees the bare minimum, citing unforeseen circumstances like the pandemic, inflation, and stay-at-home orders; as if workers aren’t the ones paying for corporate price gouging at the grocery store or the gas pump, not to mention the landlord!
In 2014, Kshama Sawant’s socialist council office and our movement had won overwhelming support for $15, and coming off the heels of Obama’s Wall Street bailouts and the Occupy movement, there was little sympathy for profitable big businesses paying workers poverty wages. Big business attempted to reframe $15 around small businesses not being able to afford to pay higher wages. The response from our movement and Kshama Sawant was to call their bluff by proposing to tax big business to subsidize small businesses that were genuinely struggling to increase workers’ pay. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, small businesses largely sided with big business over their workers. The real betrayal, however, was that labor leaders took the bait and made a show of “reasonable compromise” — at the expense of workers! Loopholes like long phase-ins and tiered wages were introduced, which laid the formal basis for Hollingsworth’s attack ten years later.
Doomsday scenarios of layoffs and economic meltdown were forecast by company owners and their media; the same arguments they made in opposition to our 15 NOW campaign in 2014, and again in response to our Tax Amazon campaign. Unsurprisingly, they were blowing smoke then (just as now) and after those victories transferred billions of dollars into the pockets of the city’s lowest paid workers, Seattle’s economic boom continued unabated. The real threat to the bosses was not economic, but political: the 15 NOW victory provided an example to workers everywhere that we can organize, fight, and win. This concern was well-founded — we took our 15 NOW movement to cities across the country, including Minneapolis which became the first city in the Midwest to pass $15.
Last August, following the Democrats’ attempt to roll back the $15 victory, Workers Strike Back and Kshama Sawant organized with union members and restaurant workers to show up at City Hall and defend our wages from the bosses and their Democratic establishment proxies. Some workers took it further: after the owner of local chain Cherry Street Coffee threatened store closures if he had to pay the minimum wage, nearly a dozen workers quit or walked out, followed by a majority of staff across locations organizing and drafting a list of demands. As one employee said, “The fact that he had to shut down a store is proof of how much power we have as workers.” This was followed by a strike, which was organized with the help of Workers Strike Back and successfully shut down every Cherry Street location in the city, sending a powerful signal to both the Cherry Street boss and employers across the city: don’t mess with $15.
Cherry Street Coffee House workers speak on the picket line with Kshama Sawant after successfully shutting down their store in
We were able to force the political establishment into a retreat: Councilmember Hollingsworth withdrew her bill to make the sub-minimum wage permanent. But we should be clear in understanding that our defense of $15 was only successful because working people got organized and fought back.
The reality is that none of our gains are safe under the capitalist system, which is run in the interests of the billionaires and bosses. Just in the last few years we’ve seen basic rights like child labor laws, union protections, and Roe v. Wade rolled back, with threats of further attacks on the horizon regardless of Democrats or Republicans holding power.
We also need to be clear that the Democrats are not on our side. Their loophole of “ten years for small businesses to catch up” provided the Trojan horse for employers to try and claw back the gains made by workers a decade ago. Just because they say one thing now, doesn’t mean in any way that they’ll follow through; remember all the promises the Democrats made about codifying Roe and implementing $15 federally?
Democrats often betray working people quietly, letting Republicans take the lead in the most blatant attacks. But in cities like Seattle with no elected Republicans to blame, Democrats more nakedly represent the interests of bosses and landlords. Even the so-called “progressive” Democrats played a consistently rotten role. State house-elected Democrat and self-identified “democratic socialist” Shawn Scott was unwilling to upset his relations with the political establishment by defending minimum wage workers on $15.
Workers Strike Back members rally at City Hall against Democrats’ attack on $15
“Progressive” Councilmember Tammy Morales was also completely silent during this attack on the minimum wage, before crowning her lackluster (at best) record of political retreats by resigning from the council a few months later. Turns out relegating yourself to a political wallflower won’t protect your career, as ousted members of “the Squad” can confirm. Big business will accept nothing short of the most full-throated support for its agenda, and workers don’t have the luxury of being patient with cowards who run from the fights for what we need.
Most unfortunate is that it wasn’t only Democrats sitting out the fight. Both DSA–with the exception of individual members involved with Restaurant Workers United and the CWA–and our former organization Socialist Alternative were missing in action throughout this attack.
We should be proud of the work we’ve done in defending the minimum wage, but be ready to fight the Democrats’ next maneuver. The landlord lobby and their paid-for politicians have already signaled their intentions to undermine our renter’s rights victories like the winter evictions ban, with Hollingsworth calling her attack on $15 “an opening salvo.”
Workers Strike Back isn’t waiting to play defense. We’re fighting to Tax Amazon again, organizing to pass Seattle’s Proposition 1A and win $52 million more a year from big business to fund social housing. As they say “the best defense is a good offense” — there’s never been a better time to join Workers Strike Back and start organizing NOW.
It’s abundantly clear to a majority of people that we need an alternative to the two parties of big business; this attempt by the supposedly “pro-labor” Democratic Party to undermine workers’ wages is only a drop in the bucket. Workers Strike Back is organizing to build working class movements independent of the two parties of the bosses at our conference in February. We must get organized to fight for our needs and against the rich and their two parties.
