News and perspective on public policy issues affecting Washington's economy and quality of life, brought to you by the Economic Opportunity Institute.
Today the Senate Labor & Workforce Development Committee is holding a work session on teen unemployment, at which they are discussing Senate Bill 5275. SB 5275 would “allow employers to pay a training wage for a specified period of time,” giving employers the to authority to pay workers of any age and skill level less than the minimum wage […]
When you work, you get paid. That’s just common sense. Indeed, if you don’t get paid for your work, you are little better than an indentured servant. And we got rid of that practice, along with slavery, over a 100 years ago. Our laws are quite clear: workers must be paid at least the minimum […]
On New Year’s Day, our states accomplished something that Congress has achieved only erratically over the past 40 years: raising the minimum wage. By now, minimum wage increases have become a routine practice in our home states, thanks to a key policy reform known as indexing, which establishes automatic annual adjustments to the minimum wage to keep pace with the rising cost of living each year. Washington led the nation in adopting indexing in 1998, and Oregon followed suit in 2002. In each state, the adoption of indexing resulted from ballot initiatives that passed with roughly two-thirds of public support.
When my kids got their first jobs, I was happy that we in Washington had voted for a decent minimum wage. I knew that they couldn’t be completely taken advantage of, and that they would be doing better in Washington than in other states. Now we have reason to celebrate again, because just on Tuesday […]
