Well here's some good news: our minimum wage is safe!
At 5:00pm today, the three bills to roll back the wage officially "died" in the State Legislature.
Click here to add your voice and help us celebrate this big win for workers.
- SB 5530, which would have reduced the minimum wage to $9.53/hour for everyone who happened to work outside of King County is dead.
- SB 5532, which would have reduced the minimum wage to $9.53/hour for everyone whose employer happens to be classified as a nonprofit is dead.
- And SB 5541, which would have created a special sub-minimum wage for younger workers is dead too.
In other words: we did it! :)
So just to be clear...yeah, it's pretty ridiculous that any elected official would try to roll back our minimum wage just months after we voted by almost 60% to raise it. But these three anti-minimum wage bills had actually been sponsored by some key State Legislators. They had been endorsed by some of the most powerful big business lobby groups around. They had even gotten majority support in the Senate Commerce, Labor & Sports committee.
But then the Senators heard from you and thousands of other people across the state. We demanded that they take their hands off our minimum wage.
And we were heard.
In fact, the Senate leadership didn't even bring these bills up for a vote before today's "cutoff" in the State Legislature.
So let’s take a moment to celebrate what we’ve accomplished — and make sure we remember how it all happened!
Note: If you’ve been tracking the bills on paid family leave, you can exhale… for a moment :) It appears that these bills have been deemed "necessary to implement the budget" which is a weird thing that basically means the Legislature is giving itself more time to take on the issue. So stay tuned!