Debate surrounding the effort to increase the minimum wage in Tacoma to $15 an hour is one step closer to facing voters. The group 15 Now Tacoma has filed the legal paperwork to start gathering signatures for an initiative to put the idea on a future ballot.
The effort to gather signatures could start later this month if the initiative wording is not legally challenged. The effort would need about 3,000 signatures by the early summer to be valid.
If the signatures are gathered in time and are validated, the City Council could adopt the plan outright or the initiative would otherwise ride the ballot next November. A petition to the council that was filed in October included signatures of 1,300 people.
The official wording of the petition summary is, “Initiative No. 1 concerns establishing a minimum wage for the City of Tacoma. This measure would require employers of a certain size to pay employees who work in the City of Tacoma, or maintain, report to, or are supervised from, an office in the city, an hourly wage of not less than $15, adjusted annually by the rate of inflation. This measure would also create a citizen commission to monitor the city’s administration and enforcement of the minimum wage requirements, and make violation a crime. Should this measure be enacted into law?”
The basics of the initiative would set the minimum wage for Tacoma businesses at $15 per hour for operations with revenues of more than $300,000 a year starting in 2016. Smaller businesses would be exempt. Future wage increases would be based on the annual cost of living index for Puget Sound, which includes Seattle and Bellevue as well as Pierce County. Washington’s minimum wage of $9.32 an hour is already among the highest in America. SeaTac and Seattle already have passed $15 minimum wage rules as well as mandatory sick leave policies that are also on the Tacoma City Council agenda.
Mayor Marilyn Strickland outlined her sick-leave proposal at a Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday. The proposal would take effect in 2016 and require employers to provide employees with a minimum of one hour of paid leave for every 40 hours worked for at least three days of leave per calendar year. That paid leave can be used for a worker’s own health or for the care of a worker’s loved one as well as for domestic violence-related legal actions and other emergency situations. A business will not be required to allow workers to bank their unused sick leave beyond the 24 hours of full-time employment for use in future years. The paid leave could only be used after six months of employment. Employers will also not be required to allow workers to loan sick leave based on future employment. Workers, however, could loan other workers their sick leave if they wish.
Restaurants and bars could offer shift changes to accommodate sick workers, but neither the business nor the worker are required to offer or accept the trading of work hours.
Employers will be required to certify that their operations compliance with this city’s paid leave code as part of their business license applications and will be required to notify what accrued hours workers have each pay period.
Violations could cost $250 or two times the total value of unpaid sick leave that was denied, whichever is higher.
Paid leave has been a rallying cry for labor groups, which want more time. Healthy Tacoma, for example, has been calling for nine days of paid leave. Its proposal would have a three-tiered system for small, medium and large businesses, where small operations would have to offer five days of leave, medium-sized businesses would have to offer nine days and companies with more than 250 workers would have to offer 13 days.
Some 37,000 workers in Tacoma, about 40 percent, are employed where no sick leave is offered. About three in four of those employees work at restaurants.