News & Stories

It’s that time of year again. No, not for a holiday singalong – I mean it’s time for opponents of Washington’s best-in-the-nation minimum wage to dust the cobwebs off their pro forma “minimum-wage-job-killer-blah-blah-blah” arguments, gin up a few facts sheets, and pen an op-ed or two. After all, that’s what happens most every year there’s […]

Imagine giving an extra 5% of the nation’s total annual income to the residents of Wasilla, Alaska starting in 1980, and you’ve got a good grasp of income inequality in the U.S. today. Thanks to lower tax rates for the rich and growing income inequality, $650 billion in wages that would have gone to middle-class […]

Efforts to ensure paid sick leave as a basic workplace right have been gaining steam across the country (did you hear the Seattle City Council passed a paid sick days ordinance?), and a flood of recent reports have highlighted the social and economic benefits of paid sick leave. A cost-benefit analysis by the Institute for […]

From the Columbia Journalism Review, by Ryan Chittum: Here’s how The Wall Street Journal framed  its report yesterday on several states raising the minimum wage next year: Small businesses, already on a tight budget, are looking for new ways to cut costs as they brace for minimum wage increases in several U.S. states next month. […]

From the Everett Herald: Occupy Wall Street has turned the national conversation to corporate privilege vs. the 99 percent. The mainstream media has “discovered” the yawning chasm in income, privilege and well-being between Main Street and Wall Street. No surprise — it is the same thing that we have all understood in the back of […]

Guest column by Brendan Williams, former Washington State legislator Given that the state’s “paramount” constitutional duty is “to make ample provision for” K-12 education, the focus on proposed budget cuts affecting kids is, not surprisingly, on education. This focus is not undeserved. Even as it made a false promise of education reform in 2009, the […]

Nick Hanauer – a wealthy Seattle entrepreneur, philanthropist and venture capitalist – recently authored a column in Bloomberg Business week titled “Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators.” His argument: simple supply and demand. That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. […]

Excerpted from the Seattle Weekly: Both Marilyn Watkins, policy director for the Economic Opportunity Institute, and Eric de Place, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, recommend closing as many of the 567 tax loopholes currently afforded by the state to various corporations and industries. Watkins is particularly opposed to tax breaks for the farm […]

By David Cay Johnston, excerpted from Reuters: Everyone seems to know that about half of Americans paid no income taxes in 2009 and that the top 1 percent paid about 37 percent of the income taxes. But how many people know that households making less than $75,000 collectively paid more federal income tax than those […]

via Slog: On teacherswithspine.org, here’s a trailer for a bona fide Washington State thriller (made by Sandy Cioffi and three graduates from the now-maybe-defunct, maybe-coming-back-in-some-form Seattle Central Community College film program—a possible deal may be in the works to restore it, which would be great). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWOnMw7aNjo]

The upcoming special session in Olympia will focus on the state budget – but voters (and our tax dollars!) would get a lot more value out of it if legislators put an equal amount of time and effort into creating quality jobs with lasting value for local communities. And Washington legislators have lots of options […]

What would you do if your employer didn’t pay you for your time on the job? Or failed to compensate you for overtime? Or paid you less than the minimum wage? These types of wage violations actually aren’t that uncommon. Casa Latina, a Seattle non-profit that has been battling wage theft for over ten years, […]

Via Sightline: What does it take to live in Washington state? To pay for the bare necessities like rent, childcare, groceries, clothing, shoes, transport to work, telephone service, cleaning products and household items? (That’s without the additional costs of any comforts such as savings, vacations, cable TV, or the occasional restaurant meal.) A new report […]

Guest column by Brendan Williams, former Washington State legislator When 61% of Ohio voters rejected Issue 2 and repealed an anti-labor bill signed into law March 31 by Republican Governor John Kasich on Election Day, considerable attention was paid to the fact that the repealed bill sought to impose draconian curbs upon the ability of […]

Editor’s note: Look familiar? This post originally appeared on 11/23/2010. In my family, probably like yours, one of our Thanksgiving dinner traditions is to go around the table and say what we are thankful for. It’s an important reminder of how lucky we are to have our friends and family with us. Odds are, no […]

From PR Watch: Will Philadelphia‘s and Seattle‘s new paid sick leave ordinances be overridden by their states? Or will the states back them up, as Connecticut has? If the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has any say in the matter, Pennsylvania and Washington State should override the city ordinances as Wisconsin has done. ALEC is […]

From the Everett Herald: If you only read the headlines, you might think that by not reaching an agreement to cut the nation’s deficit, the congressional “supercommittee” was a colossal failure. But in fact, their failure was our success. We dodged a bullet that would have decreased economic security and increased personal misery. One ploy […]

Cross-posted from MomsRising.org: For a long time – even before some of the current crop of presidential candidates began accusing America’s most successful public program of being nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme” – the national conversation about “fixing” Social Security has centered around cutting benefits or raising the retirement age (also a benefit cut, […]

From the San Juan Islander: SEATTLE – Just as most Washington families are finishing off the Thanksgiving leftovers, state lawmakers will be headed into a special session to trim as much as $2 billion from the state budget. The special session starts a week from today. Most of the budget gap, says Marilyn Watkins, policy […]

ProPublica has a good rundown on a much-discussed study by the Congressional Budget Office showing that over the past three decades the income of the highest-paid Americans has soared while the income of others has grown much more modestly. Now they’ve taken it to the next level with an online app which allows you to […]

Do you remember the “hostage” movie meme of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s? Sylvester Stallone,  Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington, Mel Gibson  and other leading men all churned out movies with similar plot lines: Someone has been kidnapped or captured, and the hero swoops in to save the day (usually). Well, someone call […]

With the official end of the Great Recession two and a half years behind us, few people have seen any economic gains – and many are worse off than at the height of the recession, including women and children. There’s no doubt men have experienced higher unemployment rates than women throughout the recession and recovery. […]