Monday, December 30, 2013

With only non-airport workers "winning," SeaTac's Propositon 1 court ruling signifies a damaging loss of face for proponents.


This past Friday, King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas essentially gutted the heart of SeaTac’s Proposition 1, which mandated a $15 minimum wage for non-union contract and concessionaire workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Darvas had already telegraphed her attitude toward the measure when she ruled last summer that it did not qualify for the ballot due to signature “irregularities.” This was later overruled on appeal. This time Darvas ruled that although the measure was technically “constitutional,” the voters of the city of SeaTac had no authority to pass regulations that effected airport operations, which is under the purview of the Port of Seattle. According to the judge, only the state legislature has the authority to force the Port to raise wages. 

Thus it will only be workers in “hospitality” businesses and parking facilities outside the airport presumably used by airport customers who will benefit, since they reside outside the jurisdiction of the Port, and within the city’s. This means that only a quarter of the 6,300 workers originally envisioned to receive the new minimum wage on January 1 will, presumably, receive their wage bump. 

Proponents of Proposition 1 say they will appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court. I have already voiced my opposition to the measure and my reasons for it. While I still stand by this, and the judge’s ruling was legally correct and should not be overruled, I can’t help but be cynical about the driblets on the peripheries. For example, an argument by one of the plaintiffs is that workers should only expect to receive a “living wage,” sick pay and health benefits through “promotion.” The problem with this argument is that somebody has to do the low-level “dirty work,” and that is the vast majority of airport workers; the opportunity for promotion is actually rather limited. 

Another item of interest is the fact that labor groups and unions who are behind Proposition 1 badly miscalculated. First of all, they didn’t necessarily want to help contract workers who worked in the airport, but to harm their employment status to the benefit of the existing union work force. Even more so, it wasn’t their intention to see only workers from the city’s private businesses to benefit, in fact those workers were never the intended targets of the measure, but just thrown in there to show that proponents were not targeting just non-union airport workers for potential hurt. But the effect of the judge’s ruling has the contrary effect of giving the people who have jobs like sitting in those little shacks in parking lots all day a “minimum” wage of $15 an hour—practically a king’s ransom for them.

Why did this happen? Proposition 1 proponents should have known that the best argument against the measure—that the city had no authority over Port of Seattle operations—was the major flaw that foiled their underhanded intentions. They should have known that it was the Port—not the city—that should have been the focus of their efforts. If Darvas’ ruling stands, not only will airport unions have suffered a setback, they may find that the matter of “trust” that thwarted their efforts to unionize contract workers at the airport will blow back in their faces once the sense of “unfairness” about who actually now benefits from the measure is understood.

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