What We Must Do to Win

Four years after our first try to pass a ballot measure raising Tacoma’s minimum wage to $15/hour, we’re in a much better position to succeed. Here’s what we need to do to win:

1. We will need to craft an initiative proposal that will gain enough voter support to pass. We can use much of the language of the last one, with some changes and improvements. Our initiative writing team members and supporters are working on that now.
2. We will need to recruit more volunteer activists. A large campaign will require coordinated volunteer activity. Thus, we need to mount an outreach campaign through social media and involvement in community forums. We will reach out via our internet presence and our web page. We will need to organize community forums and debates. We will need to reach out to working class communities, labor union groups, minority communities, religious communities, neighborhood groups, and public events. In these venues, we will seek to recruit greater and greater numbers of volunteer activists. Those volunteer activists will be able to conduct further outreach and gather signatures when we work to qualify the initiative for the 2020 ballot. Later, those volunteer activists will be able to help in our get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts.
3. An important thing we need to do is register people who normally don’t vote or haven’t done so in years. Many, likely most, of those people are low-wage workers. Many are minority, single mothers, even ex-offenders. This sizable layer of Tacoma’s working class may feel so alienated from political activism that they don’t bother to turn out to vote. We need to have a concerted campaign to register these voters, telling them we’re from 15 Now Tacoma, and we intend on giving them a chance to vote themselves a raise. This hard personal doorbelling will give us a chance to educate these low-wage workers. Last time, many employers told their workers that if they passed the 15/hour minimum wage, they may lose their jobs. We need to explain why this is not so. Our organizers need to keep careful records about each visit so we can organize a followup as part of our GOTV campaign when we’ve qualified the initiative. See the article on this site titled “Why Tacoma Needs a 15/hour Minimum Wage.”

We have several advantages as we begin this fight. Voter sentiment for a $15/hour minimum wage is at an all-time high. The popularity of this demand makes our victory much more achievable in 2020 than it was in 2015.

Here’s what a 1/24/2019 article on The Hill website says about potential support for raising the $15/hour minimum wage:

The latest Hill-HarrisX poll found that 55 percent of registered voters said they would support raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Another 27 percent said it should be increased but to a lesser amount.

We seek elementary justice, a just wage, a fair wage. A just and fair minimum wage can only mean a living wage. According to a NY Times article, the average age of minimum wage workers was 35 a few years ago.

People who work hard full time should be able to meet basic living expenses without public assistance or a second or third job. Tacoma’s current minimum wage only brings in $25,688 per year, and that’s not a livable wage.