Blog

Petition Drive Postponed

by

Yesterday, March 17, 2020, the 15 Now Tacoma Board of Directors (BOD) decided to postpone further gathering of signatures until at least the end of April because of the current pandemic. At the end of April, the BOD will decide how we will continue this campaign. It is possible we may delay any attempt to put Initiative 9 on the 2020 ballot and may go for a 2021 initiative instead.

We are concerned about the health of our volunteers as well as the health of petition signers. Health authorities tell us a person may be infected but show no signs of illness. Such people can pass on the COVID 19 to other, more vulnerable members of society.

We are very grateful to those who have supported Initiative 9 with their spirit and hard work. And we are grateful to everyone who signed our petition, spread the word, or in general worked for the betterment of working people. We have every reason to be proud of ourselves.

We’re not calling it quits. This is only a postponement. We will continue to maintain the website and continue trying to get endorsers for making the minimum wage to be a living wage. Hard times are ahead of us, but we must not allow ourselves to be defeated.

Please take care of yourselves, look after your loved ones and neighbors.

In solidarity,

15 Now Tacoma Board of Directors

Victory for Tacoma Workers and Immigrants

by
Click for Important COVID 19 Info

Even Private Prisons Must Obey The Law

Northwest Detention CenterA Federal Court ruled that the NWDC must pay at least a minimum wage to inmates who work on site. This is a victory, not only for the worker inmates, but for all of Tacoma’s low-wage workers who fight for economic justice.

Seattle Times staff writer Mike Carter reported on the story on May 13. This story tells us that Federal Judge Robert Bryan has just ruled Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) must pay state minimum wage to worker inmates. In other words, NWDC can no longer get away with paying only $1/day to these locked-up workers.

Read more

Why Tacoma Needs a $15/hour Minimum Wage

by

Homeless tragedy, low wageBack in 2014, the ORIGINAL 15 Now Tacoma website published a post titled Why Tacoma Needs a $15/hour Minimum Wage. The reasons that post gave for raising the minimum wage are still largely valid, and you might want to check it out after you’ve read this article..

Here are some more recent data:

In 2017, the official poverty rate in Tacoma was 17%, not much changed from 2014. And according to the City of Tacoma’s 2016 Community Needs Assessment Report, 26% of Tacoma’s children still live in poverty.

Read more

How To Win the $15/hr Min Wage Fight

by

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.”

Read more

Is $15/hr Too Much, Too Fast?

by

By Max Hyland Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Reprinted from a Facebook Post ***** *****

This post originally appeared under a different name in the old 15 Now website. Here is a link to the original.

One of the critiques we have heard is that immediately increasing the minimum wage by 58% will have a disastrous effect on the economy. Usually to go along with this complaint is a claim that the minimum wage has never gone up that fast before, which is false. In 1949 the minimum wage went up by 87.5% all at once, overnight. Just a few years later it went up another 33%, overnight. The 50s were a period of strong economic growth, explosive economic growth, and unprecedented increases in the distribution of wealth and the prosperity of the American public including businesses.

Read more

%d bloggers like this: