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Victory for Tacoma Workers and Immigrants

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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.

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Why Tacoma Needs a $15/hour Minimum Wage

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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.

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How To Win the $15/hr Min Wage Fight

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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.”

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Uncle Weston, Wages, Inflation, and Killing Jobs

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This article first appeared in the ORIGINAL 15 Now Tacoma website several years ago.

You’re at a typically crowded and raucous family get-together picnic. Uncle Weston’s voice hovers above the park, mingling with the smell of barbecue and camaraderie. Once again, he’s handing out wisdom to the young folks.

Uncle Weston loves to tell younger family members (like you) that you’re all misguided. Your mother was the one who set him off. After your mom tells Uncle Weston that you’ve been working on Tacoma’s Yes on Prop 1 campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour, Uncle Weston rises up on his haunches, mounts his soapbox, inflates his bellows, and let loose with a mighty blast of wisdom.

Now you’ve always considered Uncle Weston to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, although he himself says he’s just a realistic adult. He tolerates your lefty leanings, and he thinks your political instincts are naive, if well intentioned. He says, “You’ll outgrow this liberalism when you grow up.” He paraphrases the old adage, “If you’re not radical when you’re young, you have no heart. And if you’re not conservative when you’ve matured a bit, you have no common sense.”

Gently draping his not-entirely sober arm around your shoulder, he says incredulously, “Do you really want to raise the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour!?!?”

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