Comments

1
I'm in.
2
Hellz Yeah!
3
I DESERVE STUFF!

GIVE ME STUFF!!!!
4
We think this will generate a lot of jobs. For Portland.
5
@4

This is a good time to remember that the airlines at Sea-Tac airport had to raise wages to compete with the $15/hr jobs that surrounded the the airport in the town of Sea-Tac.

It's basic economics. If consumers in location A are paying more for widgets than consumers in location B, then then blah blah blah...

It's why nobody has ever been able to link a decrease in employment to an increase in the minimum wage.
6
I will happily sign their petition at the earliest opportunity.
8
Can anyone explain why franchise owners are lumped in with big business? Someone who invests in a single Subway franchise is a small business by any reasonable definition.

Subway Inc. does not pay her labor costs; those are paid by the small business out of the revenues from that single store. So why do we pretend they are in the same league with big business? I don't get it.
9
I hope all the losers, like Cthulhu, who support this crap get laid off.

I really really do.

Face the facts: your a loser - and you make loser's wages.

end of story.
10
Well this is one human spammer that I will actually stop and engage with! Come find me clipboard soldiers!
11
@JF
Id really have to disagree with your interpretation of the word "entitlement". The person quoted sounds like they simply want the opportunity to advance as far as they can in society, which is admirable. People who have that sort of ambition should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to move on up and contribute more. Wanting a society with the opportunity for upward mobility isn't a sense of entitlement, it is the yearning for a meritocracy. If you think about it, it's basically the opposite of entitlement.

And this lack of opportunity is bad for society. Look at the nursing shortage. There will be far too few nurses in a few years. Yet schools haven't been able to attract nurses from the private sector to come to the classrooms and teach. This means that even though there is a real need in that sector, there are too few classroom slots for all the applicants. People are being turned down for a career path this country NEEDS them to take because of institutional problems. The quoted person's experience with the minimum wage is just another example of structural problems preventing driven and capable people from high achieving and benefiting society through that.
12
Hi, JF, Autumn Brown here. I am entitled! I believe every single person like me is also entitled to the right to a decent life and I don't think that's a bad thing! I'm a socialist!
13
@9

And when employment doesn't decline at all, your ideology will not change in slightest. That's how you know you're a blind ideologue. You get the social experiment you always wanted to prove your strident claims, and when you get your ass handed to you, nothing changes. You become a dead ender, one of those in the aging demographic the rest of America is waiting to die off so the reactionary wing will drop out of the politics.

For the record, if 15Now's charter amendment passes and any of the doom you guys predicted comes to pass, I'll have to admit I was wrong.

The fact that you guys think minimum wage workers are losers is why Charter Amendment 20 will pass. The "No on 20" campaign is made up of creeps who think the people at the bottom of the wage scale are garbage. Seattle wants nothing to do with the likes of you.
14
@8

They benefit from the economics of scale. That's why they're not "small".
15
@JF Please tell me you are pulling some next-level irony and not being a gaping asshole. EVERY full time job ought to pay enough to afford someome healthcare, education, and housing. If a job does not pay as much, government (read: taxpayers), fills the gap, and that is hardly fair.

Since when are housing, healthcare, and education anything other than utter necessities.?
16
If higher education were truly a necessity, it would be free like primary and high school are. The fact is that two thirds of jobs, including lots that pay reasonably well, do not require a college degree. Couple that with the fact that too many people with degrees are unemployed and the ridiculous cost of college is definitely a luxury, not a necessity.
17
@fnsb I want to live in the world you're living in. Most od those jobs that you say don't require a college degree do require some accredition or post-sexondary education. Excepting people who were born pretty, rich, or without conscience, I can't name many twenty-somethings who aren't struggling.
18
@16
Id say that the employment info you are talking about shows that our educational system is broken, not that a college education is clearly overvalued. Learning needs a practical purpose. Many college majors lack that purpose. Our high education system was formerly used to train the managerial class, now it is used to train our technical class, but its systems and structure havent fully moved from the former to the latter. I think in order to be effective, higher ed needs to do 2 things. 1) stop being pay to play 2) partner with government and industry to produce the graduates that industry actually needs.
19
@18- You are absolutely right

@17- I'm living in the real world, and the fact that people are struggling is NOT because they need more college education. Most recent college graduates are among those struggling, and not for lack of education.

There are good-paying jobs out there for people that don't require degrees. Most of them involve starting out in a crappy job, working really hard, and moving up. People who have the insight to see the long-term payoff of that are doing exactly that, and we're fine. I also have a lot of friends who are struggling. Most of them have either refused to take jobs they felt were beneath them, or didn't stay in those jobs because they didn't like their job. News flash- you don't always have to like your job. That, also, is a luxury, not a necessity.

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