Seattle: America’s First Large City Approves a $15 Minimum Wage

.@Mayor_Ed_Murray is here! Is he excited about this historic vote? “…Yeah. Tired but happy.” pic.twitter.com/se3Wd7lcMd

— Ansel (@Ansel) June 2, 2014

Seattle, Washington’s nine-member City Council unanimously voted to raise the local minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. It won’t happen immediately: The hourly minimum wage will jump to $11 an hour starting next year for large employers like Starbucks, and then according to the Times, “will rise to $15 by 2017 for employers with more than 500 workers that do not provide health insurance, and by 2018 for those large employers who do.”

It’s a big win in what’s been an uphill battle for workers and organizers who have been advocating for a minimum wage increase, which hasn’t risen on the federal level since 2009, and is not tied to inflation. Back in January, 600 economists from across the country signed a petition urging Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016. The president has pushed for the legislation but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s currently stalling in a divided Congress.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Gov. Mary Fallin recently signed a bill that would prevent cities in the state to decide for itself what local minimum wage laws should be: Fallin’s bill prohibits all Oklahoma cities from establishing mandatory minimum wage or vacation and sick-day requirements.

Related Reading: Just off of his recent Pulitzer for explanatory reporting, Eli Saslow has written about how the fastest growing job in America is also among its hardest — and also pays just barely over minimum wage: working as a nurse aide caring for the elderly.

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