Labor is showing life -- good news needed in a new Guilded Age

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Out in this corner of America's "Left Coast," we seize at every opportunity to boast whenever the Pacific Northwest is out front in a national trend or movement.

The most curious of such trends: Pay. Our region is an epicenter of both the New Guilded Age -- Exhibit A, Amazon -- and an epicenter of agitation against the New Guilded Age. We've become a hotbed of organizing for higher base wages, better working conditions, and family time off.

On this Labor Day weekend, labor unions are showing life in these parts. It's good news for those who want to make a more even playing field out of a country run by and for the very rich.

Employees at KUOW recently signed their first union contract. Anchoring their cause to traditional union demands -- wages, decent time off and job stability -- staff at Crosscut/KCTS just voted to affiliate with the NewsGuild.

The movement for a $15 per hour minimum wage, while launched in New York, became airborne out here. It scored a seminal victory with a 2013 vote in SeaTac, and the phased-in $15 wage that Seattle enacted in 2014. The chief organizing force, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The strategy: Lift all boats.

Unions drove a 1998 initiative that indexed our state's minimum wage to inflation, and the 2016 initiative that is ramping up that wage to $13.50 by 2020. Unions (and Civic Action) are carrying the ball for a long-overdue rewrite of the state's formula for overtime pay.

We have, today, the third most unionized work force in an America where labor has fallen on hard times. Just under 20 percent of the state's work force belongs to a union, up a tick from 2017 and twice the national percentage. We have an estimated 649,000 union members in the state.

https://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/Connelly-Labor-is-showing-life-Needed-good-14400609.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletterspi&utm_term=spi

[KPN]

1. The northwest rocks!

[CrispyQ]

2. If you were born after 1980, all you've ever heard is that unions are bad.

[BigmanPigman]

6. Thanks in large part to Ronald MFucker Reagun.

[Wounded Bear]

3. They kind of blew the spelling there..."guilded"?

A "guilded" age would presumably involve lots of unions.

[murielm99]

4. Ya beat me to it.

[Wounded Bear]

5. I clicked in...it was in the original article...