SeaTac, Washington, has a funny-sounding name, but that's because it shares a name with its biggest employer: the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. If you factor in the many surrounding hotels, eateries, car rental lots and similar businesses, it's one of the metropolitan area's major employment hubs, and many of those jobs are non-union, service-industry jobs that don't pay very well. Even the well-paying jobs that are inside the airport aren't that secure or lucrative: for instance, in 2005 Alaska Airlines (whose hub is in Seattle) replaced 472 unionized baggage handlers with contract workers.
The proposed ballot measure in SeaTac—a blue-collar suburb that's one of Washington's most diverse communities, where one in six residents lives in poverty—would give a boost to many of those employees. Although it exempts many small employers, airport and hotel employees would be subject to a minimum wage of $15 per hour. The same measure would also give paid sick days to those same employees. You can probably figure out the implications: this kind of change isn't going to happen through gridlocked Congress and probably not even through state legislatures, but it can be done at the local level—and if these changes can be implemented here without, as some fear, significantly raising costs or unemployment, then it can be an object lesson for larger jurisdictions that it works.
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