Cadie Hood’s first job paid under $3 an hour.
She was 18, and working as a server at an Applebee’s in Wyoming — one of about 20 states still following the federal minimum wage, which has stagnated at $7.25 an hour for more than a decade. Employers can count up to $5.12 an hour in tips toward an employee’s wage.
“I was a senior in high school living on my own and paying my own rent and everything,” Hood said. “I survived solely off of my tips, which weren’t great.”
Hood moved to Washington state after graduating and started working at an Applebee's in Renton. Her wages immediately shot up to Washington state’s minimum wage at the time: $16.28 an hour — not counting tips. Though more than a third of Hood’s paycheck was still going to rent, the increase was notable, and less than a month after starting, Hood’s hourly wage went up again, thanks to a 2024 ballot initiative passed by nearly 60% of Renton voters that raised the minimum wage for large employers to $20.90 an hour. Hood, now 19, was thrilled.
Renton is one of about a half-dozen Puget Sound jurisdictions that in recent years have opted to set wage floors above those required by the state — or anywhere else in America. Through ballot measures and local legislation, activists have successfully raised the wage in SeaTac, Seattle, Tukwila, Everett, Burien, Renton and unincorporated King County, bringing hourly pay at large companies above $20.
For employees like Hood, the increases have been life-changing. “I stopped stressing about money for a little bit,” she said. “I didn’t think $4 an hour would do that, but it was just a huge jump.”
Even as some business owners sound alarm bells, ballot measures raising the wage keep passing — and advocates say the increases have been a success as they look to expand their efforts across the region. After winning an initiative campaign to raise wages in Burien this winter, labor groups and advocates are now pushing to raise it above $20 in Tacoma and Olympia.
“People understand that it’s tough to live out there, and we need to raise the standards,” said Colton Rose, a community and labor organizer with UFCW Local 367, which is gathering signatures to support Tacoma’s minimum wage ballot initiative.
Workers like Hood say pay increases provide stability and the freedom to live life outside of work. But higher wages can come with tradeoffs, and aren’t a silver-bullet solution to the region’s fundamental unaffordability, researchers say.
When it passed in 2014, Seattle’s minimum wage received national attention, with supporters and opponents making “radical” predictions about what would follow, said Jacob Vigdor, a professor at the University of Washington who worked on a multi-year study of the policy.
Would Seattle become a workers’ paradise? Would businesses be forced to flee?
Ten years later, Vigdor says, the outcome is more nuanced.
Trade offs
After Renton’s ballot initiative went into effect, Hood says the extra $4 an hour she earned reduced her financial stress and gave her freedom to spend money on nonessential purchases, like a plane ticket home to see her sister. But the pay increase wasn’t without tradeoffs. Applebee’s cut back on employees’ hours, she said, “and we were working skeleton crews most days on a Friday, Saturday night when the whole restaurant would be packed.”
This response to wage increases isn’t unusual. Business owners opposed to recent wage increases argue that small businesses operate on incredibly thin margins, and that being forced to pay employees more could mean laying off staff or even closing altogether.
According to Vigdor’s research in Seattle, these concerns are largely unfounded. About 99% of businesses survived the first year and nine months of Seattle’s wage increase, he said, and most workers kept their jobs.
“If a business can’t figure out how to accommodate higher labor costs, then the odds are that there was something about the business that put them at higher risk beforehand,” Vigdor said.
Businesses found ways to adapt, often by raising prices and cutting hours — mainly for younger, less experienced workers, Vigdor said. Many workers came out ahead, he said, but some came out behind.
“One of the big predictors of whether you came out ahead was whether you had experience,” Vigdor said.
Data showed a decline in new people entering the Seattle labor market when the policy went into effect, even as the rate continued to rise in the rest of the state, said Mark Long, a professor who worked on the UW study and is now dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. Higher wages meant less employee turnover, but also fewer job openings for younger, entry-level workers.
Reduced hours, limited staffing
On a late Wednesday morning in March, only one employee had clocked in at Cascadia Pizza in Maple Valley. “Typically, we’d have two other people there,” said co-owner Thomas Reinhard. “But because of this wage, and this is obviously a slower time for us, we’ve really had to cut back.”
When the King County Council voted to raise the minimum wage last year, Reinhard was a vocal opponent. He testified against it alongside several of his employees, arguing that it would hurt businesses and ultimately make things worse for workers.
The law went into effect on January 1. Two-and-a-half months later, Reinhard thinks his concerns are coming true.
“It’s been really tough, we’ve had to let some people go,” Reinhard said.
Like many regional minimum wage laws, the new King County policy comes with caveats. Large businesses with more than 500 employees are required to pay the full $20.29 minimum hourly wage, but businesses like Reinhard’s — with fewer than 500 employees but more than 15 — pay a reduced rate of $18.29. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees making under $2 million in gross annual revenue can pay employees $3 under the total wage.
These exemptions aren’t static: They’re set to decrease by 50 cents each year. By 2030, employers of all sizes will be paying the same amount. The total wage is also set to increase with inflation.
Reinhard hasn’t raised prices yet, but he said he was forced to reduce hours available for employees to work and cut about five part-time staff positions. He said young people have been most affected.
“We’ve really got to shuffle those hours over to folks who are relying on this income as a full-time career,” Reinhard said.
Reinhard worries the higher wage means his business can’t devote extra time to training younger, less experienced employees.
“If you’re going to be paying these premium wages, you want to have premium skill sets,” Reinhard said.
What about tips?
Tips play a complicated role in minimum wage debates. Opponents sometimes argue that wage increases will hurt workers by prompting customers to tip less, though the data on this is murky.
Reinhard said tips for his employees decreased by about 15% after King County’s wage increase. As a result, he said workers’ effective wage rate hasn’t actually increased. But after Renton’s law went into effect, Hood said, her tips stayed the same, or even increased. Menu prices went up, she said, but tipping held steady at around 20%.
Vigdor, the UW researcher, said the impact of wage increases on tips is challenging to determine. The state doesn’t keep good data, so it’s a bit of a “blind spot,” he said.
When the King County Council was considering its minimum wage ordinance, Councilmember Reagan Dunn proposed an amendment that would have allowed employers to count tips toward an employee's wage.
Seattle’s minimum wage law had a similar carveout for tips when it went into effect in 2015, designed to be phased out after a decade. As the sunset date for the tip exemption approached last year, restaurant owners lobbied to keep it, and Seattle City Council briefly considered an extension.
Sean Case was among the restaurant workers who spoke out against the extension, noting that business owners had had a decade to prepare for the end of the tip credit. The City Council ultimately decided against keeping it. As of Jan. 1, Seattle’s minimum wage is $20.76.
“Everyone is breathing a little easier,” said Case, a line cook at Saint Bread who is also vice president of the Restaurant Workers United union.
Case said he hasn’t seen a decrease in tips or hours as a result of the new wage increase. His employer has raised prices, but customers are still coming, he said.
“The money has to come from somewhere, so it makes sense to see prices go up a little bit,” Case said. “That’s the balance, right? People need to get paid.”
Big margins
Some business owners might have qualms about proposed minimum wage increases, but they’ve proven popular among voters.
Initiatives to raise the wage passed with 77% support in SeaTac and 82% in Tukwila. Similar measures in Bellingham, Renton and Everett all passed with just under 60% of the vote.
“I think the track record of these initiatives shows how popular it is, and how needed it is,” said Katie Wilson, the general secretary of the Transit Riders Union, a progressive group that helped lead many recent minimum wage ballot initiatives.
Wilson, who recently announced she is running for Seattle mayor, said minimum wage increases benefit everybody by giving workers more money to spend in the local economy.
“It really makes a difference in people’s lives when they have the money to pay rent and put food on the table,” Wilson said.
The Transit Riders Union most recently fought to raise the wage this winter with a ballot initiative in Burien aimed at closing loopholes in a minimum wage law passed by the Burien City Council last year. The Union’s initiative passed with 57% of the vote in February, but the city filed a lawsuit shortly after in an attempt to block it, arguing that the initiative was misleading and unenforceable.
The initiative is set to go into effect at the end of March. A city spokesperson declined to comment when asked what will happen if a judge doesn’t issue a ruling before then.
Wilson, named as a defendant in the lawsuit, said she’s confident it will be resolved in favor of the initiative.
Points south
A bill in the state legislature to raise the wage statewide died this year, but Wilson said she hopes it will be revived. In the meantime, Wilson said advocates are hoping to build on the momentum from recent victories in Everett, Renton and Burien by passing wage increases in other Puget Sound cities. Tacoma and Olympia are next on the list.
In Tacoma, labor organizers and advocates are gathering signatures for a “Workers Bill of Rights” ballot initiative that would raise the wage to $20 an hour for large employers. The initiative would also give workers more rights to fair scheduling and workplace safety, and require businesses to offer additional working hours to existing employees before hiring new employees or contractors.
“This will allow people to have more spending money, more housing stability and just more ability to engage in the community,” said Zephyra Burt, a Tacoma DSA co-chair who is helping with the campaign. “I think it’ll just lead to people having more full and engaged lives.”
As with other recent initiatives, the law would include a gradual phase-in period for small and medium businesses.
Before drafting up the initiative, Rose of UFCW 367, said organizers tried going to Tacoma City Council and asking them to simply pass a law raising the wage and expanding worker protections. The reception was “pretty lukewarm,” he said. So organizers instead decided to go the initiative route.
Activists are hoping to convince the Olympia City Council to pass a similar Workers’ Bill of Rights this year. Councilmembers there have spent several months discussing a proposal that would raise the wage to $20.29 an hour. At a March meeting, city officials said they planned to do more research into the potential impact of the policy, and are expecting to revisit it later this year.
‘Still not enough’
The Puget Sound region has the highest minimum wage in the nation, but that hasn’t necessarily translated to a living wage. Estimates put the cost of living for a single adult in King County at more than $30 an hour, which UW researcher Vigdor attributes to factors like the tech boom.
“If people were struggling to make ends meet in Seattle in 2014 when the city voted to raise the minimum wage, they’re still struggling now,” said Vigdor.
Case, the worker at Saint Bread, supports wage increases, but said more is needed to support workers at minimum wage jobs.
“The cost of living is not slowing down,” Case said. “There’s still a lot of pressure on people in the industry, so any increase in their wage helps, but it’s still not quite what people need.”
Case thinks the city should look at other ideas to help low-wage workers: more late-night public transit options, social housing and a public pension plan that stays with workers when they switch jobs. He said wage theft is another major issue in the restaurant industry that needs to be addressed.
Hood quit her job at Applebee’s earlier this year. She was tired of the stress. She’s now going to community college and working part-time at a restaurant in Bellevue, which still follows the state’s minimum wage of $16.66. But it’s an affluent area, and Hood said big tips help make up the difference.
Hood is a big supporter of minimum wage increases. She said the added stress from uncertain hours and low staffing was the fault of her employer, not the policy.
“Businesses don’t think about the fact that, if your workers do well, your company does well,” Hood said. “Work should be something that you do and something you like, but there’s just a whole world out there … if you’re making that high-enough wage, then you should have the time to go be free and go live your life and not worry about trying to pay your bills by working every day of your life.”
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