A coalition of workers, unions and community groups leading a campaign to raise Burien’s minimum wage to $20 an hour on Monday submitted a ballot initiative petition with more than 6,000 signatures to the city clerk’s office.
Raise the Wage Burien organizers said the initiative will lift the city’s wage floor in line with those nearby like Seattle, SeaTac, Tukwila and unincorporated King County. They aim to place the proposal on the February election ballot.
The initiative comes about five months after the city approved a minimum-wage increase that local activists criticized as being riddled with exemptions that would result in few workers seeing pay bumps.
“We want to pass legislation that actually gives workers a wage increase,” said Katie Wilson, general secretary of the Transit Riders Union and campaign coordinator for Raise the Wage Burien.
It’s part of a steady drumbeat of citizen-led ballot initiatives and government-led ordinances across the region to increase the minimum wage in recent years, led by some of the same organizers.
Burien’s new ordinance requires large businesses in January to start paying $3 more than the state’s minimum wage, currently set at $16.27 an hour. Smaller employers must pay $2 more starting in July, and businesses with 20 or fewer workers are exempt from the ordinance.
But Wilson, along with labor unions and other activists, criticized the ordinance for being “full of carve-outs and loopholes.”
Under the ordinance, businesses can use tips and benefits to count toward a worker’s required wage increase. That means waiters at local restaurants and grocery store workers with health insurance would likely not see a pay bump, Wilson said.
Franchises can also potentially classify as small businesses depending on how many workers the owner employs in King County under the city’s ordinance. For example, a fast food franchise owner with a couple dozen part-time workers in King County could be exempt from raising their minimum wage, even if their network employs thousands across the country.
Raise the Wage Burien organizers said the new initiative will provide important relief to workers who are struggling to keep up with the region’s ballooning cost of living.
Under their proposal, Burien’s minimum wage would match Tukwila, where the minimum wage is currently $20.29 for large employers and is adjusted annually for inflation.
The wage rate for midsize employers — businesses with 16 to 500 workers — would be $2 less, and increase a dollar each year until it matches the big-business rate. Small businesses’ rate would be $3 less, and increase by 50 cents annually over a seven-year phase-in period. Tips and benefits could not be counted toward wage increases.
“Making more money means more disposable income to spend at local businesses and restaurants, that goes back into and cycles through the local economy,” Wilson said. The hike would let workers “be able to pay rent and not live out of their car on food stamps,” she said.
The proposal comes on the heels of a similar campaign in Renton that was approved by voters earlier this year, and a vote in May by the Metropolitan King County Council to raise the minimum wage in unincorporated areas.
The Renton ballot initiative passed with about 58% of the vote in February, modeling its wage language on Tukwila’s initiative, which passed with about 83% approval in 2022. Tukwila’s hike brought the city’s minimum wage closer to those in SeaTac and Seattle. King County voted to raise the minimum wage in unincorporated areas, including White Center, by as much as $3 an hour.
When the Burien City Council approved its minimum wage ordinance in March, business leaders celebrated it, saying the policy balanced the needs of workers while mitigating economic effects for local employers.
But Councilmember Hugo Garcia, one of two council members who abstained from the March vote, criticized the ordinance for allowing tips to be counted toward the wage increase and franchise owners to potentially classify as small businesses.
“My dad worked as a waiter and then manager of a restaurant for 20 years on minimum wage,” Garcia said during a Monday news conference in Burien in support of the ballot initiative. “We were able to have a home, we were able to have food … but it was very hard and he survived off tips.”
Now that his parents are aging, a lifetime of low wages has caught up to his family, he said. “They’re having a really hard time with their health care,” he said. “They can’t really afford the best care for what they need.”
To qualify for the February ballot, the petition requires certified signatures from 15% of active registered voters in Burien, or about 4,500 people. Raise the Wage Renton organizers hope King County Elections Office will certify signatures by early September.
