Bill Virgin: Giving Them the Business

Is there something worse than continually winding up on the short end of political fights?

Why, yes, there is. Its being considered irrelevant to the discussion in the first place.

Thats about where the Seattle business community, such as it is, appears headed in the wake of the $15-an-hour minimum wage proposal by the mayor and vote by the City Council.

Yes, the mayor accessorized the lets send the minimum wage skyrocketing task force sorry, the Income Inequality Advisory Committee with some business representatives as window dressing. Some were heard to mutter in the aftermath about how much notice their objections to the massive increase in the minimum were taken into account.

They should feel fortunate they were even allowed in the room. For the next piece in assembling the planned workers utopia and rest assured, whether its rent caps, other price controls or huge penalties for even thinking about driving a car, there will be more they might not even get that much.

For some, this is great. That camp can be further subdivided into those who think business should have no say in how Seattle operates to start with and those happy to let Seattle wallow in the unpleasant consequences of its ill-considered decisions.

Then there are those who see businesss complaints as overblown, either because what the city is doing (or hopes to do) really doesnt affect as many businesses as badly as claimed, or because they suspect business retains plenty of clout on the issues it really cares about, such as development in South Lake Union.

This last point is one more illustration of a truism that helps define businesss predicament in Seattle: There is no such thing as a business community, not a monolithic one with a single point of view or agenda, anyway. Even in an urban setting like Seattle, theres too much diversity in the sizes, lines, structures and operating models of businesses to allow for uniform interest, much less unanimity of opinion, on issues.

Boeing, because of its size and heritage, creates its own governmental-relations climate, which it is loath to disrupt by getting involved in issues in which it has little at stake. Its interests are not the same as those of the franchise fast-food business. For the high-tech industry that Seattle covets, the minimum-wage issue represents at most a shoulder shrug.

But businesss problem goes beyond inherent structural realities. Some of the weakness is self-inflicted. Remember that Mayor Ed Murray, who was plenty eager to go along with a $15 minimum, was endorsed by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerces Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy before the primary election last year. Its not as though Murrays political leanings, given his track record in the state Senate, were a secret.

After the mayors committee released its proposal, the chamber was left to issue a statement loaded with milquetoasty language you could parse until the next election and not find a sliver of objection to what the mayor and crew planned to do to its members.

Those who will be affected by the minimum-wage hike (and who know that a $15-an-hour wage costs a lot more than $15 an hour) are left with two choices: Write off Seattle as hopeless and a lost cause and hope to stem the spread of bad governance beyond the city limits or, as appalling as the idea may sound, learn some lessons in the projection of political power from Kshama Sawant.

John T. Molloy, who built a career advising people to match their apparel with their occupational aspirations, has a mantra about how to move up: Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Socialist Sawant eked out a City Council win last year against a not terribly popular incumbent in a race that few people paid close attention to because it was down-ballot from the mayors race. That hardly sounds like the stuff of a massive electoral mandate, but Sawant has operated as though hers was a landslide victory reflecting a great popular uprising. And it has worked. It certainly made an impression on the mayor, who figured he was going to wind up on the bus, under the bus or left behind, so he chose on.

This is the sort of forceful projection of opinion the business community will need to mimic if it expects to have any influence. Will it work? Cant hurt to try, especially when the alternative is working out so well.

Regular contributor Bill Virgin is the founder and owner of Northwest Newsletter Group, which publishes Washington Manufacturing Alert and Pacific Northwest Rail News.