Vancouver bartender Christiaan Colville is among thousands of Washington workers who will get a small pay raise Saturday when the state’s minimum wage increases from $8.55 an hour to $8.67.
He feels somewhat indifferent about the extra 12 cents an hour, said Colville, who typically works 30 hours a week at Tommy O’s restaurant in downtown. The wage hike will add $3.60 a week to his paycheck, he said.
“Honestly, it won’t even pay for my bus fare to and from work,” which costs $3.75 per day, Colville said.
In the meantime, business groups are suing the state to rescind the wage hike, an increase that restaurant owners like Tom Owens, Colville’s employer, say poses another threat to an industry battered by high unemployment and lower consumer spending. Owens said patronage has dropped by up to 30 percent at the two restaurants he owns and operates in Vancouver. At the same time, he expects food costs to increase by between 3 percent and 7 percent in January.
The minimum-wage hike will affect 16 employees at his two restaurants, Owens said.
“I am struggling to maintain profitability. It’s this whole vicious cycle we’re in right now.”
The upcoming raise for the state’s lowest-paid workers is one of the smallest since a 1998 voter initiative that required the yearly adjustment, according to the state’s Department of Labor & Industries, which oversees the rate hike.
In 2010, minimum-wage earners did not get a raise because the adjustment is tied to the Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners, which fell 1.9 percent from August 2008 to the same month in 2009.
This year in November, L&I announced Washington’s minimum wage — already the nation’s highest — would climb by 12 cents in 2011 to reflect a 1.4 percent increase in the index during the 12-month period ending in August 2010. The index had increased 5.9 percent in 2008, which led to a 2009 wage hike of 48 cents per hour.
Though smaller, the 12-cent-per-hour wage hike has rattled the ire of business groups who are suing the state over its decision. Calling the increase illegal, they say the Consumer Price Index does not reflect a net increase in the cost of living since 2008.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out how (the state) got around it,” said Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business, which counts 7,200 private-sector employers among its members.
The lawsuit against L&I was filed in Kittitas County Superior Court by the Washington Farm Bureau, the Washington Restaurant Association and the Washington Retail Association.
The rate hike was L&I’s “best read of the law,” the agency’s director, Judy Schurke, said in a written statement.
Restaurants, retailers and farms are the primary employers of minimum-wage workers, according to the state. About 2.5 percent of the state’s work force, roughly 52,700, workers, earned the minimum wage in 2009, according to data from the Employment Security Department.
Other Vancouver-based restaurant employers say Washington’s rising minimum wage presents a competitive disadvantage when compared with similar businesses in states that use the federal minimum wage.
For example, McDonald’s chain owners Matt and Val Hadwin say their menu prices reflect the same corporate-wide model followed by the Montana McDonald’s owned by Matt Hadwin’s brother. But Montana’s workers earn the federal minimum wage, about $1.30 per hour less than Washington’s.
“That lowers the playing field for us,” Matt Hadwin said.
Starting Saturday, Washington’s minimum wage will rise $1.42 above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Washington’s minimum wage is highest in the nation, followed by Oregon’s minimum wage, set to rise by 10 cents to $8.50 per hour on Saturday.
