How the Minimum-Wage Movement Entered the Mainstream

When Kshama Sawant won election to the Seattle City Council, in 2013, running under the banner of the Socialist Alternative party, she seemed in the assembly of American politics a genuinely new figure: a forty-year-old Indian-born engineer and economist, a defector from the technocracy in that most technocratic city, a socialist too young to project the factional mustiness of the City College cafeteria. Her highest-profile endorsements were from grunge musicians, and much of the moral outrage that Sawant channelled had to do with gentrification. She ran on the platform of a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage and then, in office, pressed the issue. When the cause seemed to her to be drowning in overly large and platitudinous meetings, Sawant told reporters that if the city council and mayor did not adopt the issue, she would take it to voters as a ballot initiative. Soon they did.