Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, in one of her last official acts before leaving office, will veto City Council legislation that would have repealed the $4 an hour hazard pay boost for grocery workers that has been in place for nearly a year, she said Wednesday.
The Seattle City Council voted 8-0 last January to approve the mandatory hazard pay for the duration of the pandemic.
The City Council voted 8-0 last week to repeal the hazard pay requirement.
Durkan, in announcing her coming veto, cited the rise of the omicron variant and rising infection case numbers.
“Now is not the time to roll back the pay for these critical front-line workers,” Durkan said in a prepared statement. “In a time that there are no good choices, there are decisions we can make to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of our residents, and hazard pay is one of the key city policies that have supported workers who have supported all of us.”
Councilmember Kshama Sawant, normally an unrelenting Durkan critic, praised the veto while criticizing her council colleagues.
Advertising
Sawant was absent from last week’s vote to repeal the hazard pay ordinance. She called that vote a “capitulation” by “self-described progressive Democrats in the interests of big business.”
The City Council initially passed the hazard pay legislation, with Durkan’s support, after advocacy from the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21. It withstood a lawsuit from the grocery industry.
Other cities,...
President Donald Trump made false claims about NATO, NASA, foreign policy, taxes, immigration and other subjects in a Fox Business interview that aired Wednesday morning. Here is a fact check of s...