Election season … again
The fields for the 2023 Seattle City Council and King County Council races are beginning to take shape, because the region loves nothing more than an odd-year November election season.
Sitting councilmembers Lisa Herbold, Debora Juarez and recently Alex Pedersen have announced that they will not be running for reelection to the Seattle City Council.
Juarez made her intentions clear in a Council Briefing session in December 2022. The attorney has represented Seattle’s North End since 2015 and is known for championing issues such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement. She ran a tight ship as council president, insisting on civility among her colleagues.
Herbold represents West Seattle and won convincingly against former Seattle Police Chief Jim Pugel in 2019 but wrote in her newsletter that she felt the best way to ensure a progressive candidate wins District 1 is to create an open seat to drive turnout.
This is Pedersen’s first go on council after narrowly edging out challenger (and former interim Real Change editor) Shaun Scott by 4 points in 2019. Pedersen wrote in a public release that he was “not a career politician” and wanted to hand off the reins to someone who would “produce substance instead of slogans on Twitter.”
He doesn’t have a Twitter account, so he couldn’t subtweet properly.
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay does have a Twitter account, however, and posted a video to his feed Jan. 4 calling for support. Councilmembers Claudia Balducci, Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Joe McDermott are all up for reelection in 2023.
Compete all you want
A new proposal by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would ban noncompete clauses from worker contracts. The commission estimates that the rule change would increase worker wages by $300 billion per year.
Noncompete clauses prevent an employee from picking up sticks and going to a new company. The commission decided that was a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act because “noncompetes constitute an unfair method of competition” by preventing workers from seeking out better compensation packages at other companies.
The proposed rule is straightforward for a government regulation: employers can’t use noncompetes in the future, they can’t enforce or maintain existing noncompetes and they can’t tell workers that they are subject to one. It also covers employees, independent contractors or basically anyone who works for an employer, whether or not they’re being paid.
Noncompetes are not confined to any single industry. They appear in employment agreements from sandwich shops to high-tech work. According to a study cited by the New York Times, anywhere from 20 to 45 percent of U.S. workers are impacted by noncompetes.
Ashley Archibald was the editor of Real Change through July 2023, and is now a communication specialist for Purpose. Dignity. Action.
Read more of the Jan. 11-17, 2023 issue.