SUMMARY: Artist Dale Chihuly has become synonymous with reimagining what glass can do. Having long ago stopped blowing glass himself, at 75, he heads an art world enterprise at his Seattle studio. But using a team of artists to create his works has also raised questions over who is really making his art. Jeffrey Brown visits Chihuly at his studio to discuss his career, his mental health and more.
SUMMARY: In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, Seattle's seawall was like most others for 80 years, a flat, concrete slab that held back the sea. But a $400 million infrastructure project has turned Seattle's new seawall into a really big science experiment to see whether cities can better coexist with fish.
SUMMARY:Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered a sweeping review of police reforms initiated under the Obama administration, suggesting a potential rollback in federal oversight of police nationwide. One city still committed to reform is Seattle. Special Correspondent Joanne Elgart Jennings reports on how the reforms, five years in the making, have been received.
SUMMARY: In 2015, Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price announced he would raise the company's minimum wage to $70,000 a year by 2017 and slash his own compensation by more than 90 percent. More than a year later, Price reports the company's revenue and clientèle has grown substantially, despite critics' predictions that the move would be bad for business. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent John Larson reports.
RECEPTIONIST: Gravity Payments, this is Korinne.
JOHN LARSON (NewsHour):About a year-and-a-half ago, life changed for the 100 employees of Gravity Payments in Seattle when their boss, Dan Price, announced the company's minimum wage would jump to 70-thousand dollars a year.
DAN PRICE: Effectively immediately, we are going to put a scaled policy into place, and we are going to have a minimum 70-thousand dollar pay rate for everyone that works here.
JOHN LARSON: The hikes would be phased in. A 50-thousand dollar a year minimum wage took effect immediately, and would rise to 60-thousand by the end of 2016, and 70-thousand in 2017. Price said he'd help pay for the increases by slashing his own million dollar a year compensation by more than 90 percent to 70-thousand.
DAN PRICE: I'm curious if anyone has any questions?
JOHN LARSON: Stories of his announcement went viral.
CBS/SCOTT PELLEY: Everyone is getting a raise at a Seattle-based company.
NBC/LESTER HOLT: One boss just changed the lives of his employees.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The battle over the minimum wage heated up across the country today, as fast-food workers in several cities launched a one-day strike.
Outside Chicago, near the corporate home of McDonald’s, workers protested as the company held its annual meeting. More than 100 were arrested. The workers are demanding minimum pay of $15 an hour, which brings us to the question: What is it like to live on minimum wage, even in a state with the highest wage in the country?
The NewsHour’s economics correspondent, Paul Solman, profiles two people dealing with that question, all part of his reporting Making Sense of financial news.
TERRAN LYONS, Crew Trainer, McDonald’s: Everything just seems to be going wrong, you know? So, I’m just — I’m trying to be responsible and fix it, but it’s stressing me out.
(LAUGHTER)
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Terran Lyons was talking about her car, but it may as well have been her life. The 25-year-old single mother of two, a high school dropout, works as a crew trainer at a McDonald’s in Seattle, earning $9.85 an hour, just above the state minimum wage of $9.32.
Using her federal earned income tax refund, she moved to a cheaper suburb 30 miles south, close to her mother, who watches the kids while she works, and bought a 17-year-old car for the commute.
TERRAN LYONS: Car’s the quickest way for me to get there, because on the bus, I will be on there for three hours.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The battle over raising the minimum wage may be at a stalemate in Washington, D.C., right now, but, in Washington State, the fight is still under way.
Our economics reporter, Paul Solman, has the next in his series of stories on that subject, this one on just how much it really costs to live in a city like Seattle.
It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): In Seattle this spring, rallies to raise the minimum wage, but not to the $10.10 being debated nationally. Here, they’re talking about $15 an hour citywide, 62 percent higher than this year’s inflation index state minimum wage of $9.32, already highest in the nation.
PHILIP LOCKER, Socialist Alternative Party:Wall Street and big business crashed the economy. They got bailed out. They’re making record profits. But working people are faced with what? Poverty wages, low wages, McJobs, student debt. What’s our future? --- PAUL SOLMAN: Seattle multimillionaire investor and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer is a leader of the $15 wage movement, but he still helps run his family’s pillow company.
NICK HANAUER: And, indeed, we have factories where we do not pay workers $15. If my competitors pay $10 and we pay $15, we will surely go out of business. A great challenge we face in the city of raising the minimum wage to $15 is precisely that dynamic.
PAUL SOLMAN: But, look, says Hanauer, every economic decision involves tradeoffs. It boils down to weighing the costs against the benefits.
And in this case:
NICK HANAUER:The benefits overwhelm the costs. When worker compensation goes up, everyone benefits, right, because those workers both go buy more stuff and need less services from taxpayers.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): We move now to the Pacific Northwest and part one of a Paul Solman series on the debate over raising the minimum wage.
Tonight, he has the latest on a story he first brought to our attention last fall.
It part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): A lot was at stake last November in SeaTac, Washington, home of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, as local citizens decided the fate of a proposition to jack up the minimum wage there to $15 an hour, for thousands of workers, the promise of a huge pay hike, 63 percent if they were making the state minimum of $9.19 an hour, plus paid sick leave, which promised to be a benefit for the flying public as well.
WOMAN: Every employee that I work with comes to work sick because they have to put food on the table.
ABDIRAHMAN ABDULLAHI, Employee, Sea-Tac’s Hertz Car Rentals: Imagine you’re flying on an airplane. The worker who clean up the airplane before you fly, he was sick and he’s cleaning the airplane, imagine you eating on that table, you know?
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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