Here’s how one employee of LSG Sky Chefs—a large subsidiary of the German airline Lufthansa—describes her minimum-wage job in West Seattle: She usually has to be at work by at least 4 a.m., but when things are particularly busy, she might have to come in at 3 a.m. or even midnight. When she arrives, she and her coworkers—mostly immigrants and refugees from Africa, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Vietnam, and China—work until 1 or 1:30 p.m. assembling sandwiches and salads to be sold inside 7-Elevens and on Alaska Airlines flights. Some workers make the food, and others inspect it. All day, they’re working in a big walk-in cooler. “It’s cold all the time,” the worker says.
Sometime last year, this employee, who asked me not to use her name or job title because she’s afraid of retaliation, found out that many of the coworkers standing beside her in the walk-in cooler weren’t being paid Seattle’s new minimum wage. Instead of the $11 minimum wage Seattle law required at large companies as of last April, some Sky Chefs employees were being paid just $9.47, the state minimum wage. Many of the workers first realized this when they heard what their friends at other minimum-wage jobs were earning…
