What is Seattle today? It’s now a bona fide tech city. It has 60,000 programmers. It draws millions of tourists. And a good number of its restaurants have world-class reputations. The city also can’t stop building new office buildings and luxury apartments. Now, that is one side of the city—the happy and prosperous one.
Here is the other Seattle: 25 percent of its total labor force makes just minimum wage, which is $12 per hour. And a huge number of these impoverished workers (shop attendants, bartenders, waiters, dishwashers, janitors) provide services to the rich in the tech sector.
Alex Gallo-Brown’s new, superbly written book, Variations of Labor, is a collection of poems, essays, and short stories devoted to this other city, the minimum-wage city, the one that has men and women making espressos and cappuccinos for NIMBY millionaires or caring for the children of programmers. Class tension is found at every level of labor in Gallo-Brown’s Seattle, which is definitely sad (it has no illusions). The workers tend to hate the techies, and the techies tend to abuse the workers.
