Does it transform into a payroll tax in a couple years under the new plan, or does it stay a more regressive hours tax?

What are the benchmarks to guage success?

@1 good point it is not a progressive tax. right now its all about getting a deal, any deal. flush this turd, go back and do it right.

@2 It appears as if developing a new revenue stream is the goal here, so, success is a foregone conclusion. We will figure out how to spend the money later, and worry about whether the allocation of funds was appropriate following a future audit.

But you knew all that already, of course.

It's actually calculated by the hour right? $.13/hr or something like that? It's not "Okay, let's count up your FTEs and that will be $275 a piece right?

You'll aren't stupid enough to pass a stupid tax the stupidest easiest-dodging-est fucking way possible are you?

Just FYI, it's stupid as a hours tax too. Companies in Seattle have a new incentive to stop hiring and get their workforce from temp agencies. The tax (whether hours or head count) will be the temp agencies' burden.

But these temp agencies aren't little-Amazon's who are flush with cash. Income for them is typically around 3% of revenue, and they excel at passing those overhead costs on to employees.

For a minimum wage employee, you're new tax increases the overhead .92%. So a company who thought they were being good citizens and paying $15.50/hr would see overhead go up around .85%. Rough estimate, their actual cost for an hour of labor goes up from $18.60 (if they were offering no benefits) to $18.73.

In comes a temp agency. "We'll sell you 1 hour of labor for $18.55." That let's the agency pay $14.05/hr with a 32% mark up. Agencies calculates it's over head as 20%+.92%. Their cost is $16.99/hr and they have an 8.4% margin contribution, which is not terrible for "light industry" temp employment.

And someone who could have made $15.50 conceivably makes $14.05 instead.

And if you think, "Well someone who was going out of their way to pay employees well before wouldn't do this thing!" Rest assured, companies often don't know how much their temps are being paid!

Regressive taxes are stupid!

@2 the current benchmarks will be maintained. And when this fails the blame will be placed on this reduction in the taxes collected and/or the fact we didn't dump the $400 million dollar amount into programs.

As a one time executive partner in a temp agency I can tell you they are one of the biggest scams that have ever cursed the labor market.

I've been opposed to a head tax because it incentivizes out sourcing and using permatemps instead of hiring staff. What we need is a tax on all new construction excluding single family homes, that does not contain a minimum amount of affordable housing. Vulcan and other developers in this city have demolished a large amount of affordable housing, but are only interested in building office space for Amazon, or luxury apartments for Chinese investors, but have no interest in building affordable housing.

@7 Temp work is often the best and only way to get into certain fields for a lot of people, lab work being one. Of all the people I work with, the majority started their work in my field and company as temps (usually 6 months to a year). That meant no insurance and lower overall pay. I was lucky I was hired on outright but the company I work for continues to exploit temps for their own personal gain. Anything that promotes that kind of behavior isn't good in my book and furthers the exploitation of temp workers by these agencies and their clients.

As an additional note, internships are even worse as they drive down the worth of full time workers even more.

@7 Thanks for your concern. I'm not a minimum wage temp.

@8 In unskilled labor jobs you're totally right. If you're in tech or another high skilled job, temping can help you stack up raises a lot faster than you otherwise would.

@9 You should put MASSIVE taxes on construction new single family homes.

But the better option is to do as San Francisco does. Charge a gross receipts tax on commercial real estate companies. The people renting office space to giant tech companies can't move their assets, create very few jobs, and rarely operate at a loss.

@11 I disagree, as long as there are a lot of college kids with STEM degrees, businesses can exploit the temp as much as possible. It's cheaper for a lot of labs to cycle and retrain new temps rather than hire temps after they've shown hard work and profiency.

@2

You're funny!

@12 You're central premise "there are a lot of college kids with STEM degrees" is not true. Obviously, temping is only going to work out for the temp in markets where there's competition for talent. That could have been left as an assumption of making distinctions between low and high skilled/educated workers.

@14 Except I am talking about people with B.S. in Chem, Bio, and Phys being brought on in lab support roles sometimes earning less than $13/hr. It's not just low education/skill positions that are being exploited by the temp market but companies in general who do know that there are far fewer lab jobs than individuals trying to pursue that career.

I can tell you for a fact that for every lab tech position there are about 40-50 people applying for it. And private, for-profit labs know exactly how to exploit that for their own monetary gain.

@2: As the "debate" over this tax has been kept rigorously and antiseptically clean of any and all facts related to if it will actually house a single homeless person, you can keep your silly talk of benchmarks to yourself, dear.

Or, what @4 and @6 said.

how much does microsoft and boeing and other smug eastside companies have to contribute for the head tax? nothing? guess they can all just keep exporting their problems for seattle to solve...