Thanks, SPOG: One in five City employees earn six figures a year—many of them cops, firefighters, and City Light employees.

Air Show Tragedy Update: Washington resident Greg Morcom was amongst the dead in the recent tragic Reno air show.

Bachmann on the Tonight Show: She doesn’t deny that her husband’s clinic offers ex-gay services, claiming it would be discriminatory not to offer the requested therapy.

Elwha Dam Removal Begins with Fanfare: U.S. Representative Norm Dicks, our U.S. Senators, Governor, and the Secretary of the Interior attended ground breaking for the removal.

How Low Can He Go? According to a new poll by CBS/New York, Obama’s approval ratings have hit an all-time low of 43 percent.

Finally: Obama is finally proposing a millionaires’ tax. Let’s see how long he keeps his spine on this one.

Massive Crash on U.S. 2: Killed one, injured six, with the highway closed for three hours.

The Original Ray’s Is Closing: It’s closing over inheritance disputes, and it was so original it didn’t have “original” or “real” in its name.

In honor of National Cheeseburger Day (and the Emmys?):

44 replies on “The Morning News”

  1. To be clear, I am not a member of the 100k club. Anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence or curiosity can find my wage. It’s listed on the internets!

    But before the troll comes in here with predictable outrage, let me just say this: Electrical workers – which I am not – have a dangerous and extremely physical job. It’s also mentally demanding, as you have to know a set of codes and construction standards that is both voluminous and constantly changing. Yet these positions are fairly easy to get – particularly if you are a young person in decent physical shape and of average intelligence, who wants to make a good living. Yet it’s hard to get people interested in the apprenticeship program, which basically pays for your education and pays you a good wage, in exchange for agreeing to work for the utility for a number of years.

    City Light’s wages to electrical workers were slightly lower than what the neighboring utilities pay, and they still may be. Many people choose the city because of the higher safety standards that City Light uses.

    Also, consider electrical engineers – which I am not, but I work in a unit where we do some basic engineering and design work – and how in demand they are in a city like Seattle. Yet very few of them hit that mark either.

    I don’t know anything about the Police or Fire departments, other than what everybody else does, so I won’t comment there. But I stand by the electrical workers and their wages. They earn every penny of it.

  2. Bachmann and her clinic are a fraud. She makes quite a living fleecing the taxpayers both as a congressperson getting her taxpayer funded socialised medicine and taxpayer funded Christian “clinic” where she gets taxpayer money from Bush’s “faith based” farce. Both of which should be the first things cut from the federal budget. Bitch.

  3. And Lindsay Graham calls Obama’s plan to tax the rich “Class warfare”. No, Sen. Graham, class warfare is what’s going to happen if you rich Republicans and your friends keep refusing to pay your fair share. You could well be on the way to starting serious trouble on the streets if the people are the only one’s carrying the burden for the wholesale theft of our country by you and your friends.

  5. Overtime is the key to this union issue. As in, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is working overtime ghostwriting for the Seattle Times.

  7. Aw, Jimi – thanks for mentioning the greatest musician ever to wisely get the hell away from Seattle, 5280. Pike/Piners should be happy to learn he played his first show in the basement of the old Temple de Hirsch at 15th & Union, steps from where Chop Suey carries on now. Only the pillars of the old temple remain, torn down in ’93 despite David Brewster’s efforts to renovate the historic building to be the location for his Town Hall Seattle.

  12. @10 if an employees base wage is 60k, when you factor in healthcare and the myriad of other things an employer pays their actual cost is more like 87k. So 40k in OT is a bargain compared to another employee that needs supervision.

  14. @12 Training is a big one too. Better to train one person to work 80 hours than 2 to work 40. Plus a veteran employee can do a lot more in one overtime hour than a new hire could do in a regular one.

  17. When those guys are out there working 16-18 hour shifts after we have a storm, I don’t begrudge them a dime. I’d rather they take home the big bucks then some of the worthless managers I’ve dealt with at a certain tech company who take home 3-400k for sitting on their butts promising things that never happen and then blaming it all on their underlings when the heat comes down.

  18. In my med records job in a state hospital we’re always on the verge of being behind our target turn around time. The work:labor ratio is very tight. We scan paper documents into the electronic record keeping system. Currently one person works a few hours of OT. We would be fine without the OT if one of our full-time-employees wasn’t on FMLA with a grave illness.

    If any venture capitalists are reading this: Hospitals need diagnostic machines that can upload the info directly into the electronic records system. Doctors are still far away from being able to use 100% electronic charts, so the ability to have print outs would still need to be an option. I often feel silly digitizing data that originated as ones and zeros.

  19. All the good Italian stuff moved out to Long Island a decade ago…my sister Marie served some pizza from a place near her in New Hyde Park that was as killer as the (formerly) best Manhattan stuff. Also any kind of pasta, dinner entries…better on Long Island.

  20. #8

    Overtime is a good model…it lets people earn a great wage when there is money in the budget…but if things are slow, they can just say “no overtime” and keep people at reasonable salaries. And as far as putting money into the economy, I’d rather give it to police, other workers who are going to buy boats and put additions on their homes in Gig Harbor rather than AIG execs.

  23. The employment situation in the nation is worse than government unemployment figures indicate.

    Far worse.

    >Many who show up in the ‘unemployed’ figure have been out of work longer than a year, far more unemployed for far longer than in previous economic crises.

    >Many have given up looking for work and no longer show up as ‘unemployed’.

    >Many who are employed are underemployed making less than their family needs but can find no other employment.

    >Self employed individuals by and large have seen their business fall precipitously during the Recession and make half or a third what they used to, but the government counts them as employed and prosperous.

    The past three years have seen increasing despair and desperation among the workforce who are becoming grim and discontented.

    The pool of individuals who have secure well paying jobs with lavish benefits has shrunk and currently consists almost totally of union public “service” employees.

    This article points out the glaring disconnect that over a period when the general employment/income situation for those who pay the salaries of public “service” employees has grimly plunged those employees have seen huge increases in income.

    Most interesting is the total lack of embarrassment or empathy displayed by the privileged extortionists (and their ever helpful hipster fans on Slog who don’t actually pay any taxes….)

    Truly we are reaching 1789 levels of outrage and discontent,
    the Democratic establishment (most commonly seen in big city government and running the most liberal states) playing the role of Louis,
    their PR flacks lecturing the taxpayers about their moral obligation to maintain current levels of public payroll crying ‘let them eat cake!’;
    the public “service” union extortionists with their protected pay hikes playing the part of the clergy and nobility;
    and the teabaggerts (and their Millions of less vocal supporters) manning the barricades, pitchforks and trusty guillotine….

    The troll doesn’t find anything to gloat about.
    It is too grim and sad for words.
    The clueless lackeys quoted in the article demonstrate that the end will not be pretty

  24. The article coyly described Seattle employee salary increases of 4.5% EVERY year for the past decade as “unspectacular” , those salaries DOUBLED over a period when private salaries remained flat…..

  27. “The troll doesn’t find anything to gloat about.
    It is too grim and sad for words.”

    Well then. The troll has finally found “the people”, and concluded that because any sort of employee representation or worker uprising is against his ideology, that all is lost – and that public employees, and not the obscenely rich who refuse to pay their share, are to blame for our sad state.

    Troll dear: A gas range, made before automatic ignition, should do nicely for you.

    Just stick your head in the oven, blow out the pilot, and let all that grimness fade away.

    I’d say it was a pleasure knowing you, but I don’t like to lie.

  29. Oh don’t worry about me, troll. Whatever happens, you’ll still need electricity. Your kind wouldn’t last a minute without it. You might actually have to leave your mother’s basement and interact with the real world.

    (And please don’t try to do your own electrical work – you’d be better off taking my earlier suggestion about the gas range. Part of our mission is to protect people like you from yourself.)

    So public or private, I’ll be union and I’ll be OK. But it’s sweet of you to be concerned about me.

  31. Hmm … either I can stick to my knowledge of polls being complete bullshit … or gloat and say “I told you so” to some people … I’ll stick to my knowing polls are bullshit and wait until the next election.

  34. oh no-
    it seems the Science agrees with Michelle Bachman that parents should get to choose if their kids get the HPV vaccine….

    from NPR:

    “Dr. Joseph Bocchini chairs CDC’s working group on HPV vaccines.

    “Bocchini doesn’t think the government should require kids to get it yet.

    “We want to get some experience with it,” he says. “We want to educate physicians and other providers about the benefits of the vaccine. We want to educate the public about the infection and its consequences.”

    “So for now, the CDC’s lead advisor thinks the decision should be left to parents…..”

  35. Troll dear, for someone who is going to “live off the grid”, you sure spend a lot of time on the internet.

    Troll and a bunch of his drama queen survivalist buddies, living the dream. My oven idea would accomplish the same thing in a lot less time.

  36. People who think they can “live off the grid” usually can’t even build a generator that doesn’t require manufactured parts of fuel … much less get online without an ISP.

  38. Re: Michelle Bachmann

    “My husband, the doctor, still applies leeches to patients who want to cure pneumonia by being bled, because not to give them the treatment they want would be discriminatory.”

  39. @1,

    One of my friends works for City Light in some kind of lobbying position. She makes bank, and it’s been my impression from her experience and others’ that it’s not real workers who make six figures; it’s largely white collar management.

  42. Btw, It’s the international markets that are insisting on a US Millionaires Surtax, not Obama.

    he’s just the messenger.

    Watch Greece get kicked out of the EU common currency this week, and default on Oct. 15th or thereabouts, which is a wakeup call to all the PIIIGS nations that they have to collect taxes on the Rich and Corporations or they will be tossed on the trash heap by investors.

  43. @37 Gotta admit …. you are closer than I am to a real troll.

    @34 That’s not science saying it, that’s people’s own personal beliefs. While I agree there should be some choice in matters, parents are not always right, and most kids don’t know much as well. Someone once said something very true, which I must paraphrase because I don’t remember where I heard it: You may be treated like an adult at 18, but you don’t really mature for another 20 years.

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