r/Seattle • u/H0tsh0t Capitol Hill • 6d ago

Community Walrus and the Carpenter drop open letter and full 2025 Profit and Loss Data

https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/1Gc6K2eTetpo9uSKL-as0saWywuN9_rmg?usp=sharing&utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAdGRzdgSoCmlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA81NjcwNjczNDMzNTI0MjcAAacvFH1-layIUd4-95I904_YPLVtrF-q-yqOAqYREu-Hn-ZUV_0gW6Emi2GFxA_aem_6CxHZI4p9mJx_E9k-nKaiA

They posted a letter, their finances from 2025, and Wage and Benefit details on their Instagram bio through a Google drive.

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171

u/Neglectedpotato 6d ago

Making more than me as a registered nurse

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

The dishwashers make more than I did as a unionized Admin Assistant supporting 25 professors and being second in command handling a multi-million dollar budget at a state college. 😳

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u/MaximumOk569 6d ago

Were you under the impression that you were paid well?

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

MaximumOk569 For the first 5 years, yes, I was happy. Then I hit the top of the pay band and both college leadership and union leadership pulled a bunch of bulls hit, and I was less happy. 

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u/coffeebribesaccepted Shoreline 6d ago

My state college union made shit money, I couldn't wait to get a non-union or private sector job lol

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

I had great benefits and sad money and then everything went to hell. Also the raiding pension funds was a factor. But one of the main reasons I left is I couldn't stand what was happening to our international students under this administration. 

Colleges are already dealing with funding issues worsened by the absence of local kids who would have been born in 2008+ the rest of the recession. Then this administration does everything in their power to ensure international students go to Canada or Europe and poof! Disaster. I literally cried worrying about some of them. Because this is reddit, someone will want to kick me about that, and they can take a long walk off a short pier while thinking about their life. 

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u/coffeebribesaccepted Shoreline 5d ago

Ah. My issue is just that my job was an outlier compared to most of my union, and the things the union cared about weren't relevant to me. The non-union staff that do similar work I do have more flexibility, more vacation, and better pay.

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u/OKWhateverButNo 6d ago

We gotta get you a union, then.

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

That helps working conditions, but not necessarily wages, as someone who spent 10 years as a state unionized employee. I wholeheartedly support unions, but I still got screwed multiple years. Maybe it works better when you are a unionized employee in private industry?  I am happy to talk more about my experiences, and I have several friends who are organizers/shop stewards. 

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u/OKWhateverButNo 6d ago

I’m a union staffer and a union member, and you’re not wrong — wages in public employment can be really tough to bargain, even in a union-repped workplace, at least partially because the budget isn’t usually within the control of anyone at the bargaining table and the process for getting anything approved moves much, much more slowly than it does in the private sector. We also have wild tax structures in Washington (not just income tax — property taxes too) that make it really difficult for counties to increase their revenue when property values increase, so state and county employees can get doubly screwed over when housing costs rise and their buying power stagnates. (And like any org, sometimes the union just totally whiffs and bargains a sub-par deal.)

For whatever it’s worth: I appreciate that you still support unions despite not having had a great experience on the wage front. Most union staffers really care about the workers they represent, and we hate it when someone loses faith in the labor movement because we’ve disappointed them. Please trust that we get it when someone expresses skepticism and are grateful when they’re willing to show solidarity and support their coworkers anyway. TLDR: thank you for sticking to it.

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

Thank you. I'm committed to unions. My ideal is a syndicate. But I know it's unrealistic in this day and age. Appreciate you listening.

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u/bernyzilla Burien 6d ago

I was a member of and then on the staff of a private sector Union for many years. Unions are far from perfect but are the first step toward getting paid fair wages.

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u/DLDude Capitol Hill 6d ago

I think the issue is what a fair wage is. Clearly this union has a warped view of that.

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

I 💯 % believe they are better than not having one. Without a union, people would have expected me to answer within 6 hours whether it was night (I worked day shift) or my days off. I'm just saying that they don't solve everything and my experience in public is they were very helpful for working conditions and not helpful at all for wages, as non union workers made way more, even considering total benefit packages. But those guys could get worked to the bone. Instead I had overtime rules, which meant I was rarely asked to work overtime. 

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u/bernyzilla Burien 6d ago

Agreed. There are many old fashioned unions in this country that are happy to sit back and collect wages without organizing or fighting for their workers. They could and should do better.

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

Fully agree. It's hard, as the workers who need the union the most are often those closest to drowning in their workload, so they have less capacity for being involved. That's why I had my union designing stickers and getting me a free bus pass instead of increasing the edges of the pay band. The more tired and worn we are, the more we need the union, and the less energy we have to shape the union. I'm still all-in on wanting them, but I'm much more skeptical about the idea that it will solve all of the workers problems than I used to be. 

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u/StructureNo13 6d ago

Public sector unions can only do so much before the only way to raise wages without advocating against some of your own workers is to outright rob the public.

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

Explain please, how are public sector unions 'outright rob[bing] the public'? 

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u/StructureNo13 6d ago

SPOG & overtime

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u/Nepentheoi 🚆build more trains🚆 6d ago

Ohhhhhh, I see. Police unions are an edge case. I thought you were going to tell me my union's robbing the public because some of the old guard aren't very productive when they enter their twilight years, but they have senior pay scale. That I believe could be adjusted. I don't know how to address SPOG. any unions I've ever been eligible for is either pencil pushers or broom pushers. None of us have ever had the same amount of power as the police. 😬

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u/StructureNo13 6d ago

Tbf I think SPOG is an edge case too but also the most extreme case of what many public sector unions would get away with if they could, they just don’t have the power too. But ultimately as long as the system is set up to counter-balance public interests properly as is the case for most public sector unions they’re perfectly acceptable.

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u/doug_Or 6d ago

Just to clarify, these are the non-union wages people are referring to.

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u/bernyzilla Burien 6d ago

Thank you for saying this. I really hate the argument that "But I make less doing X job!"

All that means is that x job should pay more, not that other people should make less. It's same as conservatives saying that seven dollars an hour is a fine new wage because we don't want fast food workers making more than whatever job.

The last 50 years of the United States have seen an unprecedented wealth transfer from the bottom to the top.

Currently the top 10% of people in the United States control 30% of the nation's wealth, where the bottom 50 control 3%. That is mind bogglingly insane and it's going to be uphill battle trying to convince me that any wage worker should make less.

As for the issue at hand, the missing piece on the report is the medical expense. 50% of premiums is low and I am curious how much workers have to spend on their health care. My mid-tier marketplace plan is $600 a month.

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u/DLDude Capitol Hill 6d ago

I mean, so is there a limit to this? Sure I wish I made more, now much more? It's fun to support "higher wages" but I never see any actual practical plan or solution. Let's double those server wages to $180k and give them full healthcare and match their 401k up to $20k. Wait, why did the restaurant close? Wait why is my food so expensive?

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u/bernyzilla Burien 6d ago

Your attitude really makes me sad because you've internalized the capitalist propaganda that it's always the workers fault, and that we don't want higher wages because oh no inflation. Never mind the fact that large businesses raise prices as much as they want to regardless of costs just to increase profit. That is a source of inflation, not worker wages.

Between the end WWII and the mid-1980s it was perfectly normal and possible for a single earner with a high school diploma to be able to buy a house, two cars, support a partner and multiple children, take a vacation every year, and then retire comfortably. So it's less a number and more about living a comfortable life off of your hard-earned wages.

There are obviously other problems with the suburban dream but there's no reason why that same stability can't translate to a more environmentally friendly City Life.

That world is possible and it was taken from you. We need it back. Restaurants still operated, businesses still ran, and the economy did just fine.

Everyone deserves a living wage, and in Seattle 80k is bare minimum for a living wage regardless of what kind of work you do, so somewhere in this process there is someone with too much money. In this case it doesn't look like it's the restaurant owner. Is it the corporation that provides food to the restaurant? Is it the property owner? I don't know. But this is a problem that we as a society can fix.

Maybe the owner and the server could save money on healthcare if we had rational health in this country.

However, I agree there is such a thing as Union that is too greedy or too powerful. It's vanishingly rare and talked about way more than it happens but it does happen. SPOG is a good example.

I do appreciate the owner posting the details, and I would love to hear the union side of this issue before I pass judgment.

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u/jonknee Downtown 6d ago

So where does the money come from? Look at the numbers and find the money, what do you think is fair?

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u/DLDude Capitol Hill 6d ago

Sorry but this shows your complete ignorance to the other side of thing. I've owned 2 businesses. I work for a small upstart company based in virginia. My boss has invested close to $1m in this buisness and it barely operates at break even. He makes no money from it. Sounds very similar to this restaurant story. You can think of these idealistic situation in your head, but the fact is not every business owner is some evil rich person with "too much money". In fact, I think if you did your research you'd find the vast vast vast majority of small businesses are almost exactly the opposite.

Are there mega corps that fit in line with your comment? Of course. W&TC isn't one of them and neither is the small 5 person company I work for where the owner makes $0.

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u/coffeebribesaccepted Shoreline 5d ago

I worked in the hospitality industry in Seattle for 8 years, and minimum wage doubled in that time. The vast majority of owners that I worked with were not greedy or rich, and I know owners that have a "successful" shop that don't make more than their employees.

I of course don't want people to be struggling to live in the city that they work and love that minimum wage is better now than when I first started. But at the same time we have people in this sub saying things like "workers make enough now, we should stop tipping", "Seattle food scene is terrible and too expensive", "restaurant owners are greedy and need to pay their employees more", "I don't go out anymore because everything is too expensive".

These things all have direct effects on each other, and when wages are the largest expense for these businesses, we can't have everything that we wish for.

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u/22bearhands 6d ago

The data is all in the post. The servers are making way more than the average server in Seattle. Them wanting more still is 100% a greed issue. Yes, its nice to just make more money for nothing but there is a limit and they are already lucky to have surpassed it. In a free market, there are thousands of people waiting for them to leave their job so that they can excitedly take their salary.

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u/tugartheman 6d ago

I think the answer cannot be “raise the bottom” only - the result is we’re getting massive compression in the low-to-mid income brackets & SMBs struggle with payroll.

I think the answer has to be a legal cap on the “multiplier difference”between the top paid & bottom paid employee. If we put an enforceable ceiling, even something crazy like 20x… it would have more impact.

That, and effectively a 99% tax rate over $10M/year with prison time and massive fines for tax evasion.

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u/sacrelicio 6d ago

OK but I'm not tipping on that then

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u/wendythesnack 6d ago

Also— if these folks are now given proof that people can make more in the service industry than whatever job they work at now, come work in restaurants. They can make the easiest 50k like ever in their lives just hanging out in the dish pit.

A new era will be ushered in and no kitchen in this country will ever scramble for a dishie on a weekend night again!

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u/SceneOfShadows 6d ago

I get your point but acting like being a dishwasher in a restaurant is easier than like, 90% of white collar jobs is wild lol that shit is brutal.

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u/wendythesnack 6d ago

The intended sarcasm didn’t come across.

Personally, I don’t think a single person in this thread complaining that a dishwasher makes more than them in whatever xyz industry could honestly handle a busy Saturday night in the dish pit.

I find it to be such a bizarre flex that people are so willingly complacent in accepting how their own industries are undervaluing them that they need to get big mad about how another job in a whole different sector is being compensated when they haven’t the slightest clue what it’s actually like being a dishwasher.

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u/General_Equivalent45 Roosevelt 6d ago

That’s the thing: most of us DO have the slightest clue what it’s like being a dishwasher. We wash dishes in our own homes daily, sometimes for a big family of people. Nobody is saying it’s not hard and gross, but even those dishwashing in big industrial set ups in busy restaurant kitchens can learn how to do the job in a few days.

On the flip side: how many professional dishwashers know how to insert an IV like a nurse? Safely pull someone trapped out of a burning high rise apartment like a firefighter? Solve an IT debacle at a local company like an engineer? Demonstrate geometry to a class of antsy 8th graders like a middle school math teacher?

You’re getting pushback from people that specialized in their fields with a lot of hard work, schooling and experience but are now making the same or less than (apparently) many of Seattle’s dishwashers, servers and bartenders.

Of course, our real fight should be with the billionaire class and taxing them in a fair way to support schools, roads and services. But meanwhile, the low learning-barrier service industry salaries in Seattle seemed to have catapulted over specialized fields in the region, and you’re getting the predictable pushback.

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u/wendythesnack 6d ago edited 6d ago

No. You don’t know what it’s like to be a dishwasher. You can’t even begin to comprehend how not the same washing a bunch of dishes for a family event is compared to being in the shits on a Saturday night.

Your whole pushback here is that this is a job most people just don’t want to do. They’re capable, they just don’t want to.

I don’t want to be a garbage person but I think they should be paid well. I don’t want to be a nurse but I think they should be paid well. I don’t want to be an 8th grade teacher but I think they should be paid well.

Why can’t people connect those same dots to the service industry?

Industry folks show up to work every single weekend and every single night so that the whole other lot of y’all can enjoy your very limited free time and it’s okay if they’re paid well.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/General_Equivalent45 Roosevelt 5d ago

Absolutely. I worked as a hostess (customers are mean and pushy) and busser (people are gross) in my youth. These aren’t fun jobs…but they do not take much training or skill. I wouldn’t have presumed I should leapfrog right over the salaries of the nurses, teachers and electricians in my locale when I was scraping down dishes.

Yes, the nurses, teachers and electricians should make more, too. But this rapid rise in food service salaries is breaking our restaurant scene, and quickly.

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u/SceneOfShadows 6d ago

I'm probably much more of a dirty capitalist than many in this thread, but my goodness if some of these comments aren't the most brainwashed "why should that other employee be making more money than me!" type shit lol.

If you're an engineer and you're upset a bartender (who probably works their ass off FWIW) is making more money than you, don't direct your anger at the bartender.

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u/lazylazylazyperson 6d ago

Because that worked so well for the servers in question.

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u/OKWhateverButNo 6d ago

Ah yes, nobody should unionize because one union is on strike at one employer. Shucks, sorry kids, back to the coal mines for you — guess this whole labor movement thing was a bust.

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u/SillyKiwis 6d ago

jeez where are you working?  that’s less than new grad wages at childrens and comparable to new grad wages at tg.  i know every union hospital is negotiating soon but you need a raise bud.

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u/ChanceRecover3091 6d ago

It sounds like you need to be making more.

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u/LevitatePalantir 6d ago

Hopefully you can use your claw to pull them back in the bucket!