The Impact this week was the first of a two-part series focused on the business and workforce issues that defined 2024 and set the stage for 2025 from the policy debates in Olympia, to the Boeing strike, and the ballot initiatives impacting major state programs or the local minimum wage.
Next week we’ll hear from labor organizations. This week, the focus is on business. Dave Mastin, the Vice President of Government Affairs at the Association of Washington Business, joined us for an extended interview covering the business climate and issues to watch during the 2025 Legislative Session.
Here are a few snippets.
Mastin on most recent AWB employer surveys 1:31 — 1:49 “On the improvement side, we asked the question, do you see your business growing in the next six months? Well, we got about fifty percent, little over fifty percent, saying yeah we see that my own individual business has that opportunity to grow. That’s a little above what it was previously. It was about forty six percent previously.”
(Direct link) 2:18-2:40 “A full third of our respondents said that their costs of doing business, just the cost of doing business with others, taxes, regulation and, of course inflation has gone up about twenty to thirty percent. So that’s a third of them have seen a twenty to thirty percent increase just to open their doors day in and day out. That clearly is a concern, particularly as we move into the next legislative session.”
Mastin on the state budget deficit and potential tax increases:
(Direct link) 6:33-6:43 “There’s definitely a lot of talk about raising taxes and it’s almost exclusively on the employer community.”
(Direct link) 7:06- 7:19 -“Being progressive doesn’t mean that you have to lack fiscal discipline. You can be progressive and still have fiscal discipline. And what does that mean? You look at the revenue you have coming in and you make sure that you don’t spend three times more than what the revenue coming in is. And what we’re asking all legislators, whether they’re progressive or conservative, we need to get back to a more fiscal discipline.”
Mastin on employee benefits and related programs
(Direct link)12:35 – 13:03 “We’ve seen some effort to increase unemployment. And again, I’ll reemphasize, where are the best benefits for unemployed workers? What state has the best? Well, it’s Washington. We’re number one. If you look at the red book, which is a publication that looks at a lot of that data, we have the best benefits of unemployment. We pay the most benefits and workers comp, all those areas. We’re actually at the top. We encourage legislators not to keep moving us up beyond that. We feel like we’re in a good spot where we are and we’re going to see increased costs already so don’t be expanding those programs this year.”
Mastin on the debate over increasing the minimum wage
(Direct link) 21:45 – 22:18 “Well first, if you compare us to the rest of the country we‘re number two, our minimum wage is the second highest in the country behind California. In California, it’s a little bit higher, but we’re already number two. When you see the minimum wage is going up, it creates a salary compression and it raises costs, other places, and other salaries going up. And then that translates into an inflationary aspect of an increase in the cost of, of goods and services. – And so that is the impact and I think that’s an area where I think the legislature needs to be careful about those kinds of impacts.”
Mastin on the tax and regulatory environment for businesses in Washington
(Direct link) 22:38-23:14 “I would make the argument that right now when you start looking at the costs that are being put on the employers community, we already pay about fifty percent of all local and state taxes. Three billion dollars— likely more— in unemployment insurance and workers comp costs and all those. And now they’re also talking about an additional tax. You know, at some point we’ve got to say – hey enough’s enough. And this is another area where I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion about what’s the right number and what’s the wrong number. Four years ago, the number we have now, people would have said that was the right number. And now we have. . . wanting more. So it’s always going to be a challenge.”