eye on business
Standing Up for Small Business
Kris Johnson, AWB President
A woman who runs a Vancouver business phone company said she pays 30 percent less for workers’ compensation insurance in Oregon than she does in Washington.
In Tacoma, the manager of a metal fabricating company said she is still waiting for the“ affordable” part of the Affordable Care Act to arrive.
And in Pullman, a bicycle shop owner described how would-be customers come into his shop, take a bike for a test drive and then buy it online from a competitor who doesn’ t charge sales tax.
These are just a few of the stories we have heard since our Government Affairs team hit the road in May on a 15-city small business outreach tour. As of this writing, the tour is only one-third complete, but we’ ve already heard from dozens of small-business owners about the challenges they face running a business today in Washington state.
For many of you, the challenges will sound familiar: Minimum wage. The cost of health care. Local, state and federal regulations. Access to skilled workers.
But it’ s important we hear about them now, and with plenty of detail. That’ s because we know we are facing a long, challenging 2017 legislative session. The more detail we can provide to lawmakers, the more success we will have promoting a small-business agenda.
It’ s not enough to just tell lawmakers that small-business owners deal with too much regulation. We need to give them specifics, such as the business owner who hired someone solely to keep track of the different Business & Occupation taxes across multiple jurisdictions.
Or the cabinet designer who hired a human resources consultant to create an employee handbook that, due to over-regulation, consists primarily of information that’ s not necessary or applicable for his business or his employees.
Why are we doing this now? Because small business is the backbone of Washington’ s economy and this is a critical moment in our history. The central Puget Sound region is experiencing rapid growth, but growth is slowing in many parts of the state, and some rural corners of Washington are still waiting for the recovery to arrive.
At the same time, voters will likely be deciding this fall whether to raise the state’ s minimum wage and whether to enact a carbon tax that will drive up the cost of energy. Both of these issues stand to impact small-business owners.
Also on the ballot: governor, all of the state House of Representatives, half of the state Senate and three state Supreme Court justices.
And we’ re bracing for a long, difficult legislative session in which lawmakers wrestle with the final pieces of the
McCleary school funding court decision.
Amid this array of issues competing for attention and dollars, it’ s critical that small business has a voice. We know that small businesses helped drive the country out of the Great Recession, accounting for more job growth than big businesses.
Small businesses continue to play a huge role in the state and national economy, accounting for half of America’ s workforce and almost half of the nation’ s GDP. Two-thirds of all new jobs are created by small businesses, according the U. S. Small Business Administration.
Small businesses represent the vast majority of AWB’ s membership, with roughly 6,000 of our members employing 100 or fewer people.
And let’ s not forget, even our biggest members started out as small businesses.
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