For reasons too complicated to get into in a comment, the taxi industry has typically avoided most of these minimum-wage arguments because of the way those systems are designed. The taxi lobby is a lot more entrenched than the ride hail lobby (and for some bizarre reason, it isn’t criticized the same way, even though it is every bit as awful and exploitative — and more so in some areas - than ride share giants ) is my guess for one. Even our dysfunctional city council won’t want to take on the taxi lobby, not that Seattle has much of a taxi ecosystem anyway. Taking a taxi in Seattle is one of my last-resort options, and I moved here from New York City, and am not anti-taxi as a concept, the Seattle cabs add just terrible.

Of course, Uber and Lyft didn’t help themselves any by arguing vociferously for years that they weren’t anything like taxis, largely as a way to avoid having to pay drivers similar to medallion systems. Now, there were some good reasons for this, especially in markets like Portland, that used to have really restrictive pick-up policies for taxi cabs — and in areas like New York and Chicago, that have strict limits on how many medallions are issued and how many cabs can be on the road at once, but these companies can’t have it both ways. They can’t argue for years that they aren’t taxi companies and then complain if legislation means they have to pay more than taxi companies.