By Michelle McDaniel, Janice Deguchi, Jen Muzia, and Amarinthia Torres

If your children have attended child care or after-school programs, if you’ve accessed a food bank, or if you are a renter (or a landlord) who received rental assistance during COVID, your life has been touched by a human services professional. Human services professionals support Seattle’s human infrastructure. They work in child care, emergency shelters, food banks, family centers, home visiting programs, senior centers, and youth development programs. And their pay is so low that, too often, they can’t afford to stay in these jobs.

Sustaining our human services infrastructure requires compensating human service workers equitably, in alignment with the difficulty and responsibility of the work they do. City officials and nonprofit leaders agree that wages for human service workers do not reflect the education required, difficulty, or value of their work. These are workers who hold college and advanced degrees, speak multiple languages, and often share the lived experience of the people they serve. It is shameful that human services professionals are often paid so little that they qualify for the support programs they administer.

How far behind are human services wages? A 2022 City of Seattle-funded study conducted by the University of Washington School of Social Work found that King County human service workers are paid at least 37 percent less than workers with comparable skill sets in other industries. The report provides irrefutable evidence that human service workers—who are disproportionately women and people of color—are significantly underpaid for the essential work they perform.

Low wages result in high turnover and vacancy rates, which are preventing human service nonprofits from being able to fulfill their mission. From early learning classrooms unable to open to delayed affordable housing projects, low wages are preventing human services providers from hiring the staff to implement critical community services.

By funding the study on wage equity across industries, the city of Seattle has already taken a meaningful first step toward addressing the crisis in human service worker pay. The report provides a number of evidence-based recommendations that the city can implement now to begin closing the gap.

The primary near-term recommendation in the report is an immediate seven percent increase to all city of Seattle-funded human service contracts, which would enable nonprofit service providers to increase their employees’ pay across the board. This represents the minimum level of investment needed in the short term to address high rates of turnover and align human service worker pay with the rest of the labor market. This increase needs to be funded in addition to inflation adjustments already guaranteed under city law.

Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold has introduced a resolution that would put the council on a path to adopting this set of recommendations in the coming years. We urge supportive community members to send a message to their council members supporting this legislation at this link.

Over the next few years, the city of Seattle has an opportunity to build on these investments and support the substantial wage increases recommended by this report. We call on City leaders to work in concert with other public and private funders to identify revenue necessary to pay the full cost of providing essential, life-saving human services to all Seattle residents.

Michelle McDaniel is CEO of Crisis Connections and Co-Chair of the Raising Wages for Changing Lives campaign.

Janice Deguchi, is Executive Director of Neigohborhood House and Co-Chair of the Raising Wages for Changing Lives campaign.

Jen Muzia is Executive Director of the Ballard Food Bank and Co-Chair of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

Amarinthia Torres is Co-Director of the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence and Co-Chair of the Seattle Human Services Coalition.