 Hello, I'm Kristen Joy, and this is You Are Rights at Work. And our guest today is Margaret Wise of the Seattle Office of Labor Standards. Welcome, Margaret. Hi, Kristen. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really glad to join you today. Yeah. Well, we're excited to learn about the minimum wage from you. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your job? Sure. I work for the Seattle Office of Labor Standards. And that is one of the local labor law offices in Washington State. So my job there is as an investigator. And the role of the investigator is to contact businesses and speak with employees and to make sure that businesses are following Seattle's labor laws and that workers are receiving the protections that they get from those laws. Sounds like an amazing job. You're a lucky person to be able to stand up for workers and their rights every day. Yeah, I'm really grateful to be able to do this work. So our topic today is a worker's right to a minimum wage. So Margaret, what is a minimum wage? Yeah. So a minimum wage is the smallest or lowest amount that someone should be paid for each hour of work that they perform. I think that, yeah, that's minimum wage in a nutshell. That's a good definition. And so we're in the year 2022. And what is the minimum wage in Washington State? Yeah. So in Washington State in 2022, the minimum wage is $14.49 per hour. But it might not be the same depending on which city you live or work in. So it's not the same in every city or town in Washington. Is it lower some places or higher or both? Good question. So Washington State has a minimum wage and then there's a federal minimum wage which applies across the United States. And then in Washington State, some cities and towns have their own minimum wage. So workers, depending on where you work, get to be paid the highest minimum wage that applies where they are. So if you're in Washington State, the lowest that you should receive is $14.49 per hour. But some cities like Seattle and SeaTac have higher minimum wages. So if you're working in one of those cities, for example, in Seattle in 2022, the minimum wage is $17.27 per hour. And how can a worker tell if they're receiving the minimum wage that they should be getting? Yeah. So one good place to check is on pay stubs if that is something that a worker is receiving. So all employees in Washington State should be getting pay stubs each time they're paid. Those can be electronic or in paper form. But either way, they should have the hours that the person worked and the rate of pay. So that is one place to check to see what the rate of pay shows. And you can compare that against the minimum wage either at Washington State level, if you're in Seattle, the Seattle minimum wage. And is there anything else that you'd like to share with us about the minimum wage? One thing I did want to say is we talked about the minimum wage in 2022. But I do want to note that in Washington State, the minimum wage will increase each year. Well, Margaret Wise from the Seattle Office of Labor Standards, thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope that you tune in to the next episode of Your Rights at Work.