Seattle Wage March

Hundreds of people marched earlier this year in support of raising Seattle's minimum wage to $15 an hour. A new study by real-estate tracker Zillow says a person would have to earn nearly three times as much -- $43.44 an hour -- to rent a median-priced home in pricey San Diego County.

(Joshua Trujillo/AP Photo)

With Christmas bearing down, here are three workplace/workforce stories that caught our eye over the weekend:



Seattle grabbed national headlines earlier this year when the City Council voted to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage.

So, what do you think of a $43 an hour minimum wage?

That's what you'd have to earn if you want to live on your own in San Diego County and rent a median-priced home, according to a new study by real-estate tracker Zillow.

To be precise, $43.44 an hour working full time, according to the study.

"That means it takes an annual salary of $90,355 in order to rent the median priced property, which costs $2,259 per month," U-T San Diego reports. "For the study, Zillow lumped single family homes, condos and apartments together for ease of comparison. The median income for an individual in San Diego County is $53,150, or $25.55 an hour.

How about a $43 an hour minimum wage?

On the heels of Uber's agreement to temporarily pull out of Portland while city officials attempt to revamp their regulations to allow the company's ridesharing services comes the news that another San Francisco startup is taking on the rental car industry.



The San Jose Mercury News reports that FlightCar is offering Oakland airport travelers free parking and a little bit of money in exchange for rental fees on their cars while they are away.

Like Uber and Airbnb, FlightCar is one of a growing number of companies in the sharing economy where private citizens connect with others to sell or rent their own goods or services or both, like spare bedrooms or taxi rides. The startup has nine offices near airports, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, and about $20 million in venture capital funding from investors such as actor Ashton Kutcher and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

"The rental car industry is one people sort of despise," 20-year-old FlightCar President Kevin Petrovic told the Mercury News. "We're competing with the rental car space more than anything. This is about taking something that really sucks and figuring out how to make it better."

Just as Uber has run afoul of Portland's taxi regulations, FlightCar got into trouble with the San Francisco city attorney who sued the company in 2013 for not getting a license and paying 10 percent of the revenue and $20 per rental that the other rental car companies pay, the Mercury News reports. San Francisco collects about $94 million a year from airport rental car agencies. FlightCar has not yet settled the suit, Petrovic said.

Startup rents privately owned cars at Oakland airport

Oregon lawmakers will be looking at pioneering Colorado as they develop rules and regulations for the sale of recreational marijuana next year. While they're at it, they may want to also consider Colorado's example in planning for the graying of the workforce.

Over the next 15 years, the number of people 60 or older in Colorado is expected to more than double, boosting the need for long-term care and services that enable older adults to live independently in their homes, the Denver Post reports.



Keeping needy senior citizens in their homes will require an expansion of services like transportation, meals-on-wheels, counseling and nutrition education, so the Colorado Department of Human Services is asking for an additional $4 million next year, which would raise state funding for Area Agencies on Aging to $21.3 million.

The implications of as many as 1 million baby boomers leaving Colorado's workforce will have enormous impact on the state's tax base, Bob Semro, a health policy analyst for The Bell Policy Center told the Post. Not only will the income that older adults pay in taxes shrivel, employees who have older family members will be losing days at work to take care of their relatives.

"Do we have the workforce, the infrastructure to support that? Like any business, we need to plan ahead to determine how we are going to deal with this and maintain the highest quality support we can provide without doing damage to the state budget," Semro said.

Colorado's aging population will need increased services to age at home

Have any story ideas relating to the workplace? Share them with me at grede@oregonian.com or @georgerede

-- George Rede