Philadelphia’s City Council is getting ready to host a hearing on the possibility of implementing a “fair workweek” law, write Juliana Feliciano Reyes and Aaron Moselle for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A version of that law has been in effect in Seattle for around a year, giving Philadelphia a good guide to learn from. For example, Seattle’s experiences show that Philadelphia would need to allocate funds for enforcement and education from the very start to ensure that the law is not purely symbolic.

When it passed its “secure scheduling” law, Seattle also doubled the size of its Office of Labor Standards, the workplace law enforcement arm. However, even with those extra resources, the agency is still swamped.

According to politicians and advocates, the goal of the Seattle law was to fight poverty. This makes the stakes even higher in Philadelphia. It’s the nation’s poorest big city with a median household income of just above $41,000.

As a comparison, the median income in the Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma area is more than $78,000. Furthermore, Philadelphia is nearly twice as big as Seattle.

Read more about the “fair workweek” law in the Philadelphia Inquirer by clicking here.