Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage May Be Hurting Workers, Report Finds (usatoday.com) 511
As companies look for ways to cut costs, Seattle's $15 minimum wage law may be hurting hourly workers instead of helping them, according to a new report. From a USA Today article: A report (PDF) from the University of Washington (UW), found that when wages increased to $13 in 2016, some companies may have responded by cutting low-wage workers' hours. The study, which was funded in part by the city of Seattle, found that workers clocked 9 percent fewer hours on average, and earned $125 less each month after the most recent increase. "If you're a low-skilled worker with one of those jobs, $125 a month is a sizable amount of money," Mark Long, a UW public-policy professor and an author of the report told the Seattle Times. "It can be the difference between being able to pay your rent and not being able to pay your rent."
Typical... (Score:2, Insightful)
If goes from "The science is settled!" to "may be doing something" when the results don't fit the popular narrative.
and you wonder how people can be skeptical? Geesh.
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Insightful)
Thomas Sowell (based Harvard / Stanford economist and academic) has researched this to death using actual data, minimum wage creates fewer jobs. Listen to his explanation https://youtu.be/6TGkfjaxFWs. He started as a Marxist until he actually did some research.
Please watch the video or even read his research, this isn't the answer.
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Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is obvious to pay workers nothing, thus guaranteeing infinite work.
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He started as a Marxist until he actually did some research.
If you say so. The video is just an excerpt from an audiobook, so I went looking for something a little more substantial in video form... which I did not find. I did find a lot of articles though, and this guy is partisan as shit. If he "started as a Marxist," it was a very long time ago.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely conclusive evidence until you read the rebuttals. Like the fact that his data excluded all restaurants (almost 35% of minimum wage jobs), excluded any business with more than one location, etc, etc, etc. Just remember, figures never lie but liers can figure.
The data set the researcher used was substandard at best, someone might even argue the data set was cooked to extract the desired result.On top of that he refuses to provide the data to outside users and reviewers making his "research" a fucking black box. But he was at least honest and listed all the problems with the data, just didn't include why excluding more than a 1/3rd of low wage jobs in the study area was a good idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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It depends on what that 5 bucks would buy, I guess. But the erroneous assumption here is the word "everyone". This isn't about "everyone" making minimum wage. There has to be entry level jobs with room to improve, else where do beginning employees start?
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Here's the f**king problem - reformulating the minimum wage to being a "living" wage hurts those with a low skill set.
Part of keeping a job is
- showing up every day
- showing up on time every day
- showing the will to this day in and day, week in and week out
- being clean and reasonably well groomed
- following directions
- being personable
You may take these "skills" for granted but they nee
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Insightful)
if you're putting in 40 hours a week to a job, then you have every expectation to be able to live off said job.
Not live well mind you, but you should be able to house, clothe, and feed yourself.
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That stopped being the case about 30 years ago.
In 2014, only 19% of minimum wage workers were the sole income for their household. It makes more sense to target that 19% with EITC, which is based on total household income, rather than raising wages above the market rate for teenagers looking to earn gas money.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of them have these things? Go on, give me a percentage of people living in economic poverty who have these items. Surely you must have an actual statistic, right? I mean, you wouldn't just be making it up for effect, right?
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Informative)
When I was starting my family out my neighbor was section8 + all the other social support.
She was the stereotype to a T. Three kids by three different men, all spaced 5 years apart (First 5 California), had cable, had a car, had a cell phone.
She needed help with her paperwork one day and asked me to help, so I saw all the numbers. I did a P&L for her and compared it with a P&L for me and you know what? I was working my ass off for $13/hr (1999) and she was bringing home about $100 per month more than me sitting at home doing nothing. Hugely frustrating to me, but of course if she actually got a job it would be min wage and she'd lose at least twice as much in benefits as she'd have earned. The system is desperately broken, but I haven't the foggiest how to fix it.
Now, where I live public transit is shit. Jobs are spaced out. A car is kinda needed. A low end cell phone on a cheap plan is cheaper than a land line now. I get it, but the system still keeps people dependant.
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Insightful)
But are there, really? I can only think of two groups of people who don't need a living wage: People who get paid disability by the government (e.g. people with serious mental disabilities) and high school students. The problem is that most high school students don't really want a job, and more importantly, can't do a job during the most critical part of the workday except three months out of the year. So depending on them is not a viable way to sustain any sort of business.
Ostensibly, you could extend that to recent high school grads living with their parents, but the problem is that eventually those folks have to be able to move out of their parents' houses, which means they need additional education, which costs money—way more than a basic living wage if you want to afford even a basic two-year community college degree. And if you they don't earn enough money for that, then you've effectively created a permanent underclass that can never move out of their parents' houses, who thus eventually end up homeless when their parents retire and can no longer afford to pay their rent. This is simply not sustainable, either.
The notion of a group of people that doesn't need a living wage is, frankly, absurd. What you're really arguing is that there is a group of people who don't have enough clout to demand a living wage and/or don't understand that they're getting screwed. And that's not the same thing as not needing to make ends meet.
(Well, okay. Pedantically, there are a fair number of independently wealthy people who have enough money that they can afford to work for less than a living wage and still make ends meet. But they also don't need the money, and sure as h*** won't work for less than minimum wage, which makes that moot.)
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Informative)
Working hard and playing by the rules has never been a recipe for anything but modest success at best
Yet this is the delusion under which a large number of Americans labor, and the ruling class perpetuates.
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A very small percentage of full time workers make only minimum wages. And for those that do, it is a very temporary situation as they get raises and climb the employment ladder.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, when minimum wage first began under FDR, it was 25 cents an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is $4.25 an hour today.
Most economists don't even like the concept of a minimum wage at all, and that includes famous Democrat economists like Paul Krugman.
Anyways, if you look in my post history, I personally predicted exactly this, and was downmodded as a troll post.
I told you so, slashdot.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that really depends on what things you factor in when adjusting for inflation. I would argue that the primary metric when setting minimum wage should be based on the cost of getting an education to allow someone to move beyond a minimum wage job. In 1938, tuition at Harvard was $420 per year. Using that as a metric, minimum wage should be $25.76 per hour today, or about $54,000 a year.
Other possible metrics range from significantly less than minimum wage to significantly more:
That first one is pretty important, because both that and the cost of education are solid indicators of whether someone can possibly make enough money to make a crucial leap in personal financial development—from minimum wage to better wage, from renting to home ownership. When low-end wages fail to keep up with inflation in those areas, even though the day-to-day survival items remain affordable, it means that the people at the bottom are more likely to be kept permanently at the bottom with no opportunity for advancement, effectively growing the divide between rich and poor and eroding the middle class. This, in turn, leads to much more serious societal problems.
And there's also another critical number that this ignores: 15. That's the improvement in years of life expectancy since 1938. In 1938, on average, people lived only about 63 years, which means most people never reached what we would consider retirement age. Now, they live for more than a decade after retirement, on average, and those years are significantly more expensive in terms of average healthcare costs.
I can't find average healthcare cost statistics for the 1930s, but if we compare against 1958, the cost has roughly quadrupled after adjusting for inflation. So if we used the cost of healthcare in 1938 as the metric for computing inflation, I could easily see thirty or forty bucks an hour as a reasonable minimum wage.
Really, minimum wage is way too low. Way, way too low. And if that means that there are jobs that aren't worth what businesses have to pay, they will have to adapt—either by finding more efficient ways to use personnel or by adding automation to replace personnel with machines. And the result will be that certain categories of jobs will cease to exist. And it will ultimately be the government's responsibility to find a way to subsidize the cost of their education so that they can be qualified for jobs that pay more. But that's really the only realistic future. We simply cannot continue to live in a society where a sizable percentage of workers can never realistically afford to go to college.
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that really depends on what things you factor in when adjusting for inflation. I would argue that the primary metric when setting minimum wage should be based on the cost of getting an education to allow someone to move beyond a minimum wage job.
Usually I try to be respectful of other people's opinions but no, I'm sorry it's not. I think it's very sympathetic to the plight of the lower classes but overall it's a terribly misguided idea to track inflation to education costs and only education costs. You can't pretend the rest of economy and society doesn't exist. Not everyone in poverty is capable/interested/planning on obtaining a post secondary education. So what happens if education costs go down and they can't afford other basic living expenses? Oh, they should all just go to college? Really? No, minimum wage should track the whole basket they use today for measuring the CPI because these are things people need to live everyday.
The truth is, already education is free in the US. You don't have do anything to obtain except show up. I have to assume you're talking about post secondary education? If so, you're making it sound like all you have to do to get into the middle class is go to college. Sounds a lot like today's problem of kids obtaining college degrees and not being able to find gainful employment afterwards... Yes having a degree is a good indicator of your place in society. Yes, it'll raise your odds, statistically speaking. However there are still NO guarantees on this. The nuances are much more complex. Location, type of degree, you as a person, life skills, all of these details are important but more challenging to track and measure. As time goes on, society is beginning to realizing that post secondary education is neither an autopilot for success nor is it always even necessary to do well. Sure it's anecdotal, but just ask my plumber/electrician/landscaper/contractor. You don't need a college degree to be in the middle class. You just don't. The solution to "fix" society is not sending everyone to college. The really difficult question is how do you built up a society in such a way that everyone strives and works hard to obtain meaningful and gainful employment. It's a really, really hard problem to solve. Especially if you already have existing paths for people to do so, but they aren't doing it. Altering minimum wage is very easy and yet ineffective way of solving this problem. You can put more and more carrots in front of people to persuade them to go where you want them to go. But when do you stop adding carrots and instead figure out why they're not chasing the carrots?
Besides, post secondary education is way overpriced right now for all the wrong reasons compared to Harvard 1938. If you could break down the cost of your college bill, you'd be surprised how much of it is not even academic in nature. No way in hell we should be pegging something bloated like that as a measure for minimum wage.
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you predicted this, then perhaps you can answer this question:
If it's possible to reduce the hours of all of your low-skill workers without impacting your business's competitiveness, then why did so many managers not do so before this? Reducing your labour costs by 9% would have a huge impact on most companies' bottom lines, yet apparently they were happy to waste this money until minimum wage went up.
And, on a related note, why do the managers that were wasting 10% of their payroll on inefficiency (that apparently can be trivially addressed) for years all still have jobs?
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If it's possible to reduce the hours of all of your low-skill workers without impacting your business's competitiveness, then why did so many managers not do so before this?
For lots of fabulous reasons. Reasons like preferring open floor plans to offices with doors that close. Reasons like calling a meeting to determine the agenda for the next meeting that you're going to have. Reasons like asking IT to fix the temperature in the office because the thermostats are technology.
You seem to believe that managers and the C-level and HR folks work on logic and evidence. They have in maybe 5% of the organizations I've either worked in or have become familiar with. (Current o
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
agreed, but there is always 2 sides of an equation... if you dont work both sides it wont balance, you just drive up costs. You said it yourself : "to be able to support themselves". Lets say that it costs $1000/wk to support yourself, your wife, and your kids living a meager lifestyle. You work for $400/wk and your wife works for $400/wk. Now one approach could be to raise minimum wage, but run the risk of the cost to support everyone increasing to $1100/wk, or you can focus on lowering the cost of living down to $800/wk. A lot less discussion ever happens about the latter yet we see examples of that sort of thing actually happening from time to time.
Not that I would count most things in the tech industry as essentials, but look at things like cell phone plans, internet plans, etc over the last 10yrs. Just the talking and texting part of cellphones has fallen all the way down to $15/mo for unlimited talk and texting. In 2003 sprint was selling 1000 minutes of air time for $100/mo. No texting included. This just illustrates that its entirely possible to lower the costs of essentials perhaps easier than it is to raise wages.
What is killing everyone, despite everyone insisting its good for the economy, is property booms. Before the big 2008 crash, my real estate area had experienced a 30yr trend where property values doubled every 10 yrs. No increase in wages but the cost of property doubling every 10yrs is a recipe for the poor house. Increase property values work against the affordable living scenario.
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I could support myself on minimum wage. It'd be a bare existence but I could exist on it. In South Georgia. I have no idea how people in San Francisco live on three times that. Or NY City for that matter. The only jobs here I know of that pay minimum wage here are fast food or some part time jobs. I know one guy that does construction and he pays teenagers 10 bucks an hour just to pick up trash on the job site.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't let poor, old, and/or sick people die in the street. They won't have preventative care or retirement, but they'll get emergency treatment for their medical emergencies. If they skip out on the bill or go bankrupt, the hospital pays it, passes it onto insurance companies who pass it onto you.
Or you could potentially pay more now in terms of welfare and maybe higher minimum wages, both of which have potential other benefits, like more people with money = healthier economy for everyone else since they can buy stuff.
I dunno, but I do know "MONEY MINE! NO TAXES!" is not a very sound economic theory.
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Poor people can't afford to live in lower crime areas or spend as much time with their kids.
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Re: Typical... (Score:2)
Hey I want $100/hour to come clean your house. What? Too expensive? You will not hire me? You greedy bastard!
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well I'm torn on the issue. I dont want people to get shit wages, but raising minimum wage wont solve the issue. Raising minimum wage amounts to forced inflation. If people still have a hard time understanding why, look back 5 yrs when we had $4/gal gas. How many things started going up in price as a result of the increase cost of fuel and energy? It got so bad that some countries started rioting because they had to chose between eating and paying rent. The prices of consumables went up 150% in some cases.
Lesser of two evils? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking that "don't work at all" may be the lesser of two evils: A sub-livable wage exploits workers and amounts to an unorganized form of corporate welfare. If you keep people from working for such low pay, even if it means less income for them, it cuts off the corporate welfare stream that was available to all companies paying sub-livable wages and ensures that those who still have jobs can support themselves.
As for those who can't find work anymore? Well, what to do with the ever-increasing number of ever-more-skilled people our lovely capitalist system has no need for is another question, and we won't answer it any faster by papering the problem over with sub-livable-wage jobs...
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Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it has a negligible effect on employment at approximately it's current level.
At it's current level, raising the minimum wage causes a nearly one-for-one increase in consumption. That increased sales offsets the expense of the higher wage.
If it jumped to $100/hr, that would no longer hold true. Well, at least until inflation turned that $100/hr into the equivalent of $10-15/hr.
Re: Typical... (Score:4, Insightful)
For the same reason that drinking an extra liter of water per day has a negligible affect on your health, but drinking an extra 100 liters of water per day is a terrible idea.
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing I've learned in social science is never trust research -- or at least give it a good read before making any comments. In fact, I actually left the econ PhD a decade ago after seeing that pretty much all research done in this field is a giant form of confirmation bias: "Keep working on it until it makes sense", they'd tell me. Or "Make sure the results are in line with what you'd expect and consistent with literature" and so on. I have yet to see someone confirm someone else's economic theories -- only their own. And it wasn't my school either: I wish I could remember the details, but I recall reading a paper way back when from Princeton that had methodological errors in it that I was amazed it was even taken seriously, much less published.
Personally, The reason that I like Hayek and Sowell is that it's based on logic and reasoning. Then again, I am biased, so there's that...
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A ton of research has been done on minimum wage and the consensus is that is has negligible effect on employment.
That's a serious misstatement of the minimum wage research. There has been a lot of research, and it has found that small, cautious increases in minimum wages tend to have negligible negative effect on employment. This isn't because minimum wages have no negative effect in general, it's because governments tend to avoid raising it so far that it becomes damaging.
This study shows that Seattle has gone too far.
It's also worth pointing out that past studies may have less relevance in the future, as much la
Re: Typical... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you read the study its exclusion criteria is so bad it can't consider the results anything other than exploratory.
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If you're talking about people who aren't economists, yeah, this just in, sometimes people say things that are wrong. If you're looking at professional economists who aren't regarded as cranks, I'm skeptical you'd find many saying "FACT. MINIMUM WAGE ALWAYS GOOD."
Slashdot, undergoing a fox news regression, likely prefers researchers who do their research and then politely refrain from making anything more than timid suggestions that are c
This has already been proven bunk (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:This has already been proven bunk (Score:5, Interesting)
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There's a part of me that wonders if one could actually do better "under the table", at least on the short term (lack of healthcare would eventually trip you up) due to the employer's lower overhead. (No payroll taxes, no insurance, etc.)
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I understand, and you don't even have to be an "undocumented worker". Years ago I spent a couple years as a private contractor and chose during that time not to have medical insurance at all. My salary at the time was fairly high, and I was in general good health, so it seemed a safe bet.
Then, it so happens I had to have some procedures done. Some precancerous growths removed, dental work done, nothing critical but still potentially spendy. The interesting thing is that as a cash customer, I was charged
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Making stuff up?
"For the restaurant/service industry there's also been an increase in the number of illegals hired and paid even less than before under the table."
The report says at least twice that the restaurant/service industry is seeing the exact same number of workers and the exact same number of hours worked.
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Re:This has already been proven bunk (Score:5, Insightful)
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The paper states "we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent."
The paper's definition of "low-wage" is up to $19 per hour, so not all of the "low-wage" workers received a legally required raise due to the higher minimum wage.
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To be clear, for those making $19 per hour or less "total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employeesâ(TM) earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016."
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Fascinating how some people can't do the math of clocking out earlier for the same paycheck.
Re:This has already been proven bunk (Score:5, Interesting)
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That sure sounds beneficial for the worker - they work less and get the same.
UW study contradicts... (Score:5, Insightful)
The University of Washington study comes to a very different conclusion than a UC Berkeley report.
How a Rising Minimum Wage Affects Jobs in Seattle
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]
Re:UW study contradicts... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:UW study contradicts... (Score:5, Informative)
The UCB study was paid for by the Mayor after he saw an early draft of the UW post. Check the Seattle Weekly article on the topic. The UCB report is pure BS.
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-object-lesson-in-weaponized-data/
Re:UW study contradicts... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd order another study myself if I was given UW's pure BS. From your own cited source:
"Among other things, the UW study did not include multisite businesses in the study, which the UW researchers argued produced a cleaner data set but which Berkeley researchers said meant a huge portion of Seattleâ(TM)s low-wage work force was left out of the study. "
"Cleaner" as in is necessary to show the purported effect?
Re:UW study contradicts... (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting point, but the UCB report is not "pure BS." Actually, it's a pretty difficult problem to address and economists have been working on it for years. Like previous studies, it appears that the UW study has its own methodological problems. You probably quit reading before you got to this point in that seattleweekly.com post:
"Berkeley’s Reich did not return a phone call seeking comment, but in a memo released Monday he blasted the UW report, saying it was full of red flags.
Among other things, the UW study did not include multisite businesses in the study, which the UW researchers argued produced a cleaner data set but which Berkeley researchers said meant a huge portion of Seattle’s low-wage work force was left out of the study. Reich also notes that many of the UW team’s most dire conclusions fall outside what even highly critical research would suggest."
“The unlikely UW estimate of large negative employment effects likely results from the problems noted above. Their findings are not credible and drawing inferences from the report are unwarranted,” Reich wrote."
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It'll never be settled. Basically as soon as minimum wage is implemented, both sides mark a future date in their respective calendars to write up a victory lap (victory condition for the negative side is an employment mushroom cloud).
All this supported by impeccable data, on both sides.
I personally think that a UBI regime is far better than a livable minimum wage, but UBI hasn't got the miles on it yet to
Special Advisory on invalidated study (Score:4, Informative)
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Since the "report" excluded the target (Score:5, Informative)
Surprise!
Those are the target audience of tax-supported employers
Worthless "Study"
Biased study generates intended result (Score:5, Informative)
If you exclude all the employees from businesses that have multiple locations, [fortune.com] then focus only on single-location businesses that are under pressure by the excluded businesses, you're pretty much guaranteed to get that result.
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It doesn't matter how large your study population is if your selection process is biased.
Using confidential payroll data from the Washington Employment Security Department, the researchers compare employment, hours and wages of workers in Seattle and various other parts of Washington both before and after Seattle began raising its minimum wage. [washingtonpost.com]
Ok. So what about that data means that they have to
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Only Temporary (Score:2, Insightful)
This is only temporary.
Lower management sought to bring costs "back to where they were before the wage increase." How? They cut hours, which means fewer person-hours per day to do the job. Quality or quantity will suffer.
Middle management will see the drop in gross sales –due to lower quality. Upper management will breathe fire down upon them for the lost of brand prestige or drop in quarterly profits.
Middle management will instruct lower management to staff-up in order to fix it. Workers will ha
Re:Only Temporary (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's humorous you think there's so many levels of disconnected management in small companies employing minimum wage workers.
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"A good rule of thumb is that a living wage should be three times the cost of renting an apartment with a roommate."
Move someplace where rent is cheap enough to afford on a minimum wage job -- and seek employment there. Maybe rent in Seattle will go down, too if enough people follow this suggestion.
Re:Only Temporary (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy answer: the study is a BS (Score:5, Informative)
And lo and behold! The model shows slightly more growth than the real Seattle.
Sounds like a win for employers (Score:3)
If employees are given 9% fewer hours and getting less overall pay and are presumably doing the same jobs they were before the wage increase, then they must be 9% more efficient and saving businesses money.
I bet businesses around the country are going to push for higher minimum wages now -- they'll save money and get more efficient workers.
Win, but not the way you think (Score:5, Insightful)
For service employers who don't interact with customers (e.g. maids), it just means their hours were reduced. The office decides to have cleaning services come in every other day instead of every day. The floors are a bit dirtier, but it's considered preferable to the higher price of cleaning service. Thus efficiency is increased.
For production employees, they simply moved production out to someplace with a lower minimum wage. Thus efficiency is increased.
Bad research (Score:2)
The subjects are from a small range of people, and the statistical analysis is dubious.
Someone bent this data until it gave a result, perhaps even the result they wanted.
Don't trust this study.
WaPo has links to several studies (Score:2)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/27/seattles-higher-minimum-wage-is-actually-working-just-fine
According to the stuff they quote, Seattle's doing just fine, thank you very much. With an unemployment rate of only 2.6 percent, I'm inclined to believe them. As mentioned by others, the study excludes workers at businesses that have more than one location, making it pretty damn meaningless in this age of the multi-national corporation and a Starbucks on every corner.
orly? (Score:2)
Seems like bad solution (Score:2)
Statistics are hard (Score:5, Interesting)
"Seattle data show - even in simple first differences - that payroll expenses on workers earning under $19 per hour either rose minimally or fell as the minimum wage increased from $9.47 to $13 in just over nine months."
So they're including people making more than the new minimum wage, up to 46% more, in their calculations. Given the discrepancy noted above it seems likely that the higher wage employees are bearing the brunt of the reduction in hours
Most likely the wage increase helped the people it was directly targeted at but had a negative impact on others who were making above minimum wage but not enough above the minimum to escape the "low-wage" classification.
making ends meet (Score:4, Interesting)
These are illuminating in regard to any discussion of the economic impact of the minimum wage:
http://thehill.com/homenews/ho... [thehill.com]
And this:
https://boingboing.net/2017/06... [boingboing.net]
Perfect! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh cool! Now we have two reports that draw opposite conclusions, so we can just pick whichever one we already agree with and ignore the other. Sweet!
Complacent (Score:2)
Who could of guessed? (Score:2)
Expected result, because $15/hr is not a panacea (Score:3)
If there is work to be done, you will have to pay someone to do it, and that minimum will be $15/hr. If your business cannot afford that, then you will adapt and find some way to eliminate the need for such work. It's pretty simple, businesses trim up when payroll costs rise.
If you needed to guarantee that every person has a basic income, then you have to work out a social program to provide that because minimum wage never promised to do that. Minimum wage only increases the bottom end of the amount of money labor gets per unit of work, it does not promise a chicken in every pot.
Free market and businesses are incapable of feeding and clothing every person. If that's your only goal here, then minimum wage was the wrong tool. That people get their hours cut doesn't negate the fact that thousands of people have earned more money for a unit of work.
There are only so many hours in a day. If you make more per hour, even if you can't fill every one of those hours with work currently you at least have those hours available to look for work or try to arrange for ways to save money. Working 10-15 hours a week at $15/hr and not having to spend money on childcare is probably better than working 20-30 hours a week at $7.25/hr and almost certainly needing to work out some arrangements for childcare.
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Why not increase the minimum wage to $100/hr?
Because we'd all get laid off and the economy would go into a recession (or depression).
When most jobs are fully automated, maybe we should work for around $1000/hr, and work 1 hour a week. In the US we'd need about 125 million jobs to fill for full employment, if half (or more) of the jobs are automated we have some options on how to address that. A minimum wage increase with lots of part time would be one.
It's easiest to consider labor to be a commodity. It's not entirely accurate, but in terms of market
The bottom line: 3.1% (Score:3)
The bottom line is that the unemployment rate in Seattle is 3.1% (compared to 5.2% in Washington as a whole), and has actually been going down as the minimum wage increases have taken effect. Clearly the high minimum wage is not leading to massive unemployment as the service industry shutters all businesses and people beg for jobs on the street.
Flipping Burgers is an Entry Level Job (Score:3, Insightful)
Minimum wage is not supposed to be a "living wage." McDonald's and the like are supposed to be the first job a person gets, not a lifetime career. You're supposed to learn a work ethic in a minimum wage job so you can move on and get a better job. $15 / hour prevents people from getting that first job because they have no skills and have to be taught everything. I might be able to support a minimum wage if there was a lower "training wage" for people with no skills in their first job.
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Illegal immigration has decimated the availability of those entry-level jobs.
No, its the minimum wage that did it. Illegals wouldnt have an advantage attaining these low skill jobs if they didnt also have an advantageous wage.
This shit keeps repeating. The sour of these dumb minimum wage increases will grow more and more apparent and will take minimum wage increase policies off the table of support-of-the-ignorant for a decade or two, until a new generation of ignorant people is raised to replace the ones lost to reality.
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All expenses are either for your own labor and profit, or your suppliers (and their suppliers, etc) labor and profit. There is nothing else. And before someone gets the bright idea to say 'taxes!', taxes are to pay for the governments labor.
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How do rent and/or mortgage payments fit in to that "everything is labor or profit" model? I'm willing to believe that it does fit in, I just don't quite see how.
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You increase prices to cover the added expense.
Sure, because the price wasnt already what the market could bear.
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"Look, if your business can reduce hours without significantly lowering the quality of customer service, then you should have done that BEFORE the wage increase. Otherwise you were wasting your money."
Increase costs make a business owner look at recovering those costs to something that were acceptable before. You are right -- maybe they could have done this before. Maybe their profit margin was working for them so they didn't bother doing a full analysis of their business to determine if that was the case