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Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage May Be Hurting Workers, Report Finds (usatoday.com)
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."
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.
they're working less hours. They got a $5/hr raise. No $hi1 they're working less hours. Hours worked != Quality of Life. Who knew?
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The company cut each workers wage by $125 because that's the amount they needed to save. If the minimum wage was lower, then they would still have cut their wages by $125, it's just that they could have demanded more work for it.
Given the higher minimum wage, at least the workers got shorter workdays for the same amount of money.
The problem is that for years governments ignored the lagging behind of entry level wages. But clearly raising them significantly with a sweeping increase can also be just as damaging. Most people with any common sense would have guessed that businesses would react negatively even if on the surface they support minimum wage increases. Its also unrealistic to expect some jobs to be good paying primary incomes for people. The skill level and available workers means it cannot sustain the wages some people expect.
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...
No, it's really not hurting them. Or at least, if it is, this study isn't in any way proof that it is: Source
Negative --- Forbes just came out with the counter-argument that this study was invalid since they didn't research all the workers, just 60%. Must cover all the workers or at least 95%.
Multi-national and nationwide chains are excluded from the study by NBER.
Surprise!
Those are the target audience of tax-supported employers
Worthless "Study"
This is only because the employers are cheating the system. They are still flying their CEO's around in private jets and paying them millions of dollars selling hamburgers.
This is not about profitability or money at all. This is all about power money and greed.
As a fast food CEO how can you enjoy the fruits of your "labor" on the backs of your workforce living in poverty?
Unless there's a a comprehensive change this type of bullshit will continue to happen. Regardless if you are a democrat or a republican both parties still enable employers to exploit and take advantage of their labor forces. They scream and complain about profitability yet live lavish lifestyles at the top. If this was really about business they would cut some of the wasteful spending at the top of the food chain.
If you exclude all the employees from businesses that have multiple locations, then focus only on single-location businesses that are under pressure by the excluded businesses, you're pretty much guaranteed to get that result.
No source because I forget who and where it was (JFGI) but,
The UW study had sampling problems. Another study was done around the same time, or was at least also released recently, which showed that the $15 wage (which is actually phased and is currently just $13) wasn't significantly responsible for current unemployment rates. Couple this with businesses like McDonald's that are speeding up their plans for self-service automation and there are too many variables to account for in a study or two.
As always, the truth is somewhere in between.
This is only temporary.
Lower management sought to bring costs "back to where they were before the wage increase." How? They cut hours, which means fewer person-hours per day to do the job. Quality or quantity will suffer.
Middle management will see the drop in gross sales –due to lower quality. Upper management will breathe fire down upon them for the lost of brand prestige or drop in quarterly profits.
Middle management will instruct lower management to staff-up in order to fix it. Workers will have schedules adjusted, then, to bring them back up to the same number of person-hours as before.
Where they will cut instead is anybody's guess. My guess: "deferred maintenance".
All of the worker would have been sooner or later not been able to afford anything. Folk, inflation do happen if minimum wage is increased or not. Except for 2009 for obvious reason and 2015 , it was always in average around 2% per year, averaged over a decade. That means every 35 years nominal value of dollar is divided by two, e.g. your 100$ are worth half they were 35 years ago, have half as much purchasing power. To give you an example federal minimum wage did not move since 2009. That is about 8 years ago. Assuming 200 hours per month, $7.25 per hour is $1450. Not even counting taxes , insurances, etc... those $1450 in 8 years lost more than 11%, that is more than 150$ , and it was exceptionally low because of the 2008/2009 crisis (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/) , in reality it should have been more than 20% if we had the same average inflation as before 2008.
So basically, you either make a few worker lose 150$ because they work less ("some companies") , and update minimum wage to something livable, OR you make it so that everybody basically lose the same equivalent nominal value because of inflation and not updating wage. Personally I would chose the first, because at least it re-inject money into the economy, whereas not increasing wage does absolutely nothing.
Of course it hurts the workers. Only idiots wanting minimum salary to be $15. They don't realize all the problems it will cause, from people between the old minimum wage and $15, who suddenly end up on minimum wage and can't function anymore because EVERYTHING raised in price accordingly... to just plain loss of work because companies can't afford to pay $15 to some idiot flipping burgers.
The UW study is a BS. Instead of just looking into the actual data (it's not compatible with the aim of the study as it shows improvements in wages and jobs) they created a "fantasy Seattle". Then they compared the growth of wages and employments in this "fantasy Seattle" with the reality. Then they tweaked the model to produce the numbers they want - they omitted minimum-wage workers from chain franchises.
And lo and behold! The model shows slightly more growth than the real Seattle.
Implicit in this study's conclusion is that the company cited had actually kept employees on the clock for longer than they needed them. Most businesses do not pay someone to work unless there is work that needs to be done.
Now, if we can accept that as being true, the only logical conclusion one can draw is that these companies cut the hours of their employees solely to create hardship for them in an attempt to claim that it was the rise in minimum wage that caused this action.
A local pizza establishment has a sign on their menu which states the reason why they raised the price of their pizzas $1.50/each was due to an increase in our local minimum wage law. And given that there are rarely more than two employees working at any given time, one can only assume that they only sell two pizzas per hour - or so they would like us to believe.
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.
If your company was doing well, then you would increase hours regardless of the hourly wage. Anyone that is stupid enough to decrease hours when business is steady or going up will lose customers, assuming they had proper hours previously.
Most likely what was going on was a slight downturn in business that happened concurrently but not caused by the minimum wage increase.
At worst, some employers decided to be proactive and cut hours when they were on the fence, rather than totally sure they did not need the extra hours.
This article is as stupid as any that claim that business owners 'create' jobs, or that capitalists are evil. Business is not an art that lets the owner do what they want. Instead it is a coldly logical set of bookkeeping equations. X sales = x inventory re-stockings, Y sales, z profit, etc. etc. etc.
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Two reports out this week showing different results. Apparently USA Today... nevermind, we all know their politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html
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.
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.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
It's the companies who cut the hours, but they can't conceivably do anything wrong, so blame minimum wage. Maybe if workers worked 3x the hours and donated half their paychecks back to the companies, the companies would cheer up and some of their generosity would trickle back down onto the workers. But no, workers are selfishly spending all the money the company was legally forced to give them, on last month's food and rent.
There is evidence that disputes these talking points. Rather than get into the nuance how about a flood of right wing confirmation bias for the first two pages of a google search? check. Just like climate there will ample well paid shills and posing-libertarian-right-wing useful idiots galore.
Minimum Wage May Be Hurting Workers
some companies may have responded by cutting low-wage workers' hours
companies
cutting hours
Minimum Wage May Be Hurting Workers
So is it "minimum wage" that is refusing to employ workers, or is it the companies?
The takeaway is meant to be "RAISING MINIMUM WAGE = BAD", which is in the plutocrat interest. Giving people more buying power is good for them. It's bad for the slave masters.
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.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
No wonder these morons are working minimum wage jobs. They sure as hell can't do math and don't know how economics or business math works.
I've always been in favor of ratio based minimums. E.g. The CEO can't earn more than 10x the lowest paid employee or contractor. That's an illustration, yes it has to be a bit more complex. I feel like no one ever talks about it though. It's just minimum wage this and that, and even then not discussed in the context of being pegged to inflation. Wouldn't it be nice for the boss's success to be everyone's success, just as the myth of the job creator dictates? "The boss doubled his paycheck! We all get a raise! Woohoo!"
The math on this wasn't making any sense to me, an 18% or 32% wage increase (depending on whether you count one or both increases) ought to more than compensate for a 9% decrease in hours. So i dug through TFA a little and eventually found this:
"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.
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This is the expected outcome. If it's illegal to pay less than $15 for an hour of labor, what the hell do people who don't generate $15/hr in value do? They lose their job. It's on purpose. The whole reason for raising the wage was to artificially create a barrier to entry to favor those who can earn more than the barrier limit. Jesus fucking christ, any jackass freshman econ student understands this. The idea that the elite don't is just their scam for giving favors to the over-$15/hr crowd.
These are illuminating in regard to any discussion of the economic impact of the minimum wage:
http://thehill.com/homenews/ho...
And this:
https://boingboing.net/2017/06...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!
Everyone be complacent to the ruling elite and things will be ok.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ontario is also going to a $15 / min wage and it will cause nothing but problems. If people already can't get a full week of hours at $11, do they think they'll get more when the employeer is forced to pay them more? This will only cause wages to fall as hours get cut, to keep up with the fact that employeers are being forced to pay low / no skilled workers high wages, at least for what they do.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The New York Times, "How a Rising Minimum Wage Affects Jobs in Seattle": https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Washington Post, "Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine": https://www.washingtonpost.com...
EPI.org, "The “high road” Seattle labor market and the effects of the minimum wage increase": http://www.epi.org/publication...
Seattle Minimum Wage Policy: http://murray.seattle.gov/mini...
We are mid-2017, and on January 1st, Schedule 1 employers with >500 employees and w/o providing medical benefits, now have a minimum wage of $15.00/hr, up from $13.00/hr (in the period that the UW study most recently concluded on.) Schedule 2 employers (w/ $13.00/hr. So by looking at the data for the next few years, we should get a clearer picture on the effects, since whatever effects there may have been, if they were systematic and attributable to the minimum wage increase, they should deepen and be more visible.
Time will tell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html
"an owner and the chief executive of Ethan Stowell Restaurants, said the chain had not reduced hiring, but it had raised some menu prices and added a service fee."
Sure on paper everyone getting more pay but guess what everything is more expensive to afford as well. Unless price increase wage increase you cannot claim wage increase is a win.
Seriously, it is long past time to do a compromise bill dealing with illegals in America.
1) For those that were brought here, and raised in our school, give them a green card, and allow them citizenship for military or vista service
2) those that brought those kids, OR came here as adults and have American kids here, give them a pink card in which they have no social benefits such as SSI, Medicare, Medicaid, and no citizenship.
3) send all others home, which is around 80% or more of the illegals. And yes, there are a load of illegals in Seattle
In doing this, it keeps those that re-invest their money here, while sending back those that are basically outsourcing jobs that can not be outsourced.
This solves the whole issue up there in seattle.Raising the minimum wage is fine and actually smart. We have way too many ppl on unemployment and all sorts of gov support. Far better to get them working. And yes, it takes an HONEST wage to accomplish that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who funded this research? What was the criteria? Did they measure how happy the workers of Seattle were about it?
The states are all supposed to be independent economic experiments, one of the states should try something like dropping the state minimum wage to whatever the federal minimum is, institute state-wide single payer basic healthcare, and promote it all as a business-friendly measure.
After all payroll costs will drop, medium sized businesses can get out of the burden of being health care managers altogether, a lot of skilled numerate people will be available who would otherwise be filling medical insurance claims (businesses claim they are looking for good people these days), larger businesses can still offer "Cadillac" health insurance top-up plans with claims processing via their own HR departments at lower cost because some of the bases are already covered, and man-on-the-street gets health coverage so does not need to stiff the ER via bankruptcy whenever things go bad.
Pay for it all with mix of state personal and corporation taxes pitched at a point that makes it attractive to move something better than a McJob into the state.
Nullius in verba
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...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm...soo...shocked...
Getting less hours at a part time job gives more free time to seek full time employment.
The report has issues. For a look at some of them, look here https://sccinsight.com/2017/06....
Also the report focused on small local businesses – the cafe on the corner, rather than the big restaurant chain. Two problems here: big restaurant chains are profitable minimum wage employers and leaving them out is likely to skew the results of the study. But a second one is that the corner cafe is very sensitive to any shift in the economic winds, and Seattle rents have been rising dramatically in a boom.
So it's really hard to evaluate this work. The objections above, as well as contradicting many prior results may indicate problems. On the other hand, it might be that it is valid. I make the researchers (thought I am not a professional these days) usual plea for peer review and more study.
The Evans School web page which covers the report is here: https://evans.uw.edu/policy-im...
Why not increase the minimum wage to $100/hr?
"If you're a low-skilled worker with one of those jobs, $125 a month is a sizable amount of money,"
OK, we done screwed up with the minimum wage increase to $15... let's fix this.
Let's create a Minimum hours offering requirement - Minimum wage shall be $30 instead for an employee's first week of work with a new employer --- employers must allow employees to work at least 32 hours a week and may not interfere with or penalize an employee for working all 32 hours.
The minimum wage for an employee will increase from $15 to $20 per hour if during any given month, their average hours per week is less than 32, and if an employee works less than 32 hours per week average during a given calendar month, that employee's minimum wage will be increased by $1 times the difference between 32 and the average hours each employee worked for that entire month, and the employee must be paid that increased minimum for every hour worked during that month;
if the employee works less than 25 hours/week average, then an additional $1 is added to the minimum wage for the entire month for every hour they worked less than 25; if the employee works less than 20 hours, add another $1, etc....
Allow 50% of the hour-based increase to min. wage to be waived for work-at-home and autonomous/unsupervised jobs only, Or when the employer contributes for employee health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and pension accounts (Defined benefit plan) meeting requirements.
A possible positive would be that workers might now have enough free hours to work a 2nd job, IF THEY CAN FIND ONE... The net effect would be more money at the end of the month, but its a big if...
For service employers who interact with customers (e.g. fast food register operators), this basically means customers have to wait in longer lines. Having more employees working the registers means customers get faster service, but it also means you have more employees sitting idle when there aren't enough customers. Having fewer employees working the registers means customers have to wait longer, pushing some of those customers into time the employees would otherwise be sitting idle. Thus efficiency (in terms of reduced time employees spend idle) is increased.
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.
So given there was no change to taxes and so forth does rather show that it must be increasing the prosperity of the state.
There is no such thing as a minimum wage. First is that there are enough exceptions to every minimum wage law that someone will find one if they bother to look hard enough. Second is that a minimum wage law only affects those that report their wages, there is such a thing as black market labor.
One exception to the minimum wage is contract work. If I tell someone I'll pay them $100 to dig a ditch and they grab a shovel and spend a week doing it then this is contract work and not covered by minimum wage laws. If I do the same to someone else and they use a backhoe to dig the ditch and it takes them an hour they still earned the $100 because that's what value I see in having a ditch where there was not one before.
I was once in some sort of on the job training program where I was to build a webpage and I was given a set weekly rate for showing up three days a week. I once sat down to figure out how much I actually got paid per hour and stopped halfway through once I started to realize just how little I got paid. People in a kind of internship don't have to get paid minimum wage, the employer just has to fill out the right kind of paperwork to get away with it. Then there were the people that expressed astonishment that I actually got paid at all for this work. Unpaid internships are still a thing and people volunteer all the time to do work. I guess I should feel blessed I got paid at all.
If the first option to avoid minimum wage is finding an exception in the law, and the second is keeping the job off the books then is there another option to avoid the minimum wage law? Sure, the third option is to hire nobody. This means the job does not get created, it's done by some sort of automation, or generally a lot of people are out of work.
Minimum wage laws are stupid. Why not just declare the minimum wage $1000/hour and then everyone can be a millionaire?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
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But if they are working less, they can get more jobs with that extra time.
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 price it has many parallels. It's not unusual for certain commodities to be protected with minimum prices by the government like corn, milk and eggs. And again, the parallels for commodity labor would find benefits to some price control. Of course pure economic analysis of the problem of labor cost is flawed, as it ignores the social cost. Labor is people, human beings, and they create all sorts of complex problems if they aren't employed (labor supply exceeds demand). Humans are not like excess milk that can be dumped to avoid a market crash when you have produced too much.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Looks like the wage change economists need to remind the deniers that this is settled economics. There isn't any room for dissension now that the wage change models have shown the hockey stick effect: as wages increase so does income and general happiness.
and very few layoffs. As for moving out of the city, they can go. There's no shortage of people that want do do business in Seattle and can do so profitably. I keep hearing about these Job Creators creating jobs and how we have to bend over backwards for them. But what's the point if it's shit jobs that border on slavery?
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90 years ago, the triangle shirtwaist factory fire occurred in which over 100 men, women, and children died in a sewing factory on the 3rd floor of a building because the managers locked everyone into the room, told them not to worry about fire by putting buckets of water in the corners of the room, and worked people in appalling conditions until surprise surprise, an electrical short started a fire. That caused the public to realize they'd allowed the ego's of the rich to go too far and push them to the point of being destitute. We got building codes and eventually, minimum wage out of that. Minimum wages came from the concept that you needed a certain amount of money just to eat, breath, and live, and paying under that was indentured servitude. Telling me "Well you can live in an apartment with 15 people and eat moldy bread while working 18 hrs a day" and taking the entire "well if it doesn't kill you it's fine" gambit way the heck too far. You have to be beyond daft to believe in that.
"$15 an hour hurt the economy" is a bunch of MBA's who's only real skill is understanding how to build a poverty trap crying because paying a little more to their workers so they can live reasonably might result in them finding a way out of that poverty trap, and thus ruin their no-talent management of business. Cry me a river. Try living in a cardboard box for a week and get back to me about destitution.
We've proven that the rich don't care when people working for them die and that hunting them down and wiping them and their entire family lines and fortunes out as reparation for this is not effective or constructive to building an awesome society.
We've also proven Basic universal income, also known as communism, doesn't work and never has. It's a fantasy and you are either a adolescent circus animal man-child in denial about the empirical data available or you are engaging in or are a victim of a psychological warfare operation for even remotely believing that will work.
Want to know what is super-effective and proven to work?
50 years ago we had caps on pay via an income tax that reached 95% of your income beyond something like $250k a year. Literally, executive managers and company owners could not grow their net wealth beyond a certain point or they'd be taxed. Same goes for stockholders. This is why we have healthcare insurance, 401K plans, and all sorts of other "!@!ck Uncle Sam" shazbot; they had to get creative with benefits.
Cap out incomes at 500k a year, crank up the minimum wage nationally to $18, implement wage and working condition parity tariffs on products and tell China they can either play fair or get nuked, and while you're at it, implement an income tax for stocks and throw everyone involved in HFT in the slammer.
THAT will fix things. And it will happen. Because when the president of your country is elected on a radical platform like "abolish the IRS and deport 11 million illegals", that's a pretty strong political signal to the rich that it's time to cut it out or else the public is going to further radicalize all on its own. Nobody wants that happening, you have to be truly nuts to want that.
I see store after store with Help Wanted signs.
Sometimes for just one job.
Sometimes for two jobs.
Sometimes for 3-5 jobs.
yeah, sure, we believe you ... NOT!
(study done in six neighborhoods of Seattle, but not done amongst the super-rich gated neighborhoods which tend not to have any stores)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why not bring back child labor and bring back lead paint? As long as this is Ask Stupid Questions day.
You mean, this wasn't obvious earlier? Of course companies are going to work people less! They have to make a profit somehow without pissing off customers too much for increased product prices. So now the narrative is you work less but work harder when you work because your shift is grossly understaffed. Don't believe me? I work $11/hr minimum wage in WA (outside Seattle) and my weekly hours shrunk by 5-10 hours along with my other coworkers, and especially small businesses in my area. And next year statewide will be $13. Needless to say our government is screwing us. On top of that my second job ($15 hourly) got devalued, and I may not see a raise next year to compensate the new minimum wage so my wage will be even LESS valued. You may say we were going to get replaced by computers anyways, but this high wage just drove the final nail in the coffin for companies that can afford it while the small guy will either struggle or go extinct. The writing is already on the wall unless they stop raising the minimum wage
Way to be a fucking idiot. The choice isn't $15 or $100, and you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to suggest $100... which, congrats, you are. It doesn't make your argument any better, it just makes your stupidity that much more pronounced.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Not to worry. Seattle will just raise minimum wage to $30 per hour. That'll fix everything.
I realize it's hard to get past the childhood appeals to authority, but use your head! Increasing minimum wage leads to layoffs for minimum wage jobs because businesses can't afford labor costs! McDonalds paying 10 people 10.00/hr means that to make the same profit margin (which in restaurants is incredibly low) they can pay for 6.6 people. So you have 3.4 people on Welfare/Unemployment out of 10 minimum wage workers.
While we can certainly argue that McDonalds will raise rates to a certain level to compensate for "enough" people to do the work, it is not going to be 10 people. In fact you have them installing kiosks and removing _more_ people due to labor costs.
I can take any data set you want and make it look like turds sell better than roses. That won't make my assertion true, but if you only look at the report and fragments of data used to come to that conclusion you have to believe it. Using (read misusing) statistics to manipulate opinion is not something new, it's as old as math and rhetoric. It's also not new that morons can't figure out the difference and argue from a position of basic reasoning.
So where in their study did they account for increased welfare, unemployment, and people who stop working overtime or move out of state because they are being taxed to death? Yeah, Seattle is suffering from the same problem as the SF Bay area, where people are saying "fu*K it!" and leaving because more than 50% of their wages are going to asinine levels of taxation.
Posting AC as communist/progressive shills hate reality and moderate for censorship.
ps. You leftist supporters don't support taking money from the millionaires and billionaires, you support taking money from hard working middle class people. You are just too self centered to realize it or even ask what we think.
However, if workers are working less, theoretically, that leaves them with more time to do something ELSE productive. In that sense it's not a zero sum game. Business owners will need to do more with less, but for most workers, they will have more free time. Some of that free time will be spent creating more economic activity. I can't see how there's an argument to be made that this is bad for workers. And, workers have taken a beating in the last 10-15 years.
This hits exactly on the issue. A minimum wage prevents businesses being able to leverage things like desperation for work in order to drive down the wages, but it absolutely can lead to lower overall employment. The question is what is worse: having people working many hours for a pittance, or having people working less hours for a higher rate per hour (with potential increases in unemployment).
If you have a social security system that ensures everyone receives a minimum amount of money to live (by providing additional income to those who earn under a specified amount), then a minimum wage makes a lot more sense. In the presence of such an income support system, the government-provided benefits can ensure that those who cannot get enough hours to make sufficient money to live (potentially due to a minimum wage) can be assisted. However, in the presence of such a system and without a minimum wage, such government assistance can operate as a subsidy to businesses because they can drive down per-hour wages, still have people work more hours, and have the government stump up the gap between that and a living income.
(Note: one assumption of the above is that the government assistance is only available to those looking for work, or looking for additional working hours, so as to avoid freeloading. Otherwise people would could simply quit jobs with low per-hour wages and live on government assistance.)
Already refuted https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/06/27/seattles-higher-minimum-wage-is-actually-working-just-fine/?utm_term=.588fad132097
If you can't afford to pay people $15 an hour, then you probably don't need the help anyways. Why should the government be subsidizing private businesses by giving welfare to people that have jobs? Why should companies like Walmart be allowed to pay minimum wage with no benefits and require the taxpayers to pick up the remainder of the tab?
If you don't want to be modded down, perhaps you could try not being so full of shit.
It is not the increase of minimum wage that caused the decrease in income, it is the greedy companies that do not want to give more money to their employees.
I.e. it is again Capitalism to blame.
It really is as simple as that. It happens every time. Businesses are not a magic money tree. McDonalds has already announced they are replacing people with order taking machines in response to the spreading insanity of a $15 minimum wage. Smaller restaurants are closing because small businesses can't afford that.
The change in minimum wage got managers to review the number of hours they actually needed. Their needs didn't change, they just became more aware of them. This is the first effect of any minimum wage change. The real effect on the overall economic health of the average worker in a given city is best measured some time after the first year.
This is like screaming at your child to do better in school, and then asking him if his grades are up the next day. It's fucking insane.
> workers clocked 9 percent fewer hours on average, and earned $125 less each month after the most recent increase
All the focus is on the $125 less/mo. But 9% fewer hours/month translates into 15 hours 38 minutes and 34 seconds of more free time per month (averaged over an entire year). If I went out and got a second job using this extra time at $15/hr that would be $234.64 additional income per month, more than offsetting the loss of $125 (=15.64 hours at my old (implied average) wage of $7.99/hr). Or I could use the extra time to start my own business, or go back to school part time, or spend it with my family; or I could simply get utility from enjoying two extra days to myself per month... The research doesn't say (or care!) what's being done with this extra free time! We're supposed to ignore that aspect, and only focus on the money. Money is all that matters! Praise Mammon!!! BTW, if there were no minimum wage laws whatsoever, then wages would be far less than the previous implied $7.99/hr average -- which was propped up by minimum wage laws -- and the monthly loss to the average worker would be far more than $125; but we're not supposed to think about that either. What we're supposed to do, after reading this right-wing economic propaganda, is to vote to repeal all minimum wage laws, and then compete against prison labor earning 23 cents per hour in some privatized prison owned by the type of right-wing Mammon-worshippers who sponsor and hype this type of rubbish research.
...have you seen the women in Sweden?!
Hey I want you to come clean my house for $0/hour. What? Too extreme? A straw man argument? You cheeky bastard!
I've never understood the use of teenagers having extra money as an example of what is wrong with raising minimum wage. I see three things with teenagers having extra money: 1) Most will spend it, which would help the economy and business. 2) If for some reason they saved it... they could better afford college education, with less crippling debt. ...so what is so bad about that?
It teaches them if they work they are a valued member of society. Do your job well --> get good things.
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.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
Free market and businesses are incapable of feeding and clothing every person.
Well, in superpower nations, at least, they certainly can. Whether they should, or whether there's enough wealth distribution to ensure that happens, are different stories.
The WaPo article on this was pretty detailed. There are a lot of variables that could be weighted differently, especially lack of survey of large employers and controlling for the "what if Seattle's economy wasn't booming?" question.
A Berkeley study was also released a week earlier that basically said, "working as designed", so I wouldn't take this study as definitive as opposed to informative.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
That's the water level that for which your boss is willing to sell out your livability. #Merica
This was expected. Focusing on one part of the problem isn't going to fix it, but that way of thinking is a problem in itself that needs to change if you are going to make any reasonable progress in this area.
Besides, many progressive areas cause this themselves by making the cost of living in these places very high (in one way or another) so naturally they see minimum wage as too little.. Seattle, San Francisco, Denver/Boulder... and yes, it is WAY more expensive, from my own personal experience. Add more government services? Taxes go up, waits get longer because more people use them and quality goes down.
Furthermore, just because companies make money, it is not their duty to give it away to people they don't need to work for them, while some companies have found effective ways to do this, it just doesn't work everywhere. If you don't like it, come up with a working plan and execute it yourself. I would be just as thrilled as you are to see that happen and I would give you kudos for it, but the chance of it working everywhere? meh.
You don't have to like the idea of economics, but every change you make will have another impact that, if not thought out well, will be unexpected (or you won't want to believe). Add more government services? Taxes go up, waits get longer for them because more people use them and quality goes down. Is that the quality service you want like other countries and locations, it has been studies, but tends to be ignored until it is implemented and they realize it is an issue. Rent caps? People will get places bigger than what they need leaving less places for larger families and companies won't want to build new homes / apartments because it isn't profitable.. yes it has happened and is proven. Honestly, this issue came up when the wage idea was being debated, did we really think that large conservative corporations were going to really like the progressive idea of forking out more money? Many companies I have worked for JUST make enough profit to pay their employees and keep running, not all are money hoarders. Assumptions like that are dangerous.
Just keep in mind there is a balance to everything, both sides of that balance matter. Increase wages, employers pay more, they increase costs, in turn citizens (which now have higher wage) also spend more of their wage to buy things.
The unemployment rate in Seattle has fallen from 6.7% in Jun 2012 to 2.9% in May 2017. As noted in the NYTimes, a plausible reason that people are working less hours in minimum wage jobs is that the tight labor market has forced a lot of companies to pay more than minimum wage. That may make the food industry, which the UC Berkeley study says were benefiting important, since those are exactly the sort of jobs that probably are last to benefit from a tight labor market.
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.
So things are never simple and more things are entwined than expected? It is almost as if all of the actual money has been removed from the economy and all that raising minimum wage is doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Almost.
I wonder what epic fail is coming that will open up more people's eyes? For me, it was an American Interstate Highway System bridge collapsing and killing people. For some unknown reason, I had always believed that those bridges were the best in the world and properly maintained. The concept of one collapsing would require an astoundingly huge earthquake... but no. It just fell. And now I see the American government in the same light: a fragile, barely working system that is teetering on the edge of collapse because people can only use it to extract more power and wealth for themselves.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
13 $ /h times x hours gives y pay.
15 $/h times 9/10 x hours gives y - 125 pay.
solving this set of equations gives me x = -250 .
Somethings does not make sense to me.
Queue all the âoeno itâ(TM)s notâ âoedown with capitalismâ comments
Make it a function of maximum compensation, and watch how fast the maximum compensation grows!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What did they think would happen? The money has to come from somewhere.
Another answer, one that I think will also appeal to Libertarians and anarchocapitalist, is that $15/hr minimum wage is not a problem for business, because the free market will adapt.
If the free market is such a pillar of strength of people who hold a libertarian philosophy, then why are they so scared that it will collapse by a slight adjustment? Sure $15/hr is twice the federal minimum wage, but many regions already have $10/hr or more, especially in urban areas. So instead of a doubling (100% increase) of minimum wage, we're really talking about a significant but least extreme increase (33%-50%).
Would the market adapt if we set it to $100/hr? Probably, but it might take a long time for everything to stabilize (reach equilibrium).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
if it's a free market, then no, they are not capable. Because not everyone has money in a free market. Not everyone is employed, and not everyone is capable of providing work valuable enough to the free market to be paid enough for the basic necessities.
There are certainly enough resources in a wealthy nation to feed and cloth everyone. But that cannot occur without some sort of redistribution of wealth, which is something outside of the scope of a free market.
socialism for the most vulnerable + free market for skilled, able-bodied, and employable is a compromise that is reasonable to most people. But it's the socialism that shores things up to get you to 100%, and not the free market.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Where will fast food workers go when their jobs are replaced by machines? This technology is available and getting cheaper. Just look at how fewer cashiers are need at retail stores due to self-checkout or the fewer bank tellers needed after ATM's were available.
The Cream rises to the top and that's all there is. Intelligent, well educated = good wage, good prospect, intelligent, no education, eventually rise to a good wage, average intelligence, no education, average or poor wage. This is the way it's been for the whole time of the homo sapiens race. Why is this shocking?
We told you. But you bleeding hearts didn't want to listen. And no, Indid not vote for Trump.
No, UW study is funded by "National Bureau of Economic Research" which in turn is a conservative group headed by Martin S. Feldstein (Bush).
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Martin_S._Feldstein
It's all very political.
Or, get some additional education and get a better job and therefore higher wages.