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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."
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...
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.
Or as is more likely, any business that can will move outside of the city limits and pay the prevailing wage that is lower.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
The solution is obvious to pay workers nothing, thus guaranteeing infinite work.
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.
If minimum wage has a negligible effect on employment then why not raise it to $100 hour? Serious question.
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.
Sowell isn't so much partisan as economic conservatives have adopted his theories. Before being brainwashed into dismissing anyone your betters have labeled for you, maybe read his work for yourself and make up your own mind? They label him because his theories are very difficult to dispute and they desperately don't want you researching it for yourself.
[citation needed]
No one said food. Childhood poverty, education performance, and crime later on in life are a whole mess that is not my field, but it does seem plausible that if you let one in five kids grow up poor, as we appear to be doing now, you might get a lot more criminals later on. You're going to be paying for their food, sure, but that's among the least of the costs of law enforcement and prisons that you as a taxpayer will be paying for.
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.
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...
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.
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.