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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...
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"
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.
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".
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.
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"
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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You're seriously trying to compare Norway and Sweden to the US economy? Good grief you can't be helped.
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
So say we're talking about a coffee shop, and the price of coffee goes up. Do they suddenly realize they were buying more coffee than they needed so start to purchase less of it? Or do they accept it as part of the cost of business, raise prices a couple ticks, and move on? This is nothing but sour grapes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
then you should have done that BEFORE the wage increase. Otherwise you were wasting your money.
But to prevent getting the backlash themselves, they wait until they have someone else to blame (rising wage costs). For bonus points, if enough businesses do this, maybe the minimum wage change will get rolled back.
Yes, how DARE HE suggest a country with 18 Trillion GDP provide at least as much for its citizens as two countries with 1 Trillion between them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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
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...
With tiny, culturally homogeneous populations in comparison.
They'll have to increase their prices to offset that increase in labor costs, thus negating the reason for the min wage increase in the first place since those workers will be forced to pay more for goods/services.
Except they don't have more buying power as the costs for everything increases to support it!
What's the point of increasing wages if the cost of everything else increases at the same rate to pay for it?
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...
That doesn't even make sense, unless there is some theoretical business that only minimum wage workers use. Otherwise the impact will be spread out across the economy,
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You know what I tell my kids in this situation? Stop making excuses.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Only the cost of products that rely entirely on minimum wage workers, in which case the cost was artificially low anyway. Also many people who make more than minimum wage will also be paying it. People who probably won't even notice the cost increase. I know I don't track the price when I go to a coffee shop. I already know I'm paying way too much.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Sweden and Norway don't have minimum wages, ignoramus.
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
"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. What does it matter?
McDonald's CEO has total compensation of about $15M. If you cut that to zero and distributed it to the 375,000 people that work for McDonalds, you would give each of them a $40 raise. Not $40/hour. Not $40/week. Not even $40/month. $40 per YEAR. That is not going to get anyone out of poverty.
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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There is another article that indicates that while the study was going on employment dropped below 2% forcing wages above the minimum wage level so that the increase had almost no effect because wages had already grown above that point. The UW study had NUMEROUS flaws which were immediately shown right after the researcher went blabbing all over about his cooked results.
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.
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
In practice, no... what happens is that because of an increase in the lowest rate wages, those were below the new wage enjoy a larger amount of disposable income each pay period, which they spend, and in turn infuse the economy, spurring business growth, which in turn enables the companies to more readily pay the higher wage.
There is a limit to this effect, however... The increase needs to be kept fairly modest for this to occur. Occasional larger jumps in lowest tier wages are okay, as long as they are sufficiently infrequent such that the annual average increase is still quite small. The long term impact of this tends to produce a net benefit to society and does not result in mass unemployment, as frequently predicted by people who look at the data only very superficially.. It is true that there are some who lose their jobs right away, but most will find alternative work within a few months at an increased rate of pay, so in general, more people are still better off in the long run.
The study to which this slashdot article refers is one of the only studies I've heard of that contradicts this. That doesn't mean it's come to incorrect conclusions based on the data that it analyzed, but I think the method of this study's analysis needs to be examined carefully, because there are many more studies that are saying almost exactly the opposite to this one, and which have repeatedly held up under objective scrutiny.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I did read the UW analysis. And the UW analysis isn't damning at all. It says there was no statistically significant effect for the first minimum wage increase to $11. There was no effect on headcount. Only with the increase to $13 was there a significant effect, and that may have been increased by the timing (at the beginning of the year, when spending and employment decrease after the holidays). And what was the final conclusion? "We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies."
This study didn't prove any of the things you said about the minimum wage. The minimum wage at $11 didn't hurt people, and at $13, there aren't signs that it is hurting people either. You would need to drastically raise the minimum wage before it would seriously begin to affect employment. What this study has shown are small, barely statistically significant distributional effects. Seattle hasn't made a mistake at all.
The only one going full retard is you.
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.
Except that most "McDonalds' employees" do not actually work for the company which pays the salary of the CEO of McDonalds.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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
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.
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
I don't think it's about teenagers having extra money - it's that teenagers are often less productive and have fewer skills or less experience than adults. They tend to be worth less. Making someone pay them a living wage for an adult living by themselves, or a living wage to support more than one person, just means that most teenagers won't get hired at all, and will have to wait later in life to start getting experience.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.