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Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage May Be Hurting Workers, Report Finds (usatoday.com)

Posted by msmash on from the new-situation dept.

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."

74 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. Typical... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If goes from "The science is settled!" to "may be doing something" when the results don't fit the popular narrative.

    and you wonder how people can be skeptical? Geesh.

    1. Re: Typical... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Thomas Sowell (based Harvard / Stanford economist and academic) has researched this to death using actual data, minimum wage creates fewer jobs. Listen to his explanation https://youtu.be/6TGkfjaxFWs. He started as a Marxist until he actually did some research.

      Please watch the video or even read his research, this isn't the answer.

    2. Re: Typical... by rdelsambuco · · Score: 2

      Agreed. Lowering the minimum wage may help workers to secure longer hours and higher monthly wages. We really should be discussing a maximum wage for unskilled labor - for their own good, of course.

      --
      I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
    3. Re:Typical... by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 2

      If you read the study its exclusion criteria is so bad it can't consider the results anything other than exploratory.

    4. Re: Typical... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The solution is obvious to pay workers nothing, thus guaranteeing infinite work.

    5. Re: Typical... by GLMDesigns · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why don't you stick it to the man and demand that everyone gets $100.00 / hr. That'll show them.

      /sarc

      Here's the f**king problem - reformulating the minimum wage to being a "living" wage hurts those with a low skill set.

      Part of keeping a job is

      - showing up every day
      - showing up on time every day
      - showing the will to this day in and day, week in and week out
      - being clean and reasonably well groomed
      - following directions
      - being personable

      You may take these "skills" for granted but they need to be developed. This is one of the invaluable benefits of minimum wage jobs. It's the first rung on the ladder. It's not meant, nor intended to be, a role that one can have to support ones family. It's the f**king MINIMUM.

      --
      If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
      Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
    6. Re: Typical... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      if you're putting in 40 hours a week to a job, then you have every expectation to be able to live off said job.

      Not live well mind you, but you should be able to house, clothe, and feed yourself.

    7. Re: Typical... by e3m4n · · Score: 2

      well I'm torn on the issue. I dont want people to get shit wages, but raising minimum wage wont solve the issue. Raising minimum wage amounts to forced inflation. If people still have a hard time understanding why, look back 5 yrs when we had $4/gal gas. How many things started going up in price as a result of the increase cost of fuel and energy? It got so bad that some countries started rioting because they had to chose between eating and paying rent. The prices of consumables went up 150% in some cases. 80/20 ground beef skyrocketed to $4.50/lb (now back down to around $2 - $3). Milk got as high as $3.20/gal (now back just below $2) etc. When expenses go up, for any reason, thats going to ripple back out into the cost of goods sold. The things we consume the most of, are often staffed by low wages to keep costs down. I would hate to see how much a cup of starbucks coffee costs when the cheapest employee is $15/hr. Most likely they'd cut staff and force everyone else to work 3x as hard to offset the expense, less a single cup of coffee might actually cost $15 as well.

      Frankly I think the real approach should not be focused on wages (as that is a relative number and only matters in its proportional relationship to expenses), but instead focus on spending power. Driving down costs of consumables can also have an impact on someone's spending power without having to change the income ratio. This is why someone making the Peso equivalent to $20/day sounds horrible here, but there it gets them everything they need.

      On the flip side, there is Bezos; who seems to get this; but also gets vilified for wanting to automate all these positions to avoid wages in order to keep the cost of consumables down. Im not a Bezo's cheerleader; but I have to admit I have benefited from many of his methods. I, and many in my area, are still in this void of not having received a pay raise since at least 2006 (sometime before things went to shit). The fact that I am now 46 working in a very technical industry only hurts my changes even further. I see fresh-out-of-college people starting out at wages most of my peers took 10+ yrs to achieve. Had it not been for this 'increase in spending power', things could have been a lot worse for us.

      This makes situations like cheap Chinese manufactured goods such a difficult subject. On one side it hurts things here a lot, but on the other side, its the only thing allowing most used-to-be middle-class a shot at a secure enough lifestyle that their kids still get the stuff they need for school and can grow up somewhat unaware of the struggles people face each day.

    8. Re: Typical... by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If minimum wage has a negligible effect on employment then why not raise it to $100 hour? Serious question.

    9. Re: Typical... by Dorianny · · Score: 4, Informative

      30% of the entire U.S labor market is low-wage service jobs and that number has been steadily climbing. There just isn't enough jobs up the "ladder" for everyone that works hard and plays by the rules. FYI research shows a strong correlation between higher minimum wage and lower rates of turnover, something about people getting a decent wage makes them more likely to appreciate their jobs. Who knew

    10. Re: Typical... by e3m4n · · Score: 4, Insightful

      agreed, but there is always 2 sides of an equation... if you dont work both sides it wont balance, you just drive up costs. You said it yourself : "to be able to support themselves". Lets say that it costs $1000/wk to support yourself, your wife, and your kids living a meager lifestyle. You work for $400/wk and your wife works for $400/wk. Now one approach could be to raise minimum wage, but run the risk of the cost to support everyone increasing to $1100/wk, or you can focus on lowering the cost of living down to $800/wk. A lot less discussion ever happens about the latter yet we see examples of that sort of thing actually happening from time to time.

      Not that I would count most things in the tech industry as essentials, but look at things like cell phone plans, internet plans, etc over the last 10yrs. Just the talking and texting part of cellphones has fallen all the way down to $15/mo for unlimited talk and texting. In 2003 sprint was selling 1000 minutes of air time for $100/mo. No texting included. This just illustrates that its entirely possible to lower the costs of essentials perhaps easier than it is to raise wages.

      What is killing everyone, despite everyone insisting its good for the economy, is property booms. Before the big 2008 crash, my real estate area had experienced a 30yr trend where property values doubled every 10 yrs. No increase in wages but the cost of property doubling every 10yrs is a recipe for the poor house. Increase property values work against the affordable living scenario.

    11. Re: Typical... by jeff4747 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Because it has a negligible effect on employment at approximately it's current level.

      At it's current level, raising the minimum wage causes a nearly one-for-one increase in consumption. That increased sales offsets the expense of the higher wage.

      If it jumped to $100/hr, that would no longer hold true. Well, at least until inflation turned that $100/hr into the equivalent of $10-15/hr.

    12. Re: Typical... by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not at $15/hr. In many parts of the country skilled labor is making that and living comfortably. Once the low-skilled minimum wage in their neighborhood for unskilled labor increases to the same level as their skilled labor what do you think will happen?

    13. Re: Typical... by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    14. Re: Typical... by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    15. Re: Typical... by edx93 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One thing I've learned in social science is never trust research -- or at least give it a good read before making any comments. In fact, I actually left the econ PhD a decade ago after seeing that pretty much all research done in this field is a giant form of confirmation bias: "Keep working on it until it makes sense", they'd tell me. Or "Make sure the results are in line with what you'd expect and consistent with literature" and so on. I have yet to see someone confirm someone else's economic theories -- only their own. And it wasn't my school either: I wish I could remember the details, but I recall reading a paper way back when from Princeton that had methodological errors in it that I was amazed it was even taken seriously, much less published.

      Personally, The reason that I like Hayek and Sowell is that it's based on logic and reasoning. Then again, I am biased, so there's that...

    16. Re: Typical... by GrumpySteen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For the same reason that drinking an extra liter of water per day has a negligible affect on your health, but drinking an extra 100 liters of water per day is a terrible idea.

    17. Re: Typical... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      That stopped being the case about 30 years ago.

      In 2014, only 19% of minimum wage workers were the sole income for their household. It makes more sense to target that 19% with EITC, which is based on total household income, rather than raising wages above the market rate for teenagers looking to earn gas money.

    18. Re: Typical... by swillden · · Score: 2

      A ton of research has been done on minimum wage and the consensus is that is has negligible effect on employment.

      That's a serious misstatement of the minimum wage research. There has been a lot of research, and it has found that small, cautious increases in minimum wages tend to have negligible negative effect on employment. This isn't because minimum wages have no negative effect in general, it's because governments tend to avoid raising it so far that it becomes damaging.

      This study shows that Seattle has gone too far.

      It's also worth pointing out that past studies may have less relevance in the future, as much larger swaths of the unskilled labor market become vulnerable to automation. If employers are already considering automating minimum wage jobs away, even a mild increase in labor costs may cause them to make the switch.

      I'm not generally a fan of minimum wage laws anyway, but I think right now is a particularly bad time to raise them. I think we're already just a few years away from a massive automation-driven economic restructuring, and while the overall impact of automation is going to be tremendously positive, it's also going to force a very tough adjustment on a lot of people. The faster that change comes, the harder it will hit and the harder it will be to deal with. Government should avoid economic manipulation that will accelerate it.

      OTOH, though it's too radical for implementation in the very near future, eliminating the minimum wage and other welfare programs in favor of a universal basic income would lower labor costs and thereby delay automation. It wouldn't prevent it, but it would slow it down, and it would also make the transition much less painful.

      --
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    19. Re: Typical... by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      How many of them have these things? Go on, give me a percentage of people living in economic poverty who have these items. Surely you must have an actual statistic, right? I mean, you wouldn't just be making it up for effect, right?

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    20. Re: Typical... by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      I could support myself on minimum wage. It'd be a bare existence but I could exist on it. In South Georgia. I have no idea how people in San Francisco live on three times that. Or NY City for that matter. The only jobs here I know of that pay minimum wage here are fast food or some part time jobs. I know one guy that does construction and he pays teenagers 10 bucks an hour just to pick up trash on the job site.

    21. Re: Typical... by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Absolutely conclusive evidence until you read the rebuttals. Like the fact that his data excluded all restaurants (almost 35% of minimum wage jobs), excluded any business with more than one location, etc, etc, etc. Just remember, figures never lie but liers can figure.

      The data set the researcher used was substandard at best, someone might even argue the data set was cooked to extract the desired result.On top of that he refuses to provide the data to outside users and reviewers making his "research" a fucking black box. But he was at least honest and listed all the problems with the data, just didn't include why excluding more than a 1/3rd of low wage jobs in the study area was a good idea.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com...

    22. Re: Typical... by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

      When I was starting my family out my neighbor was section8 + all the other social support.
      She was the stereotype to a T. Three kids by three different men, all spaced 5 years apart (First 5 California), had cable, had a car, had a cell phone.

      She needed help with her paperwork one day and asked me to help, so I saw all the numbers. I did a P&L for her and compared it with a P&L for me and you know what? I was working my ass off for $13/hr (1999) and she was bringing home about $100 per month more than me sitting at home doing nothing. Hugely frustrating to me, but of course if she actually got a job it would be min wage and she'd lose at least twice as much in benefits as she'd have earned. The system is desperately broken, but I haven't the foggiest how to fix it.

      Now, where I live public transit is shit. Jobs are spaced out. A car is kinda needed. A low end cell phone on a cheap plan is cheaper than a land line now. I get it, but the system still keeps people dependant.

      --
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    23. Re: Typical... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Furthermore, when minimum wage first began under FDR, it was 25 cents an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is $4.25 an hour today.

      Most economists don't even like the concept of a minimum wage at all, and that includes famous Democrat economists like Paul Krugman.

      Anyways, if you look in my post history, I personally predicted exactly this, and was downmodded as a troll post.

      I told you so, slashdot.

    24. Re: Typical... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Cell phones and cars are not really optional in much of the US. The rest of the items you list are cheap entertainment. They are way, way cheaper than, say, going to the movies even once a month.

    25. Re: Typical... by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In fact, there are many potential jobs that are worth less than a living wage, and there are people who don't need a living wage who would like to have those jobs.

      But are there, really? I can only think of two groups of people who don't need a living wage: People who get paid disability by the government (e.g. people with serious mental disabilities) and high school students. The problem is that most high school students don't really want a job, and more importantly, can't do a job during the most critical part of the workday except three months out of the year. So depending on them is not a viable way to sustain any sort of business.

      Ostensibly, you could extend that to recent high school grads living with their parents, but the problem is that eventually those folks have to be able to move out of their parents' houses, which means they need additional education, which costs money—way more than a basic living wage if you want to afford even a basic two-year community college degree. And if you they don't earn enough money for that, then you've effectively created a permanent underclass that can never move out of their parents' houses, who thus eventually end up homeless when their parents retire and can no longer afford to pay their rent. This is simply not sustainable, either.

      The notion of a group of people that doesn't need a living wage is, frankly, absurd. What you're really arguing is that there is a group of people who don't have enough clout to demand a living wage and/or don't understand that they're getting screwed. And that's not the same thing as not needing to make ends meet.

      (Well, okay. Pedantically, there are a fair number of independently wealthy people who have enough money that they can afford to work for less than a living wage and still make ends meet. But they also don't need the money, and sure as h*** won't work for less than minimum wage, which makes that moot.)

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    26. Re: Typical... by jpablo1 · · Score: 2

      Yes, standards of living are relative. Deal with it.

    27. Re: Typical... by interkin3tic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's quite a false dichotomy. Either the kids are saying "My parents have under the poverty line therefore I think I will join a gang" or money has nothing to do with neighborhood or parenting skills whatsoever.

      Poor people can't afford to live in lower crime areas or spend as much time with their kids.

    28. Re: Typical... by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Furthermore, when minimum wage first began under FDR, it was 25 cents an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is $4.25 an hour today.

      Well, that really depends on what things you factor in when adjusting for inflation. I would argue that the primary metric when setting minimum wage should be based on the cost of getting an education to allow someone to move beyond a minimum wage job. In 1938, tuition at Harvard was $420 per year. Using that as a metric, minimum wage should be $25.76 per hour today, or about $54,000 a year.

      Other possible metrics range from significantly less than minimum wage to significantly more:

      • Median house price: $12.10
      • Average movie ticket price: $8.73
      • Average cost of fuel: $7.50
      • Price of eggs: $4.08

      That first one is pretty important, because both that and the cost of education are solid indicators of whether someone can possibly make enough money to make a crucial leap in personal financial development—from minimum wage to better wage, from renting to home ownership. When low-end wages fail to keep up with inflation in those areas, even though the day-to-day survival items remain affordable, it means that the people at the bottom are more likely to be kept permanently at the bottom with no opportunity for advancement, effectively growing the divide between rich and poor and eroding the middle class. This, in turn, leads to much more serious societal problems.

      And there's also another critical number that this ignores: 15. That's the improvement in years of life expectancy since 1938. In 1938, on average, people lived only about 63 years, which means most people never reached what we would consider retirement age. Now, they live for more than a decade after retirement, on average, and those years are significantly more expensive in terms of average healthcare costs.

      I can't find average healthcare cost statistics for the 1930s, but if we compare against 1958, the cost has roughly quadrupled after adjusting for inflation. So if we used the cost of healthcare in 1938 as the metric for computing inflation, I could easily see thirty or forty bucks an hour as a reasonable minimum wage.

      Really, minimum wage is way too low. Way, way too low. And if that means that there are jobs that aren't worth what businesses have to pay, they will have to adapt—either by finding more efficient ways to use personnel or by adding automation to replace personnel with machines. And the result will be that certain categories of jobs will cease to exist. And it will ultimately be the government's responsibility to find a way to subsidize the cost of their education so that they can be qualified for jobs that pay more. But that's really the only realistic future. We simply cannot continue to live in a society where a sizable percentage of workers can never realistically afford to go to college.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    29. Re: Typical... by Trickster+Paean · · Score: 2

      By 1940, the average income was $1,368. Someone making minimum wage ($.30 by 1940) would earn about $600 per year at the minimum, working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks per year. It also means the minimum wage increased 20% in the first two years.

      In 2015, median household income in the US (according to census figures) was $56,516. Working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks for $4.25 would earn just $8500. A yearly income of $24787.72 would be a similar multiple of the average income, which would yield an hourly wage of $12.39.

      It should likely be higher. The average household income is much higher, $72,641, which would yield a comparable hourly wage of $15.93. Inflation isn't the only factor to consider on how much the minimum wage should be raised.

      A simple Google search proves you wrong about Paul Krugman, who has come to support raising the minimum wage. Saying that most economists don't like the concept of a minimum wage is completely overstating the case.

      And you should still be downmodded as a troll, one: for being pointlessly wrong, and two: for saying I told you so.

    30. Re: Typical... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you predicted this, then perhaps you can answer this question:

      If it's possible to reduce the hours of all of your low-skill workers without impacting your business's competitiveness, then why did so many managers not do so before this? Reducing your labour costs by 9% would have a huge impact on most companies' bottom lines, yet apparently they were happy to waste this money until minimum wage went up.

      And, on a related note, why do the managers that were wasting 10% of their payroll on inefficiency (that apparently can be trivially addressed) for years all still have jobs?

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    31. Re: Typical... by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 2

      You misunderstand the logic. If the value an employee adds to the business is $10 an hour, that business will likely be competitive paying them up to about $8 an hour. However, that would only apply in certain very special edge cases, most of the time an employer will want their employees to add MORE value than the cost of employing them. When it becomes necessary to pay an employee who adds $10 of value an hour $9 an hour it is no longer profitable to employ that person. It is important to remember that an employee costs more than their base wage to employ. That is why employers will often be willing to pay existing employees double time for overtime rather than hire another person.

      Rephrasing the point I made in the first paragraph: if a task adds $10 an hour of value an employer may be willing to pay up to $8 an hour to someone to perform that task, If it becomes necessary to pay someone more than $8 an hour to perform that task, the task will cease being done (these tasks will often end up being assigned to employees who perform high value tasks which are intermittent).

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    32. Re: Typical... by conquistadorst · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Furthermore, when minimum wage first began under FDR, it was 25 cents an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is $4.25 an hour today.

      Well, that really depends on what things you factor in when adjusting for inflation. I would argue that the primary metric when setting minimum wage should be based on the cost of getting an education to allow someone to move beyond a minimum wage job.

      Usually I try to be respectful of other people's opinions but no, I'm sorry it's not. I think it's very sympathetic to the plight of the lower classes but overall it's a terribly misguided idea to track inflation to education costs and only education costs. You can't pretend the rest of economy and society doesn't exist. Not everyone in poverty is capable/interested/planning on obtaining a post secondary education. So what happens if education costs go down and they can't afford other basic living expenses? Oh, they should all just go to college? Really? No, minimum wage should track the whole basket they use today for measuring the CPI because these are things people need to live everyday.

      That first one is pretty important, because both that and the cost of education are solid indicators of whether someone can possibly make enough money to make a crucial leap in personal financial development—from minimum wage to better wage, from renting to home ownership. When low-end wages fail to keep up with inflation in those areas, even though the day-to-day survival items remain affordable, it means that the people at the bottom are more likely to be kept permanently at the bottom with no opportunity for advancement, effectively growing the divide between rich and poor and eroding the middle class. This, in turn, leads to much more serious societal problems.

      The truth is, already education is free in the US. You don't have do anything to obtain except show up. I have to assume you're talking about post secondary education? If so, you're making it sound like all you have to do to get into the middle class is go to college. Sounds a lot like today's problem of kids obtaining college degrees and not being able to find gainful employment afterwards... Yes having a degree is a good indicator of your place in society. Yes, it'll raise your odds, statistically speaking. However there are still NO guarantees on this. The nuances are much more complex. Location, type of degree, you as a person, life skills, all of these details are important but more challenging to track and measure. As time goes on, society is beginning to realizing that post secondary education is neither an autopilot for success nor is it always even necessary to do well. Sure it's anecdotal, but just ask my plumber/electrician/landscaper/contractor. You don't need a college degree to be in the middle class. You just don't. The solution to "fix" society is not sending everyone to college. The really difficult question is how do you built up a society in such a way that everyone strives and works hard to obtain meaningful and gainful employment. It's a really, really hard problem to solve. Especially if you already have existing paths for people to do so, but they aren't doing it. Altering minimum wage is very easy and yet ineffective way of solving this problem. You can put more and more carrots in front of people to persuade them to go where you want them to go. But when do you stop adding carrots and instead figure out why they're not chasing the carrots?

      Besides, post secondary education is way overpriced right now for all the wrong reasons compared to Harvard 1938. If you could break down the cost of your college bill, you'd be surprised how much of it is not even academic in nature. No way in hell we should be pegging something bloated like that as a measure for minimum wage.

    33. Re: Typical... by kilfarsnar · · Score: 4, Informative

      Working hard and playing by the rules has never been a recipe for anything but modest success at best

      Yet this is the delusion under which a large number of Americans labor, and the ruling class perpetuates.

      --
      "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
    34. Re: Typical... by apoc.famine · · Score: 2

      If it's possible to reduce the hours of all of your low-skill workers without impacting your business's competitiveness, then why did so many managers not do so before this?

      For lots of fabulous reasons. Reasons like preferring open floor plans to offices with doors that close. Reasons like calling a meeting to determine the agenda for the next meeting that you're going to have. Reasons like asking IT to fix the temperature in the office because the thermostats are technology.
       
      You seem to believe that managers and the C-level and HR folks work on logic and evidence. They have in maybe 5% of the organizations I've either worked in or have become familiar with. (Current one is actually one of those places, and I'm throwing away a fair bit of money by staying here.) How do you calculate the hour reduction? How do you do this fairly without other employees crying foul? How do you do this in compliance with state laws around benefits? How do you fire an employee without a lawsuit because they claim you didn't let them work enough to get their job done? How do you attract employees who are looking for full-time work?
       
      Are all of these easily solvable problems? Yes. But they take effort to solve. And brainpower. And data.

      ....why did so many managers not do so before this?

      There's your problem. My current place wants to see that the work gets done. Wants bodies around vaguely between 10am and 3pm, because that's when face-to-face things happen. I've got 6am-3pm colleagues, and 10am-6pm colleagues. And normal hours ones that go to the gym for an hour in the middle of the day. And some that show up and leave it seems like every fucking hour. But the constant is that they all get their work done, get everything done outside of work they need to get done, get some sleep every night, and are generally the most productive people I've worked with.
       
      I've never been somewhere before where management had the wisdom to be ok with this.

      --
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  2. UW study contradicts... by Uncle_Meataxe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The University of Washington study comes to a very different conclusion than a UC Berkeley report.

    How a Rising Minimum Wage Affects Jobs in Seattle
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

    1. Re:UW study contradicts... by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Washington study considers MANY more data points.

    2. Re:UW study contradicts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The UCB study was paid for by the Mayor after he saw an early draft of the UW post. Check the Seattle Weekly article on the topic. The UCB report is pure BS.

      http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-object-lesson-in-weaponized-data/

    3. Re:UW study contradicts... by DRJlaw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The UCB study was paid for by the Mayor after he saw an early draft of the UW post. Check the Seattle Weekly article on the topic. The UCB report is pure BS.

      I'd order another study myself if I was given UW's pure BS. From your own cited source:

      "Among other things, the UW study did not include multisite businesses in the study, which the UW researchers argued produced a cleaner data set but which Berkeley researchers said meant a huge portion of Seattleâ(TM)s low-wage work force was left out of the study. "

      "Cleaner" as in is necessary to show the purported effect?

    4. Re:UW study contradicts... by Uncle_Meataxe · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Interesting point, but the UCB report is not "pure BS." Actually, it's a pretty difficult problem to address and economists have been working on it for years. Like previous studies, it appears that the UW study has its own methodological problems. You probably quit reading before you got to this point in that seattleweekly.com post:

      "Berkeley’s Reich did not return a phone call seeking comment, but in a memo released Monday he blasted the UW report, saying it was full of red flags.

      Among other things, the UW study did not include multisite businesses in the study, which the UW researchers argued produced a cleaner data set but which Berkeley researchers said meant a huge portion of Seattle’s low-wage work force was left out of the study. Reich also notes that many of the UW team’s most dire conclusions fall outside what even highly critical research would suggest."

      “The unlikely UW estimate of large negative employment effects likely results from the problems noted above. Their findings are not credible and drawing inferences from the report are unwarranted,” Reich wrote."

    5. Re:UW study contradicts... by epine · · Score: 2

      Actually, it's a pretty difficult problem to address and economists have been working on it for years.

      It'll never be settled. Basically as soon as minimum wage is implemented, both sides mark a future date in their respective calendars to write up a victory lap (victory condition for the negative side is an employment mushroom cloud).

      All this supported by impeccable data, on both sides.

      I personally think that a UBI regime is far better than a livable minimum wage, but UBI hasn't got the miles on it yet to "definitively" conclude one way or the other.

      Plus the interaction of the two where minimum wage remains in effect make pilot studies of UBI almost worthless.

      Like minimum wage, there's a huge problem with UBI where the gets and get-nots find themselves living on opposite sides of some arbitrary political demarcation line. Probably worse than interstate sales tax.

      (In Canada, Alberta was long a tax-dodge for neighbouring communities. Regulated marketing in Canada is good for animal welfare and pandemic aftermath compliance, but the higher prices involved lead to an epidemic of cross-border shopping. We don't drive to the corner store. We drive from Windsor to Detroit.)

      There can hardly be a news story with less reliable "news" content than research group A (or B) publishes report finding that minimum wage does (does not) benefit society.

  3. Re:This has already been proven bunk by Train0987 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They aren't just working more hours, many have been laid off altogether while many small employers just closed and moved outside the city limits. For the restaurant/service industry there's also been an increase in the number of illegals hired and paid even less than before under the table.

  4. Special Advisory on invalidated study by sgt_doom · · Score: 3, Informative

    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%.

    1. Re:Special Advisory on invalidated study by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      and I disregard anything Forbes says since I can't read any of their articles without risking a malware infection

  5. Since the "report" excluded the target by AutodidactLabrat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Multi-national and nationwide chains are excluded from the study by NBER.
    Surprise!
    Those are the target audience of tax-supported employers
    Worthless "Study"

  6. Biased study generates intended result by DRJlaw · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Biased study generates intended result by geoskd · · Score: 2

      But if you're a mom and pop coffeeshop, or other small business with one location, then the minimum wage is hurting your employees because you're forced to cut back on hours (and basically the owners work for free to make up for it).

      Another way to say it is "The small mom and pop store only has a viable business model if their employees are giving them labor at below fair wages..."

      Or another way to say it is that if we had slave labor, far more local stores would be able to stay in business with otherwise unworkable business plans.

      --
      I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
  7. Easy answer: the study is a BS by Cyberax · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Only Temporary by ageoffri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  9. Re:Only Temporary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's humorous you think there's so many levels of disconnected management in small companies employing minimum wage workers.

  10. Sounds like a win for employers by hawguy · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Re:Only Temporary by Train0987 · · Score: 2

    You act as if these companies are huge conglomerates. In reality the vast majority of businesses this impacts are small businesses with a small number of employees and small margins. Paying everyone $15/hr eliminates those margins and puts the shop out of business.

  12. Re:This has already been proven bunk by Train0987 · · Score: 2

    $19/hr in Seattle IS a very low wage.

  13. Seems like bad solution by Presence+Eternal · · Score: 2

    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!"

  14. Statistics are hard by Daetrin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 Space Intentionally Left Blank
  15. Re:This has already been proven bunk by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fascinating how the article notes lower payrolls, which means the paychecks are somehow smaller or that there are fewer people employed. Do you want to defend either?

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  16. Re:Let me get this straight... by Train0987 · · Score: 2

    That's ludicrous. If those employees were kept on the clock then they would've been paid for those extra hours. Do you really believe small business on a tight margin have loads of extra cash laying around to blow on making the minimum wage law look bad???

  17. Re:Bullshit. by Rockoon · · Score: 2

    You increase prices to cover the added expense.

    Sure, because the price wasnt already what the market could bear.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  18. making ends meet by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These are illuminating in regard to any discussion of the economic impact of the minimum wage:

    http://thehill.com/homenews/ho...

    "Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Monday that House and Senate lawmakers should receive a $2,500 per month housing allowance — something he explained would help ease housing costs for members who can’t afford two mortgages or rents."

    And this:

    https://boingboing.net/2017/06...

    "Rep Jeb Hensarling [R-TX/+1 202 225-3484/@RepHensarling] is the sponsor of HR 10, the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, which will ban investors from putting petitions to the shareholders and board of publicly traded companies, except when investors own more than 1% of the company for at least three years."

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  19. Perfect! by Seth+Morabito · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh cool! Now we have two reports that draw opposite conclusions, so we can just pick whichever one we already agree with and ignore the other. Sweet!

  20. Expected result, because $15/hr is not a panacea by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    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
  21. Lesser of two evils? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm thinking that "don't work at all" may be the lesser of two evils: A sub-livable wage exploits workers and amounts to an unorganized form of corporate welfare. If you keep people from working for such low pay, even if it means less income for them, it cuts off the corporate welfare stream that was available to all companies paying sub-livable wages and ensures that those who still have jobs can support themselves.

    As for those who can't find work anymore? Well, what to do with the ever-increasing number of ever-more-skilled people our lovely capitalist system has no need for is another question, and we won't answer it any faster by papering the problem over with sub-livable-wage jobs...

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
  22. Re:This has already been proven bunk by WrongMonkey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    [citation needed]

  23. Re:Only Temporary by Train0987 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No, your "living wage" fantasy is what's not viable. You can't even define a "living wage". Put a number to that. Why not raise the minimum wage to $100/hr? Seriously, why can't anyone answer that question?

  24. Re:Only Temporary by Train0987 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Obamacare saw to it that all those jobs were cut to part-time years before the current $15/hr minimum wage mandate, which is killing them even more now.

  25. Re:On purpose by Train0987 · · Score: 2

    What's the point of increasing wages if the cost of everything else increases at the same rate to pay for it?

  26. Win, but not the way you think by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  27. The bottom line: 3.1% by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

    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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    This space intentionally left blank
  28. Re:Only Temporary by Jhon · · Score: 2

    "A good rule of thumb is that a living wage should be three times the cost of renting an apartment with a roommate."

    Move someplace where rent is cheap enough to afford on a minimum wage job -- and seek employment there. Maybe rent in Seattle will go down, too if enough people follow this suggestion.

  29. Re:Expected result, because $15/hr is not a panace by OrangeTide · · Score: 2

    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
  30. Re:Reduce hours reduces service by Jhon · · Score: 2

    "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?

  31. Re:Who funded the research by Raven268 · · Score: 2

    City of Seattle.

  32. Re:This has already been proven bunk by roc97007 · · Score: 2

    I understand, and you don't even have to be an "undocumented worker". Years ago I spent a couple years as a private contractor and chose during that time not to have medical insurance at all. My salary at the time was fairly high, and I was in general good health, so it seemed a safe bet.

    Then, it so happens I had to have some procedures done. Some precancerous growths removed, dental work done, nothing critical but still potentially spendy. The interesting thing is that as a cash customer, I was charged a significantly lower price than if I had insurance. Apparently there's a lot of overhead involved in doing business with insurance companies, and doctors are willing to pass some of the savings on to cash customers. The other thing is that as a cash customer, I could go pretty much anywhere for medical or dental care, without worrying about what's "in program" or "out of program" and the care providers realize that.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  33. Flipping Burgers is an Entry Level Job by jasontromm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Minimum wage is not supposed to be a "living wage." McDonald's and the like are supposed to be the first job a person gets, not a lifetime career. You're supposed to learn a work ethic in a minimum wage job so you can move on and get a better job. $15 / hour prevents people from getting that first job because they have no skills and have to be taught everything. I might be able to support a minimum wage if there was a lower "training wage" for people with no skills in their first job.

    --
    "Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."