06 July, 2017
Lawmakers won't know the full impact of NY state's minimum wage laws for at least several years.
This is, of course, a rare victory, but it underscores a point we've made repeatedly on these pages: That minimum-wage hikes are job killers and often lead to lower wages, not higher wages. "Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016".
Raising the minimum wage was among the most ambitious and significant policy initiatives that Garcetti accomplished during his first term.
Because the new Seattle Minimum Wage Study paper is just one paper, many people will inevitably question whether it used the right measurement techniques.
To the editor: To anyone with any understanding of economics, it is obvious that randomly raising the minimum wage helps no one.
But the experience of Seattle's minimum wage hike on child-care workers may be different from the effects on low-wage workers overall, said Jennifer Otten, an assistant professor in the school of public health at the University of Washington. Smaller businesses with 25 or fewer workers that are now paying $10 per hour under the state law will need to add another 50 cents to their employees' minimum hourly pay. We surmised that big businesses like Costco or Walmart could absorb the impact, but common sense said small businesses would collapse under the weight of a $15 hike.
"A lot of [providers] were saying that some of the areas where they could potentially cut costs is in their training budgets", Otten said.
Los Angeles was one of the first cities to mandate the $15/hour minimum wage. What's more, the city had a median household income of more than $80,000 in 2015.
The City of Los Angeles slapped the West coast chain of burger joints, Carl's Jr., earlier this week with $1.45 million in restitution and penalties for failing to pay all of its employees a minimum wage.
Undemocratic, you say? The author of the federal minimum wage, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed that this was an issue best left to technocrats. Here's something different: ME just lowered its minimum for some workers. The county's unemployment rate was about 5.5 percent in May.
Pathway to 15, a group that supports a minimum wage, surveyed more than 100 restaurants in Minneapolis.
Congress should benchmark the minimum-wage level to historical data, then connect it to an independent adjustment factor, so that when it rises, it does so consistently and in response to shifts in the economy - not the political winds. Because detailed data on hours is relatively rare, it will take some time for other research teams to follow up on this new angle.
