Jeff Bezos owns this newspaper and has a deeply vested interest in keeping wages low.
Wouldn't he want them higher across the board so Amazon can fill in the price gap?
A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
31–40 of 235 posts
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#32Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#33Probably an unpopular opinion, but: Isn't raising the minimum essentially trying to save a sinking ship by adding more water to the ocean? Seems like time would be better spent ensuring that everyone has food, housing, and healthcare no matter what they do (easier said than done, of course).
The minimum wage isn't pegged to inflation, so in a sense the minimum wage workers' ship is always taking on water. The hike to $15 was a bailout operation, but if the wage isn't pegged to inflation then it's still slowly sinking.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#34Looks like the "credible" report is an approximation of a series of guesses and omissions. Measuring economic impact of almost anything is difficult but this one seems more vague than usual. If you want to discuss overall impact, you can't simply leave out things that are hard to measure but still wind up with a solid conclusion.
> If you want to discuss overall impact, you can't simply leave out things that are hard to measure
They're not leaving out things that are "hard to measure." They're being honest about the limitations of their data:
"Employers are required to report actual hours worked for employees whose hours are tracked (i.e. hourly workers), and report either actual hours worked or total number of hours assuming a 40 hour work week for employees whose hours are not tracked (i.e. salaried workers)" [1].
These data allow these researchers to make incredibly accurate measurements about the price and quantity demanded of labour. Because "the data identify business entities as [unemployment insurance] account holders...firms with multiple locations have the option of establishing a separate account for each location, or a common account." This means the researchers could only "identify business location only for single-site firms and those multi-site firms opting for separate accounts by location." Excluding multi-site single-account businesses from the analysis avoided muddying the precision of the hourly and quarterly wage data with geographic uncertainty.
In any case, the study only purports to measure employment effects amongst "single-site businesses," which "as shown in Table 2, in Washington State as a whole, single-site businesses comprise 89% of firms and employ 62% of the entire workforce (which includes 2.7 million employees in an average quarter)" [2].
[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w23532.pdf page 13
[2] page 14
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#35So low wage workers are getting cut but unemployment is still at 3.2%? Which is ~1.5% lower than the national average?
Kind of sounds like this study might be looking at only half the story.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#36.
I suspect you're getting downvoted, and not getting replied to, because
> the jobs [being] cut because of the collective actions of spiteful business owners who don't wish to pay their employees that much per hour
...just doesn't make any kind of sense. You might find an occasional individual small business owner who's willing to cut off his nose to spite his face in this fashion. To imagine it happening on a collective basis, whether in organized or spontaneous fashion, is fantastically absurd, and seems necessarily rooted in so little experience of actual business proprietors that it's hard to imagine any kind of productive conversation proceeding from this point.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#37The successful Scandinavian model doesn't have any minimum wages for a reason.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#38I find this to be credible - at some level, it'll certainly hurt. The problem as I see it is that some people say "aha, see, that doesn't work", but then stop there. There is a real problem in that some people (not all who make minimum wage, and not only those who make minimum wage) have real problems making ends meet. What's the best way to help them?
Don't take away the only entry point to employment in the economy that those people have until we actually have a good answer to that question.
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#39tldr;
* The study uses more precise data than similar prior studies and comes to a sharply different conclusion.
* Economists generally want to disbelieve this study, because the results aren't promising, but the method used is largely credible and the data is more precise.
* The impact, according to the study, is that to compensate for the higher wages employers are continuing to hire but only highly skilled candidates thereby displacing the lowest wage earners or "removing the bottom rung".
Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news
#40Probably an unpopular opinion, but: Isn't raising the minimum essentially trying to save a sinking ship by adding more water to the ocean? Seems like time would be better spent ensuring that everyone has food, housing, and healthcare no matter what they do (easier said than done, of course).
i agree. i can't help but think this sort of legislation just increases the rate at which companies like mcdonalds pursue fully automated franchises.