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I'm not intelligent enough to say either way. I do think that excluding them was a good idea. If the only businesses that can survive a law are massive multi-

I'm not intelligent enough to say either way. I do think that excluding them was a good idea. If the only businesses that can survive a law are massive multi-national corporations, we've got a problem...

runako 9y ago
That's a separate issue, also worthy of study. But it does seem ridiculous to assume the validity of a study of low-wage workers in Seattle while omitting data from companies like Starbucks that presumably employ many people affected by the change.
- surfmike 9y ago
  The reason they excluded it was because the data they were provided for those companies did not differentiate between workers in Seattle and workers outside. That said the economics of hiring an extra shouldn't be significantly different for a big company. Costco and Starbucks probably have some wiggle room to cut down on the number of staff at a certain time. Also, to quote from the study: "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]."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Joe-Z 9y ago
OTOH if they draw conclusions from data that only very poorly reflects the Seattle labour market the study's got a problem
- surfmike 9y ago
  Your commment implies they were cherry-picking the data, which isn't true. They only included data that could definitively be marked as within Seattle vs outside Seattle.
  - Joe-Z 9y ago
    Thanks for clearing that up! I wasn't trying to insinuate that they were cherry-picking data. But doing a study on the Seattle labour market and excluding these major companies completely seems to be overdoing it.
    - surfmike 9y ago
      Hopefully they do a follow up study if they can get better data sets from the big companies. But they estimate based on Washington-wide stats that they cover ~63% of workers with their data.
  - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
    But the question is, did they have 20 different datasets and picked the one that gave them the result that they wanted. Did they pick "Seattle vs outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)" and get "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage". Or did they pick "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage", and then find "Here's one: Seattle vs Outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)"?
  - taeric 9y ago
    Sometimes you cherry-pick data not to get the results you are looking for, but because it is easier to do so. No matter the reason for the cherry-picking, it does add uncertainty to the results. In the malicious case, the uncertainty is easy to predict in the direction it will go. In the "ease of picking" case, it is not. Which is to say, it does not throw out the results. This is a useful paper and more folks should look at it. Hopefully someone has the necessary energy/effort to get all of the data and we can clear up the uncertainty that it introduced.
harimau777 9y ago
I think that's a good point that we definitely need to consider. It seems to me that an alternate interpretation could be that: I would have guessed that low paid jobs were already dominated by large corporations (however I do not have data to back this up one way or the other), it seems that small businesses are at least surviving (even if they were hurt somewhat), and small businesses can't compete on economy of scale so it would make sense for them to hire more skilled employees to compete on quality. In this case maybe higher minimum wages would still be a net good?

runako 9y ago

That's a separate issue, also worthy of study. But it does seem ridiculous to assume the validity of a study of low-wage workers in Seattle while omitting data from companies like Starbucks that presumably employ many people affected by the change.

surfmike 9y ago
The reason they excluded it was because the data they were provided for those companies did not differentiate between workers in Seattle and workers outside. That said the economics of hiring an extra shouldn't be significantly different for a big company. Costco and Starbucks probably have some wiggle room to cut down on the number of staff at a certain time. Also, to quote from the study: "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]."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Joe-Z 9y ago

OTOH if they draw conclusions from data that only very poorly reflects the Seattle labour market the study's got a problem

surfmike 9y ago
Your commment implies they were cherry-picking the data, which isn't true. They only included data that could definitively be marked as within Seattle vs outside Seattle.
- Joe-Z 9y ago
  Thanks for clearing that up! I wasn't trying to insinuate that they were cherry-picking data. But doing a study on the Seattle labour market and excluding these major companies completely seems to be overdoing it.
  - surfmike 9y ago
    Hopefully they do a follow up study if they can get better data sets from the big companies. But they estimate based on Washington-wide stats that they cover ~63% of workers with their data.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  But the question is, did they have 20 different datasets and picked the one that gave them the result that they wanted. Did they pick "Seattle vs outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)" and get "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage". Or did they pick "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage", and then find "Here's one: Seattle vs Outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)"?
- taeric 9y ago
  Sometimes you cherry-pick data not to get the results you are looking for, but because it is easier to do so. No matter the reason for the cherry-picking, it does add uncertainty to the results. In the malicious case, the uncertainty is easy to predict in the direction it will go. In the "ease of picking" case, it is not. Which is to say, it does not throw out the results. This is a useful paper and more folks should look at it. Hopefully someone has the necessary energy/effort to get all of the data and we can clear up the uncertainty that it introduced.

harimau777 9y ago

I think that's a good point that we definitely need to consider. It seems to me that an alternate interpretation could be that: I would have guessed that low paid jobs were already dominated by large corporations (however I do not have data to back this up one way or the other), it seems that small businesses are at least surviving (even if they were hurt somewhat), and small businesses can't compete on economy of scale so it would make sense for them to hire more skilled employees to compete on quality. In this case maybe higher minimum wages would still be a net good?