3 ms·
Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Might Be Backfiring
- sgift 9y agoI can only talk about the article, as the paper itself sits behind a paywall, but the most interesting question seems to be missing: How is that possible? Restaurants are location-bound. Short of shutting down, they don't have many methods of moving jobs away, so how is it possible for them to reduce hours worked? I see a few options: - Less demand. The shops increased their prices to compensate for the new minimum wage. Less people wanted to pay the new prices, so they had less need for workers. Possible, but I think unlikely because all competitors have been hit by the same minimum wage increase, so they all would have this problem and I haven't read that people are less likely to eat fast food - Shorter, more stressful shifts. Shops could feel motivated to threaten their low-wage employees with loosing their jobs if they don't work faster. This looks to me like a labor safety issue, i.e. something laws and associated controls could and should fix. You cannot just up the pressure on people without harmful effects - Alternatively, the shops had more employees than strictly needed and now just removed those. This seems unlikely in the competitive restaurant business. - More mechanization: In some (more or less far off future) all this low-wage jobs can be done by machines, so maybe the wage increase forced companies to replace people with machines earlier than they wanted. On one hand that is sad, on the other hand it would inevitably have happened and is something society still has to find an answer for: There will be an increasing number of people unable to get a job, because machines can do what they can do for less money. So - which one is it? Or if it is a mix: Which one is the dominating factor? The answer to that question is IMO extremely relevant to discuss if minimum wage "might be backfiring"