Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyC
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There's been no cut back in hours.
the actual number of hours worked by low-wage restaurant workers in Seattle increased a slight 0.1 percent from the second quarters of 2014 to 2016
That's from the 20th paragraph of the article linked in the OP.
What happened was that there was a supposed decline in the number of hours worked from what someone decided would have been the number of hours worked in the increase in the minimum age had not occurred. But there is also a problem with that.
According to Michael Reich, a UC Berkeley economics professor, the UW researchers’ “synthetic” Seattle model draws only from areas in Washington that are nothing like Seattle, and the report excludes multisite businesses, which employ a large percentage of Seattle’s low-paid workforce. The latter fact was also problematic, he said, because that meant workers who left single-site businesses to work at multisite businesses were counted as job losses, not job gains in the UW study.
Reich also thought the $19 threshold was too low, and he said the UW researchers’ report “finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times more than in hundreds of minimum wage and non-minimum wage studies.
Reich and economists at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute also criticized the report as not properly accounting for Seattle’s economic boom, which they say is causing the shift from lower-paid to higher-paid jobs. In other words, less people are working less hours at low paying jobs because many of them have graduated to higher paying jobs.
Then there is the matter that the UW study is contradicted by other studies that are better designed. That was the case with a University of California, Berkeley study released last week that found Seattle’s minimum-wage law led to higher pay for restaurant workers without costing jobs in 2015 and 2016.
So, we have one study based on what actually happened and one based on what someone thought should happen. I know which one I will rely on, but then I'm not a conservative desperate to prove my misguided theories.
ETA: So I don't get accused of plagiarizing.
http://www.seattletimes.com/business...-costing-jobs/
