This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Seattle’s mandated increase in minimum wage has not only killed jobs, but a new study shows it also didn’t increase earnings of those who kept their jobs.
As a matter of fact, according to the study, the supposed increase in minimum wage has actually decreased the total wages of those earning it, especially in restaurants. As The Daily Wire reports:
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Seattle actually ended up embracing $13 per hour, raising the minimum wage from $9.47 in 2014 to $11 in 2015 to $13 in 2016 under the theory that an increase wouldn’t throw people out of work, wouldn’t encourage part-time hiring, and would inflate salaries enough to allow more affordability in the Seattle housing market.
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According to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. 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. Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase. We estimate an effect of zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.
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The only people this will come as a shock to are the leftists on the failure known as the Seattle City Council who didn’t listen to employers and real economists in the first place. There is massive amounts of historical data within the United States and around the world about government-mandated minimum wage policies. There is data from other cities and states within the country as well.
It seems the Seattle City Council would rather repeat failed history than learn from it.
What these people did didn’t help anyone, it actually made it worse for them. That’s par for the course with left-wing policies.
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