The City Knew the Bad Minimum Wage Report Was Coming Out, So It Called Up Berkeley
Two weeks. Two studies on minimum wage. Two very different results.
Last week, a report out of the University of CaliforniaBerkeley found Seattles minimum wage ordinance has raised wages for low-paid workers, without negatively affecting employment, in the words of the Mayors Office. That report, produced by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at Berkeley, was picked up far and wide as proof that the doomsday scenarios predicted by skeptics of the plan were failing to materialize.
And while another study that came out Monday from researchers at the University of Washington doesnt exactly spell doomsday either, it wasnt exactly rosy. UW study finds Seattles minimum wage is costing jobs, read the Seattle Times headline Monday morning. The study found that while wages for low-earners rose by 3 percent since the law went into effect, hours for those workers dropped by 9 percent. The average worker making less than $19 an hour in Seattle has seen a total loss of $125 a month since the law went into effect.
Theres an old joke that economics is the only field where two people can win the Nobel Prize for saying the exact opposite thing. However, by all appearances these two takeaways on Seattles historic minimum wage law are not a symptom of the vagaries of a social science but an object lesson in how quickly data can get weaponized in political debates like Seattles minimum wage fight. In short, the Mayors Office knew the unflattering UW report was coming out, and reached out to other researchers to kick the tires on what threatened to be a damaging report to a central achievement of Ed Murrays tenure as mayor.
Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-object-lesson-in-weaponized-data/