Seattles Minimum Wage Hike May Have Gone Too Far [View all]
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Source: Five Thirty Eight
As cities across the country pushed their minimum wages to untested heights in recent years, some economists began to ask: How high is too high?
Seattle, with its highest-in-the-country minimum wage,1 may have hit that limit.
In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline.
“The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city,” said Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington economist who was one of the study’s authors. “You’ve got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help.”
Read more: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-hike-may-have-gone-too-far/
This contradicts what I've heard anecdotally, but thought I'd post it here.
= new reply since forum marked as read
