How’s that new minimum-wage working out for you, Seattle?
The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio. While the claims are difficult to track, state stats indeed suggest few are moving off welfare programs under the new wage.
Despite a booming economy throughout western Washington, the state’s welfare caseload has dropped very little since the higher wage phase began in Seattle in April. In March 130,851 people were enrolled in the Basic Food program. In April, the caseload dropped to 130,376.
At the same time, prices appear to be going up on just about everything.
Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.
Some long-time Seattle restaurants have closed altogether, though none of the owners publicly blamed the minimum wage law.
“It’s what happens when the government imposes a restriction on the labor market that normally wouldn’t be there, and marginal businesses get hit the hardest, and usually those are small, neighborhood businesses,” said Paul Guppy, of the Washington Policy Center.
And then there was this exchange I had with Asantha Cooray over on Twitter earlier in the week:
@acooray Then why do you say it's a good thing? Minimum wage is a war on the young. Keeps them off first rung of career ladder.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 22, 2015
@acooray Why should you get an exception? You should be protesting the terrible policy itself.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 22, 2015
@acooray It's not like you have some issue unique to you. Every employer has the same problem when the govt interferes with the market.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 22, 2015
And what happens when California starts closing departments and schools due to these increased costs? On the positive side, it’s going to put a lot of cost pressure on the departments that support minimum wage laws the most (the “X” studies departments) and provide more impetus to close the weaker schools.
Somehow I kind of suspect the major cost driver in schools isn’t with people doing minimum wage jobs but bureaucratic administrative overhead.
The saying works not because only one straw broke the camels back, but because many other straws were there before the addition.
“And what happens when California starts closing departments and schools due to these increased costs?”
Have to read the whole tweet thread from Rand but, they just count on exceptions and the government giving them more other people’s money.
It’s working out just as well as all the other socialist schemes resting on the delusion that you can get something for nothing.
It ain’t true in physics, and it isn’t here either
Heinlein was right. TANSTAAFL.
So, he can’t afford to pay undergraduate researchers $15 an hour but thinks the university should pay undergraduate burger flippers that much?
Reminds me of the universe on Big Bang Theory, where a PhD physicist at Cal Tech can’t afford to rent an apartment without taking in a roommate but a quasi-employed (and not very competent) waitress can somehow afford a comparable apartment in the same building.
Sheldon’s side of the hall blows money. Fast. Just the new games, memorabilia, and video games alone are not insubstantial expenses. And then they have random robots and etc. (That may or may not be partially funded by a grant.) They’re also postdocs (right? I don’t recall the words “Professor” ever.). Postdocs aren’t uniformly paid the big money. And the scary part is Sheldon eventually being a professor.
Penny may well be “too upscale”. Pretty much all the apartments on all the sitcoms – ever – are pretty darn pricey if one went to duplicate it. On the other hand, I don’t recall her -doing- anything exorbitantly expensive. Her idea of fun is heading out and having guys buy her drinks. Not expensive for her. 😀 And she also appears to be willing to work for her tips at tables not involving the circus.
They’re also postdocs (right? I don’t recall the words “Professor” ever.)
They’ve never used the words “postdoc” or “fellowship,” either — and postdoc fellowships seldom last for 10 years. Sheldon also said he was a visiting professor at a European university at age 15, and it’s unlikely that a professor would drop back to being a postdoctoral fellow.
At one time, I thought they might be research professors. Research professors aren’t tenure track, though, and one episode showed Leonard and Sheldon competing for a vacant “tenure position” (which shows the writers’ misunderstanding of how tenure works).
This season showed Sheldon being promoted from whatever-the-heck-he-was-before to “junior professor” (a rank which doesn’t actually exist). The decision to promote him was made by the head of human resources rather than a faculty committee.
Bottom line: The writers have no idea how academia actually works. Trying to come up with a logical “real world” explanation is hopeless.
Well, hers is one bedroom, theirs is two.
What I’ve never figured out is why she’s in Pasadena. Aspiring actresses would have a lot shorter commute if they lived down the hill in Glendale or Burbank.
Comrade Jim! Please, come help us! You have repeatedly said there’s no evidence that raising the minimum wage has a negative effect on employment. Please, please come here and give us your negative evidence. I don’t know what to do. My faith is shaken. And as a recently converted far Left Progressive, my faith must be kept intact.
“$15/Hour”
Misleading title. It’s $11/hour. The $15/hour is to happen in 2021. Maybe. Quoting the LA Times:
“the coming increase in the city’s minimum wage, which kicks in April 1 with a rise to $11 an hour from $9.32. (Employers whose workers earn tips get a break–they can pay $10 if the workers make up at least another dollar from their tips.”
“The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio.”
It is rather unsurprising, to me, that a lot of people would prefer to work less and use their extra time to do other things with their life once their basic needs are met. Personally I think it is great. Every time I go to the US I see a lot of desperate workers who seem like they aren’t sleeping much at all. A lot of people are constantly on a trigger edge. That leads to mistakes and shoddy work. Others feel like since they are getting paid minimum wage, i.e. an unlivable wage, they aren’t motivated to be working all that much. That’s the other kind of people I see in the US. A lot of them look like sleep walking zombies waiting for the clock to run out. Perhaps you will get, I dunno, normal behaving people out of this experience.
“state stats indeed suggest few are moving off welfare programs under the new wage”
Weasel words to say that indeed less people resort to welfare when the minimum wage is higher. Another unsurprising fact which does not seem to be stomached well by the person who wrote the article.
“some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income”
Excellent. Tipping is institutionalized bribery. Why should I have to bribe a waiter so that the soup comes without flies swimming in it? We don’t tip here in Europe, at all, and the restaurant food and service are just fine.
“Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.”
So the people who actually make the damned food will be more motivated to do a good job at it. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
“The law of unintended consequences is a bitch, ain’t it?”
Seems more like the law of intended consequences to me.
I really like the chart on the last page of this:
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9491448/Here%27s-a-Tip_Torfason,Flynn,Kupor-Tipping-and-Bribery-6-6-12-SPPS.pdf?sequence=1
“It is rather unsurprising, to me, that a lot of people would prefer to work less and use their extra time to do other things with their life once their basic needs are met. Personally I think it is great.”
Yeah the only problem with that Nirvana is that taxpayers are paying for it. Taxpayers are willing to help the truly needy; they are not willing to finance playtime.
Well that problem plus the fact that it removes the pressure to excel. You say people are on a hair trigger? You haven’t seen much of the US.
ROFL. The frog is smart enough to jump out of the water, and Godzilla’s saying “it’s ok, the temperature is only 122 degrees not 212 yet.”
“Every time I go to the US I see a lot of desperate workers who seem like they aren’t sleeping much at all. A lot of people are constantly on a trigger edge. ”
Here is a heat map of happiness. I suspect you primarily visit the blue areas, where I’ll agree people are unhappy. Try visiting the other areas, where you will find people so relaxed that they think it is crazy that anyone would need to control every aspect of anyone else’s life.
“The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio.”
It is rather unsurprising, to me, that a lot of people would prefer to work less and use their extra time to do other things
Know who sets the hours? Not the workers. They are not choosing to work less hours to enjoy a modest raise, they aren’t getting more hours because of the cost of doing business. Increased labor costs and increased regulatory costs means no extra money for extra shifts.
Know what most poor people want? More hours. You give people a raise and they will still want to work more hours. Ask any person working 15 hours a week if they would like to have more hours and the answer is yes because then they could actually have enough money to pay for more than rent and health insurance.
But what this increase in minimum wage does is increase the labor costs such that prices will go up and some people will lose jobs. Most people in Seattle already make over minimum wage too and its not like the people already making $11 an hour will get a raise. This legislation has a disparate impact on the poor, which isn’t surprising in Seattle. They want to drive the undesirables out of the city.
Don’t forget, public-employee union wages are set at some multiple of minimum wage; raising minimum wage is a backdoor way of giving raises to the unions.
Godzilla, some employees are paid more than the minimum wage. Are you able to draw any conclusions from that? Think deeply.
“Godzilla . . . Think deeply.”
Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen.
I guess you called it, Bilwick.
There are all sorts of reasons for salaries being a spectrum rather than everyone having the same salary. Sure. There is also a lot of evidence that having a very large disparity in salaries inside the same company leads to some workers actively sabotaging their work.
“There is also a lot of evidence that having a very large disparity in salaries inside the same company leads to some workers actively sabotaging their work.”
What?
Proclivities toward sabotage are not, in my experience, correlated with wage disparities but the presence of a unionized workforce. I attended college in a car industry town in Michigan in the early 70’s. A lot of my classmates worked summers in the car plants and many also had parents who worked in heavy industry.
Despite wages that were, at that time, 5 – 10 times the then minimum wage, labor-management relations were barely short of open warfare. I heard endless tales of shop floor sabotage. It seemed far more common that the production machinery was messed with rather than the product itself, though that was also fairly common.
I grew up in a rural town where my father was a technical manager in a paper mill. I remember that in his office he had a huge, heavy, but hideously mangled inch-thick pry bar that had “accidentally” fallen into the huge steel rollers on the main paper production line at some point in the late 50’s. Two of these enormous precision-ground rollers had been irreparably scarred and replaced at a seven-figure cost in replacement parts and lost production.
If there was a “large disparity” in incomes between my father, a manager, and the “factory rats” on the production line it most probably favored the “rats.” My parents didn’t own their own home until I was nine years old. Until then, they rented a company-owned house. It was smaller, much older and on a smaller lot than either the duplex on one side or the single-family home on the other.
A shop floor guy who worked at the same mill as my father lived in said single-family home. Another lived in the rear unit of the duplex. The guy in the house next door hated my father. The guy in the duplex was much friendlier, possibly because both he and my father were WW2 vets.
Just as a matter of interest, the second unit of the duplex was occupied by the principal of my elementary school and his family. Simply having a white-collar job was no guarantee of any particular standard of living in those days – kind of like now.
Doctors probably did relatively better than they do now. All the established physicians in my hometown lived in swanky neighborhoods with lake frontage. The top manager of the paper plant, to whom my dad reported, lived in a nondescript house on an ordinary street a few blocks from where we lived.
Take it from me, there was never any “golden age” of leveled wages and universal comity in U.S. history. When the blue-collar labor force was much larger, relatively, than it is now, much more unionized and relatively better compensated, there was also more rancor and thuggery on the part of the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters were routinely shooting and killing independent truckers.
salaries are a spectrum
Very good. Now, can we boil down all those sorts of reasons to just one? They are a negotiation. A person getting more than minimum wage has to do two things. Justify his/her wage and be willing to walk if offered less. To justify a higher wage they have to provide a higher return.
Suppose min wage is 9 and I’m paid 12. Along comes a new minimum of 15. Logically, shouldn’t I fire the former 9 guy? Perhaps the 12 guy as well and start looking for someone that can justify 15? Or should a wage increase have no repercussions?