Showing posts with label Minimum Wage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Minimum Wage. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Monday, August 1, 2016
By Powerline Blog, July 29, 2016
So it’s fun to notice this morning that the city of Seattle, which threw out both shoulders patting itself on the back for raising its minimum age to $11 an hour last year, is finding the results are . . . not so good. Seattle commissioned a study by a group of economists, who reported in a few days ago:
Read More: http://www.powerlineblog.com
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Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Seattle Workers Requesting FEWER Hours
SEATTLE, Wash. — A Seattle-area nonprofit observed some workers recently asking for reduced hours, as they feared that their higher wages now put them at risk of losing housing subsidies.
Nora Gibson is the executive director of Full Life Care, a nonprofit that serves elderly people in various homes and nursing facilities. She is also on the board of the Seattle Housing Authority.
Gibson told KIRO 7 she saw a sudden reaction from workers when Seattle’s phased minimum-wage ordinance took effect in April, bringing minimum wage to $11 an hour. She said anecdotally, some people feared they would lose their subsidized units but still not be able to afford market-rate rents.
For example, she said last week, five employees at one of her organization’s 24-hour care facilities for Alzheimer’s patients asked to reduce their hours in order to remain eligible for subsidies. They now earn at least $13 an hour, after they increased wages at all levels in April, Gibson said.
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Saturday, July 18, 2015
Kansas City Raises Its Minimum Wage — But Not For Teens
By Lydia DePillis, July 17, 2015 Washington Post
Last night, the Kansas City Council voted overwhelmingly to raise the city's minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2020. But these policies aren't as simple as they seem -- they also involve choices about who the new wage floor applies to, what the penalties are for noncompliance and whether small businesses should get a break.
In this instance, perhaps the biggest argument was over age: Should everybody be entitled to the higher minimum wage, or should teenagers be left out?
The fight goes to the heart of the debate over the impact of the minimum wage, and whether it might hurt the very people it's supposed to help.
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Saturday, May 30, 2015
L.A. Minimum Wage Plan Moves Forward Without Union Exemption
A landmark plan to boost the Los Angeles minimum wage took another step forward Friday, as a panel of city lawmakers vetted a draft ordinance putting the pay hikes into law.
But a host of complex and divisive questions about the plan will likely remain unanswered even after the law is passed -- including whether unionized companies will ultimately be able to opt out of the wage requirements if their workers agree.
"This is an ongoing process," City Councilman Curren Price, who heads the Economic Development Committee, said Friday. "There’s still a lot of things to be resolved."
When it takes up the proposed law next Wednesday, the full council is widely expected to pass the ordinance, which would gradually increase the citywide minimum to $15 hourly rate by July 2020. But because the pay hikes do not start until the middle of next year, officials could make changes to the law before the increases begin.
Read the full story: www.latimes.com
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Friday, May 29, 2015
The Costs Of A $15 Minimum Wage
By Steve Chapman, May 28, 2015, Real Clear Politics
In the 1970s, when oil prices jumped, most liberals embraced a simple solution: price controls. It should be illegal, they thought, to sell oil or gasoline for more than a certain amount. Americans should be able to drive without being fleeced by oil companies and foreign governments.
The impulse was understandable. Gasoline is an essential commodity for most people. When the cost rises, it imposes a heavy burden on consumers, most of whom have few transportation options.
In 1971, in an attempt to tame inflation, Republican President Richard Nixon imposed controls on almost all prices. By 1974, he had lifted most of them. But those on gas remained. Under Democratic President Jimmy Carter, they led to widespread shortages and long lines at service stations -- and didn't keep prices from rising. But the controls lasted until his successor, Ronald Reagan, lifted them in 1981.
Liberals learned an unforgettable lesson: Price controls on gasoline don't work. In recent decades, when gas prices have soared, Democrats have shown no desire to repeat the lesson.
Read the full story: www.realclearpolitics.com
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Thursday, May 28, 2015
Washington State's Failed Minimum Wage Experiment
In a move intended to escalate the 2016 war over income inequality, Sen. Patty Murray proposed legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour.
As a representative of Washington state, Sen. Murray should know a thing or two about the minimum wage. Since the 1990s, the state has led the nation in raising the minimum wage, both locally and statewide. President Obama’s Labor Secretary, Tom Perez, recentlypraised Washington for having “the highest minimum wage in the country for the last 15 years.”
Unfortunately, Sen. Murray seems to have learned all the wrong lessons. Rather than serving as a model for the nation, Washington’s experience with the minimum wage should serve as a warning.
In a speech last year supporting a $10.10 federal minimum wage, Murray claimed Washington state’s economy “has benefited from a high minimum wage,” pointing out that job growth has exceeded the national average while poverty has “trailed the national level.”
None of these claims withstand scrutiny.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Why Minimum Wage Is A Bigger Problem For Women Than Men
Across the nation, women outnumber men in the ranks of low earners, according to data from the National Women's Law Center.
In a look at data from all 50 states, the organization found that at least 50 percent of minimum wage workers in every state were women. In New York, the data shows that a little more than half of the minimum wage workers are women. A New York wage boardis considering whether to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workersfrom the current $8.75 an hour. (Regular minimum wage increases to $9 at the end of this year).
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Friday, May 22, 2015
Could LA's $15 Minimum Wage Sweep The Nation?
On Tuesday, Los Angeles became the third major West Coast city to pass a $15 minimum wage ordinance. Though the law won't fully go into effect until 2020, it's a huge deal. LA is larger than San Francisco and Seattle, the two other $15-an-hour cities, combined. It also has a much larger contingent of low-wage workers. The ordinance will give a raise to an estimated 750,000 Angelenos, or about 46 percent of the city's workforce.
LA's wage hike points to the potential for a major minimum wage boost to sweep the country. Although experts disagree about the LA measure's impact on growth and employment, the City Council passed it by a 14-to-1 margin. The $15 wage polls well in LA and nationally, despite a dearth of national politicians pushing for such a large increase. If organizers play their cards right, this suggests a $15 wage could gain traction in other cities.
So how did it happen? The original proposal, after all, was a more modest one. The measure's backers attribute their success to a combination of grassroots and national organizing. The umbrella group leading the push, the Raise the Wage Coalition, includes more than 260 local organizations from labor, business, entertainment, and the civil rights movement.
Read the full story: www.motherjones.com
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Saturday, May 16, 2015
Big Opponent Of Minimum Wage Hike Flips Sides
There’s an important revelation tucked within in our three-part series on Mark Arabo: The once-vocal naysayer in the local fight to raise the minimum wage has flipped sides.
The head of the Neighborhood Market Association has been a growing influence in East County and beyond, declaring himself a national spokesman for the Iraqi Christian community. Around these parts, he’s inserted himself into a number of local debates that have begun to shape life in San Diego, largely those that might impact members of his corner-store club.
He was a clear opponent in the fight to raise the minimum wage, citing concerns of the small business owners he represents. That’s not the case anymore, and Arabo’s political ambition is most likely the primary motivation for that change of heart.
In Part III of his profile of the head of the Neighborhood Market Association, Liam Dillon pressed Arabo to clarify his stances on some key issues in local politics.
Dillon highlighted this 10News clip from March last year. In it, Arabo pushed back against then-Council President Todd Gloria’s campaign to raise the minimum wage. Arabo warned of the ripple effects: Higher wages for businesses would translate to higher prices for consumers, he said.
Read the full story: www.voiceofsandiego.org
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Saturday, May 9, 2015
Obama: Education, Equal Pay, Sick Leave, Family Leave, Higher Min. Wage, and Trade All Part of ‘Middle Class Economics’
May 8, 2015
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May 8, 2015
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Reich Is Wrong On The Minimum Wage
By Donald J. Boudreaux, May 8, 2015, Cato.org
Watching Robert Reich’s new video in which he endorses raising the minimum wage by $7.75 per hour – to $15 per hour – is painful. It hurts to encounter such rapid-fire economic ignorance, even if the barrage lasts for only two minutes.
Perhaps the most remarkable flaw in this video is Reich’s manner of addressing the bedrock economic objection to the minimum wage – namely, that minimum wage prices some low-skilled workers out of jobs. Ignoring supply-and-demand analysis (which depicts the correct common-sense understanding that the higher the minimum wage, the lower is the quantity of unskilled workers that firms can profitably employ), Reich asserts that a higher minimum wage enables workers to spend more money on consumer goods which, in turn, prompts employers to hire more workers.
By Donald J. Boudreaux, May 8, 2015, Cato.org
Watching Robert Reich’s new video in which he endorses raising the minimum wage by $7.75 per hour – to $15 per hour – is painful. It hurts to encounter such rapid-fire economic ignorance, even if the barrage lasts for only two minutes.
Perhaps the most remarkable flaw in this video is Reich’s manner of addressing the bedrock economic objection to the minimum wage – namely, that minimum wage prices some low-skilled workers out of jobs. Ignoring supply-and-demand analysis (which depicts the correct common-sense understanding that the higher the minimum wage, the lower is the quantity of unskilled workers that firms can profitably employ), Reich asserts that a higher minimum wage enables workers to spend more money on consumer goods which, in turn, prompts employers to hire more workers.
Reich apparently believes that his ability to describe and draw such a “virtuous circle” of increased spending and hiring is reason enough to dismiss the concerns of “scare-mongers” (his term) who worry that raising the price of unskilled labor makes such labor less attractive to employers.
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Hollywood Actors And Economics 101
Welcome to Hollywood, where dreams become real – and where logic, reason and economics 101 become dreams.
Take the current battle over the minimum wage. In Los Angeles County, the minimum wage is $9 per hour. Theater actors, however, can be paid as little as $7 a performance, and an actor can even work long rehearsal hours with no pay. Three decades ago, L.A. County actors sued their union for an exception to union wages for theaters with 99 or fewer seats.
Why do these stage actors work for so little? They want to work. By working they improve their skills, stay sharp and or perhaps have a chance to get spotted by an agent. Some say simply having something to do is better than just sitting around and waiting for a casting agent to call.
Actors Equity, the national union, wants to change this.
According to the New York Times: “The union, seizing a moment when organized labor is having some success pressuring low-wage employers to pay higher salaries, says many of this city’s small theaters – which currently pay actors nothing for rehearsals, and stipends as low as $7 per performance – should start paying California’s minimum wage of $9 an hour.” But then a very Republican thing happened – 66 percent of the union members voted against a higher minimum wage. Their rationale was simple. A higher minimum wage means fewer plays get performed. Fewer plays means fewer opportunities for actors and therefore fewer opportunities to gain experience, stay in practice or possibly get discovered. But the union’s national council ignored this advisory vote and ordered, with some exceptions, a $9 per hour minimum wage.
When it comes to their own lives, these actors understand the law of economics: Artificially raise the cost of a good – in this case the price of an actor in a stage play – and you reduce the demand for actors.
Meanwhile, last year actor Kevin Spacey lobbied Maryland lawmakers to extend their tax credit program. He films his Netflix series, “House of Cards,” in Maryland. That state offers generous tax credits and relaxed union rules, so that the Netflix series earned more money than would be the case if they filmed, for example, in Hollywood.
In Maryland, a production company can claim a credit on its income taxes equivalent to 25 to 27 percent of the costs of its film or TV production. If the credit is larger than a company’s tax liability, the company can receive a refund from the state. “Maryland has capped the total value of credits it offers,” writes the Washington Post, “with the amount varying by year but averaging about $12.5 million. Ten productions have been approved for credits since 2012. But the vast majority of the $62.5 million in funding has been allotted to ‘House of Cards’ ($37.6 million) and ‘Veep’ ($22.7 million).”
Hollywood studios aggressively seek tax credits and other benefits when determining where to shoot a television series or movie. When a shoot takes place other than Hollywood, studios call the out-of-state production a “runaway production.” Brilliant marketing. Hollywood says, “We don’t want to shoot outside of California, but, you see, our hands are tied. We have no choice. The production ‘ran away’ from us, lured by text credits and generous union rules.” When a manufacturer, however, decides to move a facility to a different location – to take advantage of tax breaks – critics call this “outsourcing.”
When it comes to politics, the Hollywood community votes for the party that seeks to raise both the minimum wage and taxes on the rich. The foundation of wealth redistribution is imposing higher and higher taxes on the so-called rich.
Yet after pulling the lever for the tax-hike party, the Hollywood community demands tax breaks for its own industry. A higher minimum wage is an article of faith for Democrats, whose party believes that society “exploits” poor workers. Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says: “A raise of the federal minimum wage is one of those common-sense proposals that is both good for the economy and good for the country. … This is a good first step to show we are committed to helping Americans who work hard and play by the rules. And as we tend to this core American value, we will expand the middle class, which will always be the backbone of this nation’s economy. These principles are essential to Democrats like me, but they do not have to be exclusive to Democrats. We would welcome Republicans to join us in the achievement of improving wages and creating new momentum for the U.S. economy.”
Another Hollywood denizen, Pat Sajak, the host of “Wheel of Fortune,” recently offered a different perspective on the minimum wage. Sajak tweeted, “When I had minimum wage jobs, my goal was to better myself, not to better the minimum wage.”
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Monday, April 6, 2015
Minimum Wage: Disadvantaged Youth Are Crucial Issue
By Bill Conerly, Apr. 5, 2015, Forbes.comWhat the minimum wage means for disadvantaged youth should be the central question of this controversial topic. Plenty of middle and upper class teenagers take their first jobs at the minimum wage, working part-time or summers. I don’t much care whether they make five dollars an hour or ten or fifteen.
They’ll be fine. There are also some older people working at low-skilled jobs.
A higher minimum wage doesn’t really solve their problem, which is low skills. However, many people parlay on-the-job learning into higher-paying jobs. Combine that with some more education and these folks should be all right.
Disadvantaged teenagers and youth in their early 20s concern me, however. For them, the minimum wage is a big issue.
Read the full story: www.forbes.com
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Thursday, April 2, 2015
LA County Supervisors Vote 5-0 To Study Raising The Minimum Wage
The movement to substantially increase the local minimum wage won a significant boost Tuesday when the county Board of Supervisors voted to follow the city of Los Angeles in studying the idea.
Until now, the campaign to raise the wage to as much $15.25 an hour has largely focused within the city of 4 million residents, prompting concerns that businesses would move to communities where wages remain lower.
But with their vote Tuesday, the supervisors put in play unincorporated areas that include an additional 1 million residents and stretch from the High Desert to the San Gabriel Valley.
The supervisors agreed to weigh the impact of not only requiring a higher baseline pay for their roughly 100,000 employees — the largest local government workforce in the United States — but also for county contractors and businesses in those unincorporated areas.
Read the full story: www.latimes.com
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Wednesday, March 18, 2015
What Jared Bernstein Misunderstands About The Minimum Wage
Jared Bernstein has been over in my native UK and is amazed to find that what the minimum wage rate is and how it should be set is all done with a certain amount of civility rather than the tempestuous party political partisanship of his native US. Well, OK, we could simply ascribe this to us being English and the US not being so but that would be more than a tad culturalist.
Part of his answer is that the rate is set by the Low Pay Commission but that’s not really it. The true answer is that we have a modest minimum wage and we raise it modestly. And as everyone should know by now modest minimum wages don’t actually have much effect in any direction. So, given that the effects aren’t much, either on incomes or unemployment, then it’s not all that contentious an issue. Thus we can go off and ponder more important issues like how many of the Cabinet went to Eton or whether the columnists at The Guardian got dropped on their heads as babies.
Read the full story: www.forbes.com
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Monday, March 16, 2015
Seattle Eateries Closing As $15 Minimum Wage Approaches
Last summer we talked about the rather faint hopes that some Seattle businesses were clinging to as the city moved toward jacking up their minimum wage (for some jobs) to $15.00 per hour. Employers – particularly in the restaurant industry – were asking the city council to reconsider as they evaluated their options in the face of labor costs which were about to rise to between 42 and 47 percent of their operating expenses. It all fell on deaf ears, unfortunately, and the plan is moving forward. And rather than waiting for the roof to come crashing down, some owners are preemptively closing their doors.
Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law goes into effect on April 1, 2015. As that date approaches, restaurants across the city are making the financial decision to close shop.
www.nation.foxnews.com
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Thursday, February 5, 2015
New York City's Mayor Calls For A $15 Minimum Wage
In his State of the City Address on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) called for a minimum wage increase that would rise to $15 an hour by 2019.
While de Blasio took office promising to push for a change in state law that would allow the city to set its own minimum wage, he laid out concrete steps for how he would like to see the wage raised. In his address, he called to raise it to $13 an hour in 2016 and then increase automatically with inflation after that, eventually bringing the minimum wage to the $15 level. He said such indexing is important because “it means that hardworking New Yorkers won’t have to wait on new action from Albany just to keep pace with inflation.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has proposed a different plan. In January, he put forth a proposal that would raise the city’s minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by the end of 2016 and the rest of the state to $10.50. De Blasio pushed back at that plan in his speech, saying, “The current wage proposal simply doesn’t do enough to help New York City.” State lawmakers increased the minimum wage last year so that it will rise to $9 an hour by 2016.
Read the full story: www.thinkprogress.org
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President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech, called for a minimum-wage hike and for government-mandated paid family and medical leave.
"We are the only advanced country on Earth," said the President, "that doesn't guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers." On the minimum wage, Obama issued this challenge: "And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise."
Minimum wage and paid family leave are not only moral imperatives, says Obama, but good economics to boot. Employees, he tells us, are happier and therefore more productive. Minimum wage and paid medical leave, understand, actually benefit business. It's just that dumb businessmen and women don't realize it.
But what does it say that perhaps the two most high-profile leftwing economists once opposed the minimum wage and paid family and medical leave?
When Obamacare architect/economist Jonathan Gruber and The New York Times economist Paul Krugman actually practiced economics, they both opposed the minimum wage. In Gruber's case, he also opposed government mandated for paid family and medical leave. In 2011 -- less than four years ago -- Gruber gave an MIT lecture called "Applying Supply and Demand." About the minimum wage, Gruber said: "Let's say the government rolled in and set a minimum wage. ... Workers want to supply more hours than firms want to hire. ... You end up with excess supply. And we call that excess supply 'unemployment.'" He also insisted that a higher minimum wage pressures an employer to turn to automation: "We have a downward sloping demand curve, and why is it downward sloping? Because the higher the wage, the fewer workers the firm wants to hire. It would rather use machines instead."
As to paid leave, Gruber also argued against it. In 1994 Gruber wrote: "I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age. I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group." In other words, Gruber said that an employer forced to pay for family leave will simply reduce the employee's wages to offset the cost -- not net benefit to the employee.
This brings us to The New York Times columnist/economist Paul Krugman, who currently supports a $15 minimum wage. He, too, has done a 180 on the issue.
In 1998, Krugman reviewed a book that supported the living wage, titled "The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy." But Krugman slammed the idea: "The living wage movement is simply a move to raise minimum wages through local action. So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment."
Krugman even dismissed Card-Krueger, the widely cited minimum-wage study that purports to show its positive effect. Krugman pretty much dismissed it. "Indeed," he wrote, "much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages 'do,' in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces. ...
"In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price -? determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal. And it is for that reason, rather than the practical details, that the broader political movement of which the demand for a living wage is the leading edge is ultimately doomed to failure: For the amorality of the market economy is part of its essence, and cannot be legislated away."
In sum, Gruber and Krugman once made Milton Friedman-like, Econ 101 arguments against minimum wage and its cousin, the livable wage. And in Gruber's case, he even argued against government-mandated paid family and medical leave.
The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is attributed with the following quote: "You're entitled to your opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." In the case of Gruber and Krugman's current support for "progressive" policies they once opposed, what changed? The facts -- or the politics?
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