Why A Higher Minimum Wage Panics So Many 8

The Teen Unemployment Crisis: Questions and Answers Employment Policies Institute

In addition, while New York state doesn’t explicitly preempt local minimum wages, court rulings dating back to the 1960s have held that the state’s minimum-wage law implicitly does so. Information about minimum-wage rates and rules in each state came primarily from the National Conference of State Legislatures, supplemented by the websites of state labor departments and online versions of each state’s statutes. Prospects for raising the federal minimum wage, which has stood at $7.25 an hour since 2009, appear to have stalled out yet again, despite broad public support for the idea. In truth, though, for the past several years most of the real action on minimum wages has been in states, counties and cities, not on Capitol Hill. Just this past November, for example, Florida voters approved Amendment 2, which will gradually raise the state’s minimum until it reaches $15 in 2026.

While wage increases are important, it’s not a silver bullet to solve the affordability issue. You look at other states like California, which also has an incredibly high cost of living, but doesn’t have minimum wages that are as high as Washington’s. What California does have is a more robust social safety net. Employers are unable to afford hire more unskilled and inexperienced workers when the minimum wage increases. Federal law sets a baseline minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for most U.S. workers, but states are free to adopt their own, higher minimums (and in some states, so are cities and counties). With the push to raise the federal minimum wage once again blocked, we wanted to update our previous look at state and local minimum-wage laws.

Raise the Minimum Wage and Expand Coverage

Some state legislatures block or « preempt » local communities from adopting higher wage standards and other worker protections. Find out what wage campaigns are happening at the federal, state, and local levels around the country. Good jobs that pay a living wage are the foundation of an economy that works for everyone. This implies that she raised the intonation on the word not and pronounced the sentence as an actual question. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

Murray says Trump’s Canadian tariffs could cause costly rift with WA

Teens are disproportionately affected in a negative manner by a minimum wage increase. Moreover, there is a general consensus that forced wage hikes lead entry-level employers to eliminate jobs or reduce work hours. Even if jobs are not cut, employers respond to higher labor costs by shifting their hiring focus to better skilled employees or more capital-intensive production, leaving the least skilled out — teens — of the labor market. Frustrated by inaction at the federal level, states and, increasingly, many cities and counties have moved to raise the wage floor. The first rule of social science is that correlation does not equal causation. Many factors could affect fast-food employment in California—positively or negatively—that have nothing to do with the minimum wage.

• The most effective way for skilled union workers to obtain higher incomes and more job security is to make unskilled, non-union labor more expensive.
• And they’re paying monthly service fees of 4% of sales, advertising fees, and a percentage of sales as rent, because the company is really in the real estate business.
• Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure.
• They want to feel good about themselves and be perceived as compassionate.

How Seattle’s record-high minimum wage has — and hasn’t — paid off

Changing this into a direct wage increase, rather than offering up indirect aid programs, could give workers of all ages more ability to provide for themselves without having to rely on ineffectual tax-funded programs. Compared to the cost of living, a deficit appears in how much a minimum wage worker earns and how much they need to spend on rent and food. Using Texas as an example, the Department of Statistics reports that the 2019 average gross rent in Texas was $1,109 monthly.

Does increasing pay for unskilled jobs devalue more skilled jobs?

We might assume that firms will absorb the higher labor costs and take a dip in their profits. But in real life, entrepreneurs are “cutting employment and making other decisions to maintain their net earnings,” according to the CATO Institute. CATO Institute experts predict even more negative consequences, including reducing employee work hours and benefits, and charging consumers higher prices. As a result, the higher cost to hire lower-skilled workers will destroy opportunities to find jobs.

• As a teenager, Nicole Lee Schroeder worked part time at McDonald’s — eight-hour shifts at $7 an hour — just to afford a car to get to and from her unpaid internship.
• She was 18, and working as a server at an Applebee’s in Wyoming — one of about 20 states still following the federal minimum wage, which has stagnated at $7.25 an hour for more than a decade.
• Corporations reap record profits yet choose to severely underpay their workers.
• In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs.
• The 10,000-jobs number originated in an article by the Hoover Institution, a free-market-oriented think tank, which analyzed raw employment data from September 2023 through the end of the year.

And in July 2028, Chicago will also require one fair wage for all workers. States follow the federal minimum wage; they have not raised wages Why A Higher Minimum Wage Panics So Many above $7.25. That narrative, however, was based on a statistical illusion.

The year-over-year increase in commercial real estate prices even by the end of 2016 was more than 6% , so racing ahead of the cost of living as data and a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show. Businesses found ways to adapt, often by raising prices and cutting hours — mainly for younger, less experienced workers, Vigdor said. Many workers came out ahead, he said, but some came out behind.

Similar claims began appearing in right-wing media, local newspapers, and the national business press, blaming the new minimum-wage law for mass layoffs and restaurant closures. She’s now going to community college and working part-time at a restaurant in Bellevue, which still follows the state’s minimum wage of $16.66. But it’s an affluent area, and Hood said big tips help make up the difference. A bill in the state legislature to raise the wage statewide died this year, but Wilson said she hopes it will be revived. In the meantime, Wilson said advocates are hoping to build on the momentum from recent victories in Everett, Renton and Burien by passing wage increases in other Puget Sound cities.

The California Job-Killer That Wasn’t

Councilmembers there have spent several months discussing a proposal that would raise the wage to $20.29 an hour. At a March meeting, city officials said they planned to do more research into the potential impact of the policy, and are expecting to revisit it later this year. Seattle’s minimum wage law had a similar carveout for tips when it went into effect in 2015, designed to be phased out after a decade. As the sunset date for the tip exemption approached last year, restaurant owners lobbied to keep it, and Seattle City Council briefly considered an extension. Reinhard hasn’t raised prices yet, but he said he was forced to reduce hours available for employees to work and cut about five part-time staff positions.