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That story really plays on your emotions doesn't it? The part about the socialist city counsel woman got you particularly fired up didn't it?
As talk builds on Capitol Hill over hiking the federal minimum wage, one city in Washington state is poised to set the highest rate in the nation.
On Jan. 1, an estimated 1,600 hotel and transportation workers in SeaTac, Wash., will see their pay jump to $15 an hour, a 60 percent increase from the state's $9.32 minimum wage.
While many workers look forward to the higher pay, employers are looking for ways to absorb the big increase in labor costs. Some plan on eliminating jobs.
"We're going to be looking at making some serious cuts," said Cedarbrook Lodge General Manager Scott Ostrander. "We're going to be looking at reducing employee hours, reducing benefits and eliminating some positions."
That's in the short term. Eventually, those jobs and more are expected to return as the Cedarbrook Lodge looks to build an addition to the hotel. The plan is to increase revenue to offset the higher labor costs.
But not every employer is being so ambitious. One has told a trade group it is going to close one of its two restaurants, eliminating 200 jobs.
The plan has also caused Han Kim -- who runs Hotel Concepts, a company that owns and manages 11 hotels in Washington state -- to shelve plans to build a hotel in SeaTac. The company already has three hotels in SeaTac, and Kim and a business partner were looking to build a fourth on land they own.
"Uncertainty is bad for business, and right now we're right in that area so we're just putting everything on hold," Kim said.
Opponents of the $15 minimum wage did score a legal victory late last week when a King County, Wash., judge ruled that it does not apply to any of the workers at the SeaTac airport. Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas ruled only the Port of Seattle can set wage and other work rules at the airport. That eliminates 4,700 workers from the successful ballot initiative.
Backers of the $15 minimum wage vow to appeal the ruling up the state Supreme Court. One of the biggest supporters is Kshama Sawant, a socialist who also won her election to the Seattle City Council. She plans on making Seattle the next city to have a $15 minimum wage.
"There may be a few jobs lost here and there, but the fact is, if we don't fight for this, then the race to the bottom will continue," Sawant said.
Sawant is skeptical that the higher minimum wage will lead to mass layoffs. But the American Car Rental Association estimates 5 percent of low-wage jobs will be cut; and another 5-10 percent of those workers will be replaced by more experienced workers.
The owner of Dollar Rental Cars told Fox News she'll outsource some functions, change schedules and cut some staff in response to the new policy.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...al-businesses/
That story really plays on your emotions doesn't it? The part about the socialist city counsel woman got you particularly fired up didn't it?
Compare and contrast the article in the OP with the below. What does the OP think is the difference between the two?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...good-economicsRaising the Minimum Wage Isn't Just Good Politics. It's Good Economics, Too.
The minimum-wage debate follows a predictable pattern any time it flares up in the media: Liberals say it’s a moral outrage that people can toil away at full-time jobs and still live in poverty. They nod at the overwhelming public support for raising the minimum wage as a way to shame reluctant politicians. Conservatives, for their part, insist that all the minimum-wage talk is just self-defeating do-gooder-ism: great for making Upper-West-Siders feel righteous, a lot less so for helping the people they claim to care about. In the real world, conservatives argue, raising the minimum wage costs jobs that the poor and young desperately need. At which point liberals mumble defensively and retreat to their original talking points, if they respond at all.
Monday’s New York Times piece on the renewed push for a minimum-wage increase is a handy case in point. The writers of the story—a nice, scoop-filled piece of reporting—talk about the issue’s potential to split Republican elites from the party’s voters, in classic wedge fashion. Intriguingly, they suggest it could goose turnout among young people and minorities, two Democratic-leaning groups that often vanish during midterm elections. And, of course, the story includes a de rigueur warning of doom and destruction from House Speaker John Boehner--“Why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people?”—which goes largely unanswered by anyone on the left.
Well, that’s no good. Yes, the politics of the issue sufficiently favor Democrats that they can ignore the GOP's economic argument—Republicans may resist, but that will only help Democrats on Election Day. But as White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer correctly points out to the Times, the hope isn’t just to retain a few Senate seats. It’s to improve people’s lives.
If they’re serious about doing that, Democrats can’t cede the intellectual fight. They have to expose the House GOP position for what it is—water-carrying for business, particularly the fast-food restaurateurs who are leading employers of minimum-wage workers and donate overwhelmingly to the GOP. Until that happens, Republicans will be able to hold out with a patina of respectability among mainstream journalists and commentators, who largely accept the GOP's job-killing claims.
When they engage at all on the job-market consequences of boosting the minimum wage, Democrats frequently cite a study by economists David Card and Alan Krueger1 from 1994, which looked at a (then) recent increase in New Jersey. After surveying over 400 similar restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Card and Krueger found that the hike had no effect on jobs, contra the Cassandra-like freak-out from fast-food proprietors.
The paper was regarded as ground-breaking and, for its troubles, immediately got labeled “controversial” by the mainstream media thanks in part to persistent grumbling on the right. But in fact what made the paper so innovative wasn’t the conclusion per se, which other studies had arrived at. (For that matter, even when you tallied together all the studies that found a negative impact on employment, the effect that was very small. Recent studies have affirmed this.) What made it innovative was the methodology, which so cleanly tested the proposition. By comparing restaurants in New Jersey with restaurants just across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Card and Krueger were basically able to compare like with like, with the exception of the minimum wage law whose effects they sought to isolate.2 It was about as close to a laboratory experiment as you get in economics (other than, uh, these guys).
Even more relevant to the current discussion, however, was the rationale for why moderately raising the minimum wage wouldn’t kill jobs, as most of us might expect. After all, it’s one thing to look at a bunch of businesses and notice that they’re not cutting back. But unless there’s a compelling explanation for why our intuition on this is wrong, it’s hard to consider the study definitive. Even a study as well-designed as Card and Krueger’s could be flukish, or corrupted by hidden forces that aren’t evident to the authors or readers. Who knows, maybe McDonald’s managers in New Jersey are just unusually altruistic (though having patronized several fine Garden State dining establishments, I consider this to be extremely unlikely).
The bottom line is that backing the numbers with sound logical arguments is an important insurance policy against flukish-ness, and Card and Krueger identify a few. The first is that employers simply pass along the higher wages to customers rather cutting back on workers. And because the cost-increase tends to be small, and because customers accept the fairness of raising the minimum wage, they don’t buy fewer hamburgers or pizzas than before. As it happens, Card and Krueger found solid evidence that this was going on, as have many others.
Card and Krueger then nodded at a second, more interesting rationale, albeit one they buried deep in their paper. The idea is roughly as follows: A lot of companies have bargaining power when they hire employees—economists call these companies “monopsonists.” This means that, instead of hiring a burger-flipper at some going market rate (say, $10 per hour), they can throw their weight around and pay $9 or $8 per hour.
But here's the rub: Even an employer with a lot of weight to throw around will eventually run out of people who will accept $8 or $9. In order to add more workers at that point, he or she will have to woo them with a higher salary. More to the point, when the business owners get beyond that low-wage threshold and offer $10 an hour, they not only have to pay $10 for each new employee. They’ve got to bump up all their existing workers to $10 an hour, too. This turns out to be a bad deal for the owners. And so instead of hiring that $10-employee, they hire fewer employees than would be ideal so they can keep paying everyone $8 or $9.
What does this have to do with the minimum wage? Well, if you’re purposely scrimping on employees so that you don’t have to raise everyone’s wages to $10, and the government says you have to pay workers $10 whether you hire more people or not, then you’re probably going to hire more people. The only reason you weren’t was to keep wages down, and that’s no longer an option.
Before any conservative starts hyperventilating, it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t true of all industries, or even all employers in industries where it regularly happens. (In fact, Card and Krueger were skeptical of this story in their New Jersey study, before warming to a version of it in a subsequent book.) But this does happen a fair amount, and often in very pronounced ways.3 And the phenomenon goes a long waytoward explaining why minimum wage laws frequently have so little net effect on jobs: If, in response to a minimum wage hike, some employers add a few workers while others cut back a bit, then it makes sense that the overall effect might hover around zero.
None of which is to say I expect the average Democratic pol to start lecturing minimum-wage denialists about monopsony employers any time soon. But if enough of us in the trenches band together and retake the intellectual high-ground, victory is likely to come a lot sooner.
I say this because even if the political resonance of the minimum wage issue helps Democrats wildly exceed expectations in 2014, they’re unlikely to retake the House. And, unfortunately, House Republicans have repeatedly showed they can hold out against public opinion for long stretches of time. What even they can’t do, however, is hold out against both public opinion and the received Beltway wisdom, as last fall’s shutdown fight demonstrated. The way to force Republicans to cave when public opinion won’t do the trick is to deprive them of any pretension to seriousness.
Well, when business moves out from the area, we will know who to blame...
repug/(dirt poor)tea bagger/VRWC strategy: screw the working poor because they deserve to be screwed with ty jobs and ty wages.
Hate to agree with WC, but that's a pretty huge minimum wage. That study Th'Pusher's article is referring to couldn't have been conditioning on a rise of $5.68 per hour.
Should keep a lot of them out your taxpayers' pockets
My OP is talking about the effects of a 60% wage increase, your OP talks about a study of the effects of a less than 20% wage increase (study is flawed by the way as they only looked at fast food chains which can handle labor rate increases and failed to account for much smaller food businesses)
Your OP is a disaster to try and read on a phone as well so there's that failure on your part as well.
It'll be an interesting thing to watch on a small scale, I'm curious to see what happens.
You know are country is ed when people want doctors to take a pay cut and burger flippers to get a raise.
*our
Thanks phone.
That much of a minimum wage increase will fail spectacularly at the local level. If the entire country had the same minimum wage increase it wouldn't kill any interstate commerce since any inflation would happen nationwide. The town doing this in Washington won't be able to produce any goods that can be sold at a compe ive price since the town 50 miles down the road can produce the good cheaper.
Great opportunity for Conservatives to convince the country we need a low minimum wage, as usual Dems taking the bait per par.
doctors are supreme ripoff extortionists, while minimum wagers are ripped off victims, with taxpayers subsidizing moocher/wellfare-queen employers that pay minimum wages.
Your op is drivel and targeted at hyper emotional rabble like you. BB made a good point based on the facts in the article I pasted. You posted garbage that made you feel good. You're too stupid to see the difference.
Were you to stupid to read the study your article quotes from? You can't seriously be trying to compare a 20% increase to a 60% increase.
What was the point of posting the study?
What goods does a town built around an airport produce?
No idea. Can't say I know anything about the town. I hope it works and it leads to increases elsewhere, I just don't think it will.
The point was to post an article based on facts and science as opposed to the op which was a couple of businessmen speculating on how they might fire some people...
It's interesting since there are probably a lot of market distortions there already due to the presence of the airport, I can't see businesses up and moving as location is everything. Stuff closer to the airport is always more expensive anyway with the exception of strip clubs.
Here's a fact.
20% =/= 60%
Help me out...what are the facts and science in the article you posted? I'm not seeing them.
You're joking right? There are multiple studies, all including facts, quoted and linked in the article.
Stop glomming on to bb's point. Your op was garbage and really showed you to be the emo pofo poster you are.
Last edited by Th'Pusher; 12-31-2013 at 11:22 PM.
I posted the article because I'd thought it'd be interesting to see how it works out. As you can see I made no comments either positive or negative. You're the one that stormed in here with a bone to pick, ironically you call me the emotional one.
I read your study, found it interesting and pointed out a flaw in that they only studied chain restaurants. I also pointed out the difference of the percentages in wage increases, which you continue to ignore.
Happy new year Pusher, I hope when we come back next year you will stop reacting so emotionally towards me so we can have better discussions.
Happy new year you hyper emotional gun felating mother erI posted the article because I'd thought it'd be interesting to see how it works out. As you can see I made no comments either positive or negative. You're the one that stormed in here with a bone to pick, ironically you call me the emotional one.
I read your study, found it interesting and pointed out a flaw in that they only studied chain restaurants. I also pointed out the difference of the percentages in wage increases, which you continue to ignore.
Happy new year Pusher, I hope when we come back next year you will stop reacting so emotionally towards me so we can have better discussions.
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