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Seattle mayor unveils plan for $15 minimum wage

Jack Fabulous said:
It will make for a nice case study.

-unemployment before and after
-inflation before and after
-business start-ups before and after
-business closures before and after
-etc...

Lots of before and afters available. Let the games begin...
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Another case study.

A year later, it is clear that raising San Jose's minimum wage has been an incredible success. The data shows that under San Jose's minimum wage, unemployment was reduced, the number of businesses grew, the number of minimum wage jobs expanded, average employee hours remained constant and the economy was stimulated.
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Fenton said:
If it's " driven" by anything other than a Free Market its doomed to failure.
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I'm curious, why do you think the mechanism matters? What happens when the labor market pushes the government to institute labor laws requiring a minimum wage increase?

Like there aren't enough examples of the damage stupid Government policies like this have on State Economies.
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Like the tax plans Norquist is pushing on Missouri, in the style of Kansas?

Raising the minimum wage is rhetoric specifically aimed at the low information crowd who's susceptible to these kind of simple minded solutions.
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Then why do business leaders often support it?
 
year2late said:
They beef up their resumes with volunteer opportunities and internships. Seems to work for many.
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lol so they work for free to get the skills they need.

doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of giving them 15 an hour?
why not just keep the pay low so they can get the job now and make money now while working on skills and other such things?
 
darkrecess said:

Another case study.
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umm it went up a dollar. we are talking about doubling the minimum wage there is a huge difference.
at least 1 article I saw got the math wrong. how they did that I have no idea.

that dollar increase was probably eaten by cost increases. you wondered why your favorite food item went up 10 cents. well that guys labor went up for everyone. so you and everyone else gets a 10, 20 cent increase in price to pay for it. so out of your dollar you are down to 80 cents and that is before the government gets involved. so you can say goodbye to another 20 cents right there.

a dollar raise basically netted them maybe an extra 50 cents an hour.
 
ludin said:
umm it went up a dollar. we are talking about doubling the minimum wage there is a huge difference.
at least 1 article I saw got the math wrong. how they did that I have no idea.

that dollar increase was probably eaten by cost increases. you wondered why your favorite food item went up 10 cents. well that guys labor went up for everyone. so you and everyone else gets a 10, 20 cent increase in price to pay for it. so out of your dollar you are down to 80 cents and that is before the government gets involved. so you can say goodbye to another 20 cents right there.
a dollar raise basically netted them maybe an extra 50 cents an hour.
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Still looking for a more detailed comparison of prices from 2012 to 2014 in San Jose but... comparing 2014 San Jose prices to what I pay here in Ohio where I live (7.25 minimum wage), there are some differences but much is the same here as it is there. I only pay 540$ rent but I live in a crummy apartment of like 600 sq ft, and my town does not have some of the geographic benefits of a town like San Jose, so it's natural to expect cost of housing to be higher there.

Most notably, I pay about the same for restaurants here as I would there. Dinner for me and my girlfriend at a nice restaurant usually runs about 45-55$, and a combo meal at McD's is still about 6$. Not much difference.

Even with that being said, a real income increase of .50c/hour still leads to an extra $1,000 a year in real income, which can be helpful to a family struggling to make it. I would still support it.
 
ludin said:
lol so they work for free to get the skills they need.

doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of giving them 15 an hour?
why not just keep the pay low so they can get the job now and make money now while working on skills and other such things?
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Kids go to college and come out with tens of thousands in debt and potentially have no marketable skill.

Look at Habitat for Humanity. Volunteer and you can come out highly skilled.

You treat volunteering as a bas thing. The reality is that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship.

As far as 15 bucks an hour goes,,, we shall see.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Easy! Here. That's a link to a Harvard study showing that because Costco pays its employees a living wage, they have a lot lower turnover and spend so much less on hiring and retraining that they actually spend less per employee than Sam's Club, even though Sam's Club pays their employees an average of $5 LESS per hour than Costco does.
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I've seen that study before and it's grossly flawed. It takes a best case scenario of a company with historically low turnover and training costs and compares it to a company with historically high turnover and high training costs. It's called a "goal-based" study. It starts with a premise and then goes out to prove that the premise is right, not prove whether it was wrong or right.
 
SheWolf said:
Everybody supports it, including local businesses... that is freaking great.
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Lol...what?

Sure...I am a Seattle business...and I am just thrilled to have to pay my workers roughly double what they now make for ZERO extra work.

Come on now.

I guarantee you virtually no Seattle business owners in their right minds support this.


From the OP article:

'"This proposal does not live up to the wishes of Seattle's workers," said city council member Kshama Sawant, who served on the mayor's panel but opposes the plan. "Unfortunately it also reflects the attempts of business to water down what the working people want."'

Doesn't sound like local businesses support it to me.
 
year2late said:
Kids go to college and come out with tens of thousands in debt and potentially have no marketable skill.

Look at Habitat for Humanity. Volunteer and you can come out highly skilled.

You treat volunteering as a bas thing. The reality is that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship.

As far as 15 bucks an hour goes,,, we shall see.
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maybe if you are going into construction or something. if you are going to be a educatorwhich or accountant then habitat for humanity doesn't do anything
for you.

I never said it was a bad thing that is a strawman.

You said they could volunteer or do internships to earn skills neither which pays money. which is the WHOLE POINT when getting a job.
which means they go further in debt.

just look at what the CBO said
Minimum wage hike would kill a half-million jobs: CBO - Washington Times
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Not so much. Even working full-time at $15/hr doesn't mean one has a whole lot of extra money to spend - it only means that one has enough to spend on essentials without having to depend on government assistance. They're still going to hunt for the best bargains not out of choice, but out of necessity...which means that market forces will not allow prices to go up nearly so much as you seem to suppose.
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Its a vicious cycle; raise wages and prices will go up. It may be more than the market can bear.
 
Deuce said:
Less regulation is good for the economy, then no regulation will be even better. DEATH TO AMERICA. ANARCHY!

Lower taxes are good for the economy, so maybe we should have 0% taxes for all! Run an all-volunteer government. I'm sure the highways will be fine and our troops will have... You know, bullets and things.
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Apples and oranges.
 
apdst said:
Its a vicious cycle; raise wages and prices will go up. It may be more than the market can bear.
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Agreed.

The economy is like an inflated balloon. You poke the balloon with a min wage hike, it's going to push out, have impact, someplace else, which is sometimes hard to predict and often not a desirable impact.
 
mtm1963 said:
When?

it could be a small business killer.

what's seattle's current average hourly wage?
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Yes, God help us if our Big Mac costs an extra quarter.
 
SheWolf said:
Everybody supports it, including local businesses... that is freaking great.
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SO says the politician wishing to impose it on them.

Funny you hear none of them agreeing.
 
With all the gloom and doom about Seattle. Why not look at places where these type of things have been attempted.

Holy crap, folks wrote the nastiest op ed pieces and had visions of San Francisco's higher minimum wage destroying SF economy. Many years later? Still there. All the gloom and doom projections were wrong.

San Francisco's Higher Minimum Wage Hasn't Hurt the Economy - Businessweek
 
Fenton said:
LOL !

Damn, why doesn't Washington do something uselful to actually HELP their economy instead of killing whats left of it ?

Like what's WE'RE doing in Texas ?

We're incentivizing growth by making it profitable for Companies to relocate here and its working !

Ask Torrance California if you don't beleive me.

We're not targeting the discretionary income of our citizens with stupid tax increases and energy policies that guarantee higher energy cost.

We're # 45 on the list of States with the Highest Tax burden on it's Citizens and we're building a real surplus.

Any Bussiness that that even thinks of moving into Washington State knows immediately that their cost on labor is going to be double of what it is in other States.

LOL !! Good luck with that nonsense.

You people are just too stubborn to admit your short sighted inept policies kill economies and produce mors poverty and suffering.

Imagine the simple mindedness that it takes to believe the concept that arbitrarily wage amounts mandated by the Government will increase economic growth.

Its just unbelievable.
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Here's the interesting thing - businesses sometimes move out of high-tax states like Washington...for instance, Boeing moved its headquarters away - not to Texas, but to Chicago. But its operations in Everett, Washington are here to stay for at least another 20, 30 years at a minimum thanks to a union deal signed just a month or so ago.

But how about you look at this list of businesses based here in high-tax, business-unfriendly Puget Sound? The list is not short, and many of the corporations are not small. You may have heard of some of them - Microsoft, Amazon, Weyerhauser, Starbucks, the list goes on. Of course most of them can't compare to Big Oil - but we're not an oil state, and we're much smaller than Texas.

So...thanks, but no thanks, we're doing Just Fine without you.

Oh, and one more thing - it's not just Texas that has a surplus - almost all states are required to maintain one, and it was the Great Recession that made that so difficult. Not only that, but while Texas might be doing well on having low taxes, in other areas, Texas is NOT something to brag bout. 41% of the teachers there have to have second jobs just to get by (compared to 11% in 1981) - that's SHAMEFUL, and it will harm your state's people for generations to come. Not only that, but you've got one of the nation's worst health care systems:

As it turns out, Texas is a role model only in the sense of being a horrible example to be avoided at all costs. As the numbers show, by almost every objective measure the Texas health care system ranks among the very worst in the nation.

That starts with leading the U.S. in the percentage of uninsured residents, the very crisis the Medicaid expansion was designed to help alleviate. Over six million Texans have no health insurance, leaving 24 percent of residents (and over 30 percent between the ages of 18 and 64) without coverage. As a result, The Hill noted, Texas "confronts billions of dollars' worth of uncompensated hospital care every year" which add an estimated $1,800 a year to the average private insurance premium in in the state. In its last state health care scorecard for 2009, the Commonwealth Fund rated Texas dead last in access to medical care. Across all five indicators (see table above), Rick Perry's state ranked a dismal 46th.

So...no, I would choose Washington state over Texas any day of the week - we've got a healthier, better-educated population...mainly because we realize that we have to be willing to PAY in order to have that healthier, better-educated population.
 
Seattle the future Detroit!!! woohooo

as no new business will come in. and the existing businesses will struggle to make ends meet!

lets see slave wages in china or pay 15 an hour in Seattle sorta a no brainer. they should go higher they are just limiting themselves at 15 an hour.

I dont see why they dont just give everyone in america some of that 1 trillion a year they have been printing. total utopia!
 
apdst said:
Apples and oranges.
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No. You say tax cuts are good, therefore no taxes must be better. Sorry dude, if you get to spew that bull**** I'm gonna throw it right back at you. If you get to extrapolate anything to whatever extreme you want, so do I.
 
ludin said:
:doh If you don't realize that there is more to pay then just what an employee costs i can't help you. if you want to site a source that compares apples to oranges go head it holds no weight in what we are talking about.






Cherry picking data will not help you either. NY and SF are some of the most highest cost of living places out there yet even at 10 dollars you could make it. you are not going to live in the high end of town or anything but you could still make it.

again you said 10 dollars and 15 was bad pay you made no mention of family it isn't my fault that you presented an easily countered argument. moving the goal posts is a fallacy.
you know nothing about me so all you are doing is making supported assumptions. which hurts what little of an argument you have left.

funny how you have still failed to address any of the points that made in the orginal post.

you have yet to take into account:

1. The cost increase due to inflated wages.
2. The additional cost of inflated salaries. if minimum wage workers get an 8 dollar hike then professions are going to want that and more. you can't raise the bottom line without pushing up everyone else. this to has higher costs as well.

3. You have yet to factor in jobs LOST due to costs and or cutbacks.
4. You have yet to factor in people that will no longer be qualified to do these jobs now.
5. you have yet to factor in lost job oppertunities. IE people that would like to start a business but can't now due to the price of labor.

so if 15 isn't good enough lets just pay everyone 100k a year then no one is poor everyone can live on that and everyone should be happy.
ol yea we have things called economic theories that say this is a bad idea it doesn't work and leads to more people unemployed or on part time.
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And what, exactly, do you have as experience in living in a high-cost city earning $10/hr? And what about as a parent?

And what you yourself are not factoring in is the fact that while initially there will be a higher cost to the corporations, the simple fact that the low-wage people have significantly more money to spend - and unlike rich people, poor people generally spend ALL their money every month - and because of that, the local businesses will prosper, and so will the corporations in turn.

If you want proof, just ask yourself why it is that low-wage red states generally have significantly higher poverty levels than higher-wage blue states. You're arguing against success, guy.
 
apdst said:
Its a vicious cycle; raise wages and prices will go up. It may be more than the market can bear.
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Y'know, look at Hawaii sometime, the land where milk is $9/gallon and house prices are hideous. Just because prices are higher doesn't mean the market can't bear it.

And market forces are universal, right? The law of supply and demand apply everywhere, right? Then why is it that when I go to a third-world nation, Starbucks costs almost as much as it does here? Why is it that food still costs almost as much as it does here? Why is it that cars and electronics cost twice what they do here? This is despite the fact that poverty is so rampant in such places.

My point is, the fear that higher wages automatically results in higher prices is not an iron law - it is not an infallible rule of economics. If it were, then why is food not much more expensive here in high-cost Puget Sound as it is in the poverty-ridden MS Delta? Why are the costs the same? The houses are cheaper there, but rent is not that much cheaper. Motel rooms cost the same there as here. Gas costs just a little less than it does here. Walk into a convenience store and pretty much EVERYTHING costs the same there in the MS Delta as it does in Puget Sound.

If high wages automatically equaled higher prices, then that would NOT be the case - almost everything would be cheaper! But it's not. Why is that?
 
faithful_servant said:
I've seen that study before and it's grossly flawed. It takes a best case scenario of a company with historically low turnover and training costs and compares it to a company with historically high turnover and high training costs. It's called a "goal-based" study. It starts with a premise and then goes out to prove that the premise is right, not prove whether it was wrong or right.
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And YOUR judgement is grossly flawed - why? What you're not getting is that the REASON that Costco has a historically low turnover and concomitant training costs is because they pay a lot more...and the REASON that Sam's Club has a historically high turnover and concomitant training costs is that they pay Wal-Mart wages.

Or what part of "people like to stay where they get paid more and leave from where they get paid less" do you not get?
 
Glen Contrarian said:
Y'know, look at Hawaii sometime, the land where milk is $9/gallon and house prices are hideous. Just because prices are higher doesn't mean the market can't bear it.

And market forces are universal, right? The law of supply and demand apply everywhere, right? Then why is it that when I go to a third-world nation, Starbucks costs almost as much as it does here? Why is it that food still costs almost as much as it does here? Why is it that cars and electronics cost twice what they do here? This is despite the fact that poverty is so rampant in such places.

My point is, the fear that higher wages automatically results in higher prices is not an iron law - it is not an infallible rule of economics. If it were, then why is food not much more expensive here in high-cost Puget Sound as it is in the poverty-ridden MS Delta? Why are the costs the same? The houses are cheaper there, but rent is not that much cheaper. Motel rooms cost the same there as here. Gas costs just a little less than it does here. Walk into a convenience store and pretty much EVERYTHING costs the same there in the MS Delta as it does in Puget Sound.

If high wages automatically equaled higher prices, then that would NOT be the case - almost everything would be cheaper! But it's not. Why is that?
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I have to third-world countries and didn't observe prices the same, or higher than The States.
 
Deuce said:
No. You say tax cuts are good, therefore no taxes must be better. Sorry dude, if you get to spew that bull**** I'm gonna throw it right back at you. If you get to extrapolate anything to whatever extreme you want, so do I.
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Yeah, but you claim that doubling the minimum wage will improve the economy. If so, $50 per hour will REALLY improve the economy, not to mention, we'll have more actual tax payers be introduced into the system.
 
Glen Contrarian said:
And when - when! - Seattle's economy continues to grow after the $15/hour MW is in effect, what will the conservatives say then?
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Seattle's economy will continue to grow as a whole due to corporate investment, and only the types who never make minimum wage will benefit.

I believe we need a higher minimum wage, but unless its enacted amongst a backdrop of trade and regulatory reforms a higher minimum wage will not benefit most workers.
 
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