Cut Hours Rather Than Workers
Make Employees Work Harder
Cut Other Elements of Remuneration
Hire Fewer People, More Robots
Economists Grace Lordan and David Neumark analyze how changes to the minimum wage from 1980 to 2015 affected low-skill jobs in various sectors of the US economy, focusing particularly on "automatable jobs – jobs in which employers may find it easier to substitute machines for people,” such as packing boxes or operating a sewing machine. They find that across all industries they measured, raising the minimum wage by $1 equates to a decline in "automatable" jobs of 0.43 percent, with manufacturing even harder hit.
They conclude that
groups often ignored in the minimum wage literature are in fact quite vulnerable to employment changes and job loss because of automation following a minimum wage increase.
Minimum wage hikes are bad public policy. Economics, like all social sciences, has difficulty testing its models against data, but even where
we can, the evidence bears this out.
4 Ways Employers Respond to Minimum Wage Laws (Besides Laying Off Workers) - Foundation for Economic Education
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