8/6/2023 0 Comments Vox media jobs seattleSecond, the study excludes many people employed by larger businesses with multiple locations in Washington state, because researchers could not figure out which of those employees were based in Seattle. Even though independent contractors aren’t covered by the city’s minimum wage law, that kind of gig economy work may have served as hidden safety net for low-wage workers squeezed out of Seattle’s regular economy. First, it excludes independent contractors - like Uber and Lyft drivers, who started working in Seattle around 2014. The detailed data set it uses has two major blind spots. The University of Washington study has significant limitations of its own. “The data that we’re using is pretty rare.” “Here in Washington state, we have data that tell us how everybody’s pay breaks down,” he continued. “Previous studies have tried to work around this limitation by focusing on the restaurant industry, focusing on teenage employment, with the hypothesis that most teenagers are in low-wage jobs, that most restaurant workers are in low-wage jobs.” “There aren’t a lot of good data resources that will tell you who’s working what wage,” said Jacob Vigdor, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington and a co-author on the paper. In contrast, the University of Washington researchers were able to track low-wage workers across all parts of the economy, which may explain why they found different results. Because this kind of information has been hard to come by in the past, much of what we know about the minimum wage has relied on research about specific low-wage sectors (like food service) or specific groups of lowly paid people (like teens). The researchers had access to state records for individual employees, which included how much time they worked and how much they were paid. Just last week, a competing study from economists at the University of California Berkeley found that the restaurant industry in Seattle - a big source of low-wage jobs - did not shrink its labor force despite raising wages to comply with the new law.īut the University of Washington study differs from previous studies in a significant way: It takes advantage of a much richer source of data. Though the paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, it is already the focus of a fierce debate because it seems to contradict more than two decades of economics research showing that the benefits of small to moderate increases in the minimum wage largely outweigh the costs. Between job losses and reductions in hours, Seattle new minimum wage policy may have cost low-wage workers about $125 per month each, the researchers say. Even though average pay went up for people at the bottom, there was less work, so they became worse off overall. According to their calculations, when the minimum wage reached $13 an hour in 2016, Seattle employers substantially cut back on low-paying jobs. On Monday, researchers at the University of Washington announced that Seattle’s efforts may indeed have backfired. Could employers afford the spike in labor costs? Or would this drive low-wage jobs out of Seattle? Between 20, the city hiked its minimum wage from $9.47 to $15 an hour - a plan so aggressive that economists weren’t sure what would happen. A few years ago, Seattle lawmakers embarked on a bold experiment in public policy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |