The UW Study on $15 an Hour Does Not Reflect My Life as a Minimum Wage Worker

The exclusion of multi-site businesses was because of the inability to distinguish a business's physical location from its account location, which would have confounded the results:

> The data identify business entities as UI account holders. Firms with multiple locations have the option of establishing a separate account for each location, or a common account. Geographic identification in the data is at the account level. As such, we can uniquely identify business location only for single-site firms and those multi-site firms opting for separate accounts by location. We therefore exclude multi-site single-account businesses from the analysis, referring henceforth to the remaining firms as “single-site” businesses.

(This suggests that a locally owned and operated Domino's franchise would be classed as a single-site business and included in the study, while a non-franchised Walmart would be classed as a multi-site business and excluded.)

Furthermore, survey evidence suggests that multi-site businesses may be more likely to contribute to the "negative" effects:

> Survey evidence, discussed below, indicates that multi-site employers were if anything more likely to report staffing reductions in the wake of the minimum wage increase...survey evidence collected in Seattle at the time of the first minimum wage increase, and again one year later, increase suggests that multi-location firms were in fact more likely to plan and implement staff reductions.

Skepticism is good, but let's give the researchers credit here: they've done a pretty stellar job of mitigating confounding variables and justifying why they've made the choices they have in which data they chose to study.

And the state is also trying to put an end to wage slavery abuses.

But most rebublicans appear to be ok with getting paid nothing and working slave hours.

So I'm happy to let them elect conservatives that cut labor laws, and lower minimum wage.

A nice cheap unregulated labor force in the heartland America will lower my cost of goods and shipping on the coast.

Republicans are like a voluntary slave force for the liberal coasts.

Beyond that, from my perspective, slavery in America was ended despite the best efforts of the government to keep it going. It's probably just semantic differences between us that make this non-obvious, but I would argue that the state made it harder to eradicate slavery than if it wouldn't have existed, or was less all-powerful. At least in North America, slavery was a result of state-sponsored colonization and state-granted charters and monopolies, not private industry. The history of British colonization of North America is not a history of private social movements, but of politics and the expansion of Empire across the globe.

At the base of this disagreement, I feel it is a mistake to conflate law with the state, and that conflation is the reason we see the state as a benefactor or positive force in the world. Because they force their own monopoly in law, they are seen as being the same as law, but law has existed and still exists outside of the modern state.