Minimum wage hikes in six cities: big impact on pay, none on jobs | Hacker News Reader

Minimum wage hikes in six cities: big impact on pay, none on jobs

news.berkeley.edu

28 pointsLiamBoogar6 comments

From the web: «In March 2016, the Albany Times Union reported on hundreds of pages of emails from Reich’s research team that showed a close collaboration between the research team and labor union groups that fund the movement to raise the minimum wage. According to the article, “the relationship between academic and funder seemed explicit” with one uncovered email showing that the research team was seeking grant money to support its research "for local groups engaged in work to raise the minimum wage" and “testimony/media work” in California.» «In July 2017, Seattle Weekly reported it had obtained emails through a public disclosure request showing that Reich had coordinated a June 2017 Seattle minimum wage study with a minimum wage advocacy group, a pro minimum wage public relations firm, and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s staff. The emails show Reich accelerated the timeline of his report to preempt a soon to be released University of Washington study that came to the opposite conclusion.»

Oh really? It was all just scaremongering from employers because they would have to share a little bit of profit with workers? Who would have thought.

Workers wages are literally decades behind the growth of productivity, with all of it taken by employers. amAnd yet enployers keep screaming about how unfair it is they have to pay a wage that is barely livable for tens of millions of people. It’s disgusting and a failure of our entire economic system.

Yes, really. To understand it, just change the currency, where 1 minimum wage is the unit for every price.

So you're saying raising minimum wage is just a way to increase inflation - both wages and prices go up.

I'm not sure the data really supports this.

Let's suppose it does. Then don't forget raising the minimum inflates away some debt and wealth as well. Which will help people in debt. And moves wealth away from those who have it.

And yet here we are, with corporations having trillions of dollars doing absolutely nothing of value with it. With central banks printing trillions of dollars and euros to give to corporations. And yet barely any inflation worth mentioning. But giving workers a wage to live on? Absolutely impossible, think of the inflation!

This isn't news at all. Minimum wage is just a price constraint, and if the supply/demand equilibrium lies above the minimum wage constraint then the optimal solution does not change.

Conversely, raising the minimum wage under these circumstances also has virtually no effect on real income. In fact, under these circumstances workers who earn minimum wage are far better served by applying and switching to higher-paying jobs.

Minimum wage levels only impacts economies when they are raised to close to the economy's supply/demand equilibrium point. Hence, minimum wage starts to increase unemployment and deflate median wages in recessions when it becomes a legal impediment to job creation.

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