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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

We don't have to use anecdotes, we have data. Linked from the article is this summary, which links to the full report: http://www.centernyc.org/new-york-citys-15-minimum-wage

Quote: "During this period, New York City has seen a strong economic expansion of the restaurant industry, outpacing national growth in employment, annual wages, and the number of both limited- and full-service restaurant establishments."

Perhaps the disagreement you see is because this study focuses on the workers, instead of the business owners. Food service worker wages and employment rates are up relative to overall growth. This article is dispelling the notion that increasing worker wages will lead to worse outcomes for those workers, which is a common objection to increasing the minimum wage.

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“This period” in the quoted report is 2013-2018.

The minimum wage hike occurred in late 2018.

> Roughly 77 percent of NYC restaurants have slashed employee hours. Thirty-six percent said they had to layoff employees and 90 percent had to increase prices following the minimum wage hike, according to a NYC Hospitality Alliance survey taken just one month after the bill took effect.

> Only about 4 percent of survey respondents indicated that none of the above changes took place in their restaurants.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-york-city’s-15-mi...

As a former service worker, I'd argue that cutting employee hours was exactly the goal.

Typically, in a restaurant in Philly or places with similarly lower-than-minimum service wages (which still has the $2.75 or whatever minimum for service workers), you'll be scheduled excessively for hours when the restaurant definitely isn't going to have any business. For example, coming in at 330/4 to start prep for the dinner shift.

When labor costs basically nothing, there's no reason not to overschedule them.

This reduced the amount of time I could spend outside of work learning to program (for example... since it's what I did hah) or others could spend improving their skills for basically no money. It's a huge detriment to the employees. You'd stand around cleaning for some nitpicky manager making 0/hour effectively, doing untipped cleaning and prep work. Your paychecks will be $0 if you get even a modest amount of tips for the night (it's all taxed).

Now restaurants will be more particular about how they schedule employees, and the untipped work actually costs money to have done (if a janitor would have to be paid minimum+ to do it, why should a server do it for $2.75/hr)?

In my 6+ years in the restaurant industry I’ve never had a manager or owner who didn’t care about over staffing. They were always focused on reducing hours and making sure the opener/closers had enough tables to make it worth it.

I worked in some of the largest (non fast food) groups to single owner restaurants.

I thought the law was hour by hour. So if you get no tips for an hour, you are owed minimum wage for that hour. Actually getting employers to pay up is a whole other battle, but in that case what is needed is enforcement of existing laws.

Over what time period is the min wage averaged out? The entire day or is it split per hour?

Look at it this way. If tips + $2.13 an hour < minimum wage for the hours you worked then your pay check will have whatever amount will get you to minimum wage. I believe it’s per pay period. If you’re in a 2$ an hour state and getting money in your paycheck it’s time to find a new restaurant.

So if I get a $1000 tip five minutes into the shift it applies for the next two weeks?

IIRC, whatever the pay period is. I would need to ask an old manager if the week or pay period matters. Could be per week.

It’s so rare in the $2 an hour states. I worked at Chili’s during the worst parts of the recession and never made a paycheck. Once the economy picked up I went to greener pastures.

The slant of that website is, uhhhhh, impressive, but let's set that aside and go to the primary source[1]. First, it's a self-reported survey, not a study. Tellingly, it doesn't list any absolute numbers, just "yes/no" reporting. For example, 77% of businesses reduced hours hours per-employee, but it doesn't say by how much. That doesn't seem at odds with the study being discussed in this thread. That is, hours may be reduced, but overall wages and employment remain up relative to other industries. Actually that's another interesting thing about the survey you link. It cites a 6% to 1% drop in growth rate, but doesn't compare that to other industries, as the study in this thread does. The survey also says that food costs went up (an expected result from the wage increase), but they didn't ask what the impact on revenue was.

The survey you cite seems low quality anecdata compared to actual industry numbers shown in the study being discussed.

As to your first point, no, "the minimum wage hike" did not occur in late 2018. The final increase ($13.50 to $15.00) did indeed take place near the end of this study period, but the overall increase from 2013 to 2018 (from $7.25 in 2013 to $13.50 by late 2018 to $15.00 by end of 2018) reflects a more than doubling of the minimum wage over the study period, so I think it is still a valid reflection of the impact of such a dramatic increase.

[1] https://thenycalliance.org/assets/documents/informationitems...

The minimum wage went from $7.25 in 2013 to $13.50 last year, finally increasing to $15 last year as well. It didn't all jump last year, so the data of 2013-2018 still appears valid.

http://www.centernyc.org/new-york-citys-15-minimum-wage

actual report:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53ee4f0be4b015b9c3690...

At least talking about restaurants with tipped employees, the $15/hr includes a $5/hr tip wage! If a server makes enough in tips, the min wage the restaurant pays is only $10/hr. See appendix figure 1, page 22 of the pdf.

There is too much investment on the left of $15 minimum wage being the "right thing to do", that miss information pieces like this Market Watch article are all too common. In reality $15 will be disastrous for small business. A better solution is UBI, which also has the added benefit of starting to recognize work that currently is valued at $0 such as stay at home moms taking care of their babies/toddlers.

>We don't have to use anecdotes, we have data.

Why should I trust the data?

There have been too many times of selective definitions, selective measurements, selective polling, selective measurements... all for reaching an agreed upon conclusion. For example, the CDC used a specific definition of rape (excluding forced penetration, counting it as general sexual assault instead) that excluded the majority of male victims of domestic rape, and then used the now biased results to give high level summary data that was greatly misleading.

If I can't trust the CDC's reporting on an issues as serious as domestic sexual violence, then how can I trust anyone's data? Maybe peer reviewed science in the hard sciences, but social science (including economics) has a similar issue of selective measurements, ignored replication, and biased publishing.

So I guess to start with, what peer review has this undergone? To what extent has it been replicated? What criticisms does it have (and none is a very bad sign)? What is the biases of the group(s) that did the work involved? What is the biases of the group(s) that provided funding?

Yes, it is odd I'm at the point where anecdotes seem to have as much weight as data because anecdotes are understood to be inherently biased whereas data is treated as pure, reliable, and free of bias when it isn't.

Also, please note that someone has already posted a criticism of this data.

Sure, you can choose to distrust any and all data provided by anyone and put faith into anecdotes. I'm not sure that will help much though.

Ok, so don’t trust anything, I guess?

Trust, but verify.

The problem is that there is not much verification going on.

Trust your own experience – not because it's more likely to be true but because it's more likely to matter to you.

The easiest person to fool is yourself.

Most data doesn't tell us anything though. It is quite hard to find data that is interesting and relevant at the same time.

The minimum wage might well have led to a worse outcome for those workers that is being masked by some other effect. In theory a minimum wage rise will have no impact (good or bad) if the equilibrium wage is high enough.

It strains credulity to think that New York's restaurant scene is thriving because of the minimum wage. There is clearly something else going on.

Why would it strain credulity? That's been the experience with every minimum wage increase, ever (economic boom, not bust).

And the explanation is easy, trivial even: people who eat at restaurants have more money to do so.

US's overall economic picture is so heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy that literally anything that puts money in the hands of the poor is going to cause an economic boost.

> every minimum wage increase, ever

^_~ You might not have researched that. There are studies that suggest net-positive impact, but there are also studies that suggest change for the worse.

> And the explanation is easy, trivial even: people who eat at restaurants have more money to do so.

Minimum wage earners aren't going to be investing in increased production capacity. Best case scenario, something that was going to be consumed by the rich gets consumed by a minimum wage earner instead. Middling case scenario, something that was going to be consumed by the middle class isn't produced. Worst case scenario, less investment and we have a little bit less to go around in 10/20 years.

None of those 3 is catastrophic, but it is very unlikely that minimum wage rises are a big-picture win. The idea that even with a minimum wage increase a poor person could out-compete a member of the middle class for any good or service is optimistic.

> are also studies that suggest change for the worse.

There aren't. The literature is surprisingly uniform. I mean, I'm sure you can find something funded by a libertarian thinktank that says otherwise, but nothing by credible researchers doing honest research. Universally and without exception, areas that increase the minimum wage experience economic boosts compared to similar areas that don't.

> Minimum wage earners aren't going to be investing in increased production capacity.

Nobody said they would, or would have to. Restaurant owners do the investing; wage earners do the consuming. Investment follows demand, obviously.

> very unlikely that minimum wage rises are a big-picture win.

Oddly, the literature says the exact opposite.

You seem to think that there's a fixed supply of restaurant meals - only 100 meals, no more, and if Sue wants to eat then Larry doesn't get to. This is... not the case.

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