Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
They also say that they "do not find evidence that capital-labor substitution could be behind the findings", but its again not within the scope of the free article to show how they were looking for such evidence, and what defined "capitol-labor substitution". Were they looking purely for "it costs $5k a year to provide everyone with safety glasses, but operating costs just increased by $50k on what used to net $60k of profit, so I guess we're not doing safety glasses anymore" or if the same reasoning was used on $600k of profit. The former is clearly capitol-labor substitution, the latter is being cheap out of spite.
Maybe these questions are being answered in a satisfactory manner, but the fact that they use a blend of wiggle words and hard numbers, with no clarifying context even in the abstract, suggests to me that this does not actually support the strawman everybody seems to be getting from it, which is "see, paying the person at McDonalds enough to actually make rent this month might get them killed! You don't want to pay them so much they might die, right?"
> We focus on large minimum wage increases (≥ $1 per hour), which are likely to be binding (Clemens and Strain, 2021, Fone et al., 2023).
Or am I missing another more obvious conclusion here?
It's worth noting that mininum wage hikes are a very profit hostile policy. This is why they tend to receive such huge pushback.
In my experience, my worst enemies were exhaustion, the crab-in-the-bucket attitude of my peers, and an inability to build a resume and to network out to the people who wanted what I could do. Ultimately I couldn't escape poverty until I could buy enough gear to work up north. That money made it possible to pay for an education.
To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder. If safety makes this harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
I see this type of attitude/comment frequently whenever the minimum wage comes up, but I've never seen any kind of justification for it.
If these aren't "real jobs" that deserve "real pay" then why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?
There aren't any such corporations. There are under a million people earning the federal minimum wage in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T16OC2.
I ask as an outsider and have to wonder why this didn't occur to an American.
I think the study is kind of stupid, since the minimum wage category is a temporary category with extremely high variability, it's not a fixed target. So the base assumption that it stays put long enough to study doesn't hold water for me.
You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.
Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:
Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
From: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-...
Emphasis mine.
There is no "the poor"... rather its just people that do not have any other options. Primarily, higher education or certified skilled trades are the only effective way out of minimal income survivor economics.
In my opinion, people working at fast food chains making the minimum legally allowable wage work harder than any CEO or academic I've met over the years.
I would recommend this book as it quantifies how income disparity impacts young Americans development:
"Outliers: The Story of Success Paperback" (Malcolm Gladwell, 2011)
https://www.amazon.ca/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...
Notably, naively explaining passive income from assets to minimum wage workers is not usually a productive conversation. Rather, folks are just projecting their own perspective on people in a different situation. =3
This. The same or more attention should be paid to ensuring there are plentiful, affordable homes, and a ladder of jobs from one level to another, as is paid to social safety nets.
This is great, until they receive a debilitating injury that puts them on disability for the rest of their lives, get a mountain of medical debt, or lose the breadwinner.
Someone still has to be at the bottom of the ladder.
I'm sorry, what?! Given the options between, opportunity for a promotion at some point, and not being injured by your job. You would prioritize maybe promoting people over preventing people from getting injured?
First, when given two options, and asked to decide, the first thing every engineer should do is ask, "why not both?". But also, Perhaps you should consider listening to fewer podcasts from Lord Farquaad?
Climbing any ladder - physical or economic - is much harder with injuries.
1) Companies barely scraping by start cutting corners when labor gets more expensive. The work environment becomes more dangerous.
2) Companies paying more for labor set higher output demands for that labor. The job gets harder.
3) Companies paying more for labor are hesitant to hire more, given the increased costs/risks of adding FTEs. They instead ask existing workers to work more. The hours get longer.
4) Employees getting paid more feel empowered to report accidents that previously would have been hidden. The workers become more outspoken.
Ironic, since the intent of minimum wage was make human capital expensive enough to promote automation and prevent human slaughter in the factories of the early 1900s
...
> We provide suggestive evidence that small minimum wage increases might reduce injury rates, highlighting the potential heterogeneity in the impact of minimum wage changes.
I mean, maybe, but that goes both ways.
Someone with a bit more financial security might be more able to seek treatment, too. $500 in savings makes it easier to miss a shift to go to urgent care.
The goal of every job paying enough to be comfortable is missing the forest for the trees, because it will always fail to account for the cost of the stress of working, and always be at odds with safety. The actual goal should be that people should be able to survive comfortably no matter their ability to get a "good" job, because as we automate more, it's just a simple fact that "good" jobs will continue to get harder to come by.