Also, Not a Surprise

Conservative economists are wrong, minimum wage increases improve the lot of workers with little or no change in employment:

The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in SeaTac are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study – and disagree about – the impact of the new policies on pay and jobs.

The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases in pay and no widespread job losses. That reinforces the conclusions that the same group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers reached in 2017 after studying the impact just in Seattle.

This time, the Berkeley researchers examined Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where minimum wages at the end of 2016 – the end of the study period – ranged from $10 to $13.

“We find that they are working just as the policymakers and voters who enacted these policies intended,” said Sylvia Allegretto, co-author of the report and co-chair of Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. “So far they are raising the earnings of low-wage workers without causing significant employment losses.”

This is the latest in a series of studies showing the same effects, but it won't change the minds of the Freshwater (conservative) economists, because they are even more impervious to reality than the economics field as a whole.