
Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Might Be Backfiring - zonotope
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2017/07/seattle_s_huge_wage_hike_might_be_backfiring_it_won_t_stop_the_fight_for.html
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sgift
I can only talk about the article, as the paper itself sits behind a paywall,
but the most interesting question seems to be missing: How is that possible?

Restaurants are location-bound. Short of shutting down, they don't have many
methods of moving jobs away, so how is it possible for them to reduce hours
worked? I see a few options:

\- Less demand. The shops increased their prices to compensate for the new
minimum wage. Less people wanted to pay the new prices, so they had less need
for workers. Possible, but I think unlikely because all competitors have been
hit by the same minimum wage increase, so they all would have this problem and
I haven't read that people are less likely to eat fast food

\- Shorter, more stressful shifts. Shops could feel motivated to threaten
their low-wage employees with loosing their jobs if they don't work faster.
This looks to me like a labor safety issue, i.e. something laws and associated
controls could and should fix. You cannot just up the pressure on people
without harmful effects

\- Alternatively, the shops had more employees than strictly needed and now
just removed those. This seems unlikely in the competitive restaurant
business.

\- More mechanization: In some (more or less far off future) all this low-wage
jobs can be done by machines, so maybe the wage increase forced companies to
replace people with machines earlier than they wanted. On one hand that is
sad, on the other hand it would inevitably have happened and is something
society still has to find an answer for: There will be an increasing number of
people unable to get a job, because machines can do what they can do for less
money.

So - which one is it? Or if it is a mix: Which one is the dominating factor?
The answer to that question is IMO extremely relevant to discuss if minimum
wage "might be backfiring"

