The Job Loss Myth Debunked

The Most Rigorous Research Shows Minimum Wage Increases Do Not Reduce Employment

The opinion of the economics profession on the impact of the minimum wage has shifted significantly over the past fifteen years. Today, the most rigorous research shows little evidence of job reductions from a higher minimum wage. Indicative is a 2013 survey by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in which leading economists agreed by a nearly 4 to 1 margin that the benefits of raising and indexing the minimum wage outweigh the costs.
This page reviews the most widely-cited and influential studies on the impact of minimum wage increases on employment, and examines the primary reasons why low-wage employers can afford higher wages today.

Source: Doucougliagos and Stanely, “Publication Selection Bias in Minimum Wage Research? A Meta-Regression Analysis,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2009. (with NELP annotations) Source

Study: Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment? (2013)
Summary: Reviews the past two decades of research on the impact of minimum wage increases on employment: this study concludes that the weight of the evidence points to little or no effect of minimum wage increases on job growth. The study also finds that a review of the minimum wage literature commonly cited by minimum wage opponents is flawed because it is subjective, relies in large part on studies of wage increases in foreign countries, and fails to consider the most sophisticated and recent minimum wage studies.

Paul Krugman, Princeton University, February 2013: “Now, you might argue that even if the current minimum wage seems low, raising it would cost jobs. But there’s evidence on that question — lots and lots of evidence, because the minimum wage is one of the most studied issues in all of economics. U.S. experience, it turns out, offers many ‘natural experiments’ here, in which one state raises its minimum wage while others do not. And while there are dissenters, as there always are, the great preponderance of the evidence from these natural experiments points to little if any negative effect of minimum wage increases on employment.” (Source)​

Bloomberg News, April 2012: "[A] wave of new economic research is disproving those arguments about job losses and youth employment. Previous studies tended not to control for regional economic trends that were already affecting employment levels, such as a manufacturing-dependent state that was shedding jobs. The new research looks at micro-level employment patterns for a more accurate employment picture. The studies find minimum-wage increases even provide an economic boost, albeit a small one, as strapped workers immediately spend their raises.” (Source)​

​

In Focus: Two Leading Studies on Minimum Wage and Job Growth

Study: Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? (2011)
Summary: Examines every minimum wage increase in the United States over the past two decades—including increases that took place during protracted periods of high unemployment—and finds that raising the wage floor boosted incomes without reducing employment or slowing job creation. The research demonstrates how a body of previous research—one frequently relied on by business lobbyists who oppose minimum wage increases—inaccurately attributes declines in employment to increases in the minimum wage by failing to sufficiently account for critical economic factors. [NELP Summary]
Study: Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders (2010)
Summary: Provides the most sophisticated study to date of the effects of increases in the minimum wage on job growth in the United States. Taking advantage of the fact that a record number of states raised their minimum wages during the 1990s and 2000s – creating scores of differing minimum wage rates across the country – the study compares employment levels among every pair of neighboring U.S. counties that had differing minimum wage levels at any time between 1990 and 2006 and finds that higher minimum wages did not reduce employment. [NELP summary]

Lawrence Katz, Harvard University, April 2011: “This is one of the best and most convincing minimum wage papers in recent years.” (Source)​

David Autor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 2011: “The paper presents a fairly irrefutable case that state minimum wage laws do raise earnings in low wage jobs but do not reduce employment to any meaningful degree. Beyond this substantive contribution, the paper presents careful and compelling reanalysis of earlier work in this literature, showing that it appears biased by spatial correlation in employment trends.” (Source)​

​

Foundational Research on Minimum Wage and Job Growth

Study: Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply(2000)
Summary: A follow-up study by David Card and Alan Krueger that repeats their 1994 analysis, but uses official government data to determine employment figures. The study finds that the minimum wage increase in New Jersey did not affect employment in fast-food restaurants after New Jersey’s 1991 increase or after the 1996-1997 federal increases eliminated the differences in minimum wages between the two states.
Study: Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania(1994)
Summary: A landmark study published by David Card and Alan Krueger in the American Economic Review examining employment at fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border after New Jersey raised its minimum wage to $5.05 an hour while Pennsylvania’s minimum wage held constant. The authors conducted a phone survey of over 400 fast-food restaurants and found no evidence that the increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey led to job loss—in fact they found employment increased in fast-food restaurants in New Jersey. For this and related research, Card was awarded the John Bates Clark medal in 1995—the so-called “junior Nobel prize,” granted by the American Economics Association every two years to the best economist under forty.

Cont'ed....

 

Cont'ed....

Why Do Minimum Wage Increases Not Reduce Employment?

#1) The vast majority of low-wage workers are employed by large corporations, not small businesses:
Study: Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage (2012)
Summary: An analysis of Census Bureau data finds that roughly two thirds (66 percent) of low-wage workers are employed by large companies with over 100 employees, not small businesses. Furthermore, the largest low-wage employers – including retail and fast food chains such as Walmart and McDonalds – are earning strong profits today and can afford higher wages.

New York Times, January 2013: “Efforts to raise the minimum invariably run into arguments that employers, especially small businesses, cannot afford to pay a higher wage. But the evidence shows that most low-wage employees work for large companies, which have largely recovered from the recession and have reinstituted generous pay packages for executives.” (Source)​

#2) There are significant savings that result from paying higher wages – including reduced employee turnover and increased productivity – and these savings help offset the cost to employers of a minimum wage increase.
Study: Why “Good Jobs” Are Good for Retailers (2012)
Summary: Harvard Business Review study by MIT Professor Zeynep Ton documents how major retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Costco benefit for higher sales revenue and profits than their low-wage competitors by investing in their employees, which reduces turnover and boosts productivity. For example, the starting wage at Trader Joe’s ranges between $40,000 and $60,000 per year, more than twice what many of its competitors offer, and yet the sales revenue per square foot at Trader Joe’s are three times higher than the average U.S. supermarket.

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek, March 2013: “We pay a starting hourly wage of $11.50 in all states where we do business, and we are still able to keep our overhead costs low. An important reason for the success of Costco’s business model is the attraction and retention of great employees. Instead of minimizing wages, we know it's a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment and loyalty. We support efforts to increase the federal minimum wage." (Source)​

Study: Minimum Wage Shocks, Employment Flows, and Labor Market Frictions (2012)
Summary: Study by economists at the University of California-Berkeley, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill finds sharps reductions in employee turnover in the first nine months following a minimum wage increase on the state level.
Study: Living Wages and Economic Performance (2003)
Summary: Examines the effects of a wage increase for workers at the San Francisco Airport, finding that annual turnover among security screeners plunged from 95 percent to 19 percent when their hourly wage rose from $6.45 to $10 per hour. After wages increased at the airport under a living wage policy, 35 percent of employers reported improvements in work performance, 47 percent reported better employee morale, 44 percent reported fewer disciplinary issues, and 45 percent reported that customer service had improved.
#3) Raising the minimum wage boosts consumer spending, generating higher sales revenue for local businesses and promoting economic growth.
Study: Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $10.10 Would Give Working Families, and the Overall Economy, a Much-Needed Boost. (2013)
Summary: An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation, would generate more than $30 billion in new economic activity and support the creation of 140,000 new full-time jobs as businesses expand to meet increased consumer demand.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, February 2012, “Raising the minimum wage will put much-needed cash in the pockets of more than 1.2 million New Yorkers, who will spend those extra dollars in local stores.” (Source)​

Study: Poor Sales, Not High Wages, Worry Small Businesses (2012)
Summary: An analysis of polling by the National Federation of Independent Businesses shows that small business owners consistently cite low sales revenue as their main economic concern, with concern over wage costs ranking as a minor consideration even through the Great Recession. Study concludes that the real concern among small businesses is not that their low-wage workers earn too much, but that their customers earn too little.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bottom Line on Minimum Wage and Job Growth:

Two decades of rigorous economic research have found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job loss. While the simplistic theoretical model of supply and demand suggests that raising wages reduces jobs, the way the labor market functions in the real world is more complex. Researchers and businesses alike agree today that the weight of the evidence shows no reduction in employment resulting from minimum wage increases.

The Economist, November 2012: “Evidence is mounting that moderate minimum wages can do more good than harm. […] Bastions of orthodoxy, such as the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, and the International Monetary Fund, now assert that a moderate minimum wage probably does not do much harm and may do some good. Their definition of moderate is 30-40% of the median wage. Britain’s experience suggests it might even be a bit higher.” (Source)​

Crain's New York Business, February 2012: "“Critics of [the minimum wage] proposal are making the same arguments as the last time the Legislature increased the minimum wage, in 2004. The hike to $7.15 an hour from the federal minimum of $5.15 was phased in over three years. If the change had a cataclysmic effect on businesses that depend heavily on minimum-wage workers, we certainly missed it. Objections . . . while meriting consideration, are essentially objections to the very existence of a minimum wage, which has been a fixture in the U.S. since 1938 and has never stopped our economy from flourishing.” (Source)​

 

You keep posting that same info, but you still have not explained why your CBO is wrong;
Congress’s chief budget scorekeeper is sticking by his recent report saying that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would probably reduce employment by 500,000 jobs, but conceded Wednesday the figure is “a central estimate in a wide range.”
“The likely range, the range with a 2/3 probability, goes from a ‘very slight’ decrease to a decrease of about a million and the 500,000 loss is essentially in the middle of that range and that’s consistent with a balanced reading of the literature,” Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). “It could be smaller job loss, it could be larger job loss.”

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/12/cbo-chief-projected-job-loss-minimum-wage-fluid/#ixzz2wVmao37o​

 

BS idiot! I said exactly why your rant was a bunch of BS. Now read the OP and tell me exactly where it is wrong.

 

I am not expert (and mostly do not have the time to waste on such) enough to debunk your propaganda, but the CBO did a good job of it.

 

Minimum Wages

by Linda Gorman
About the Author
Minimum wage laws set legal minimums for the hourly wages paid to certain groups of workers. In the United States, amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act have increased the federal minimum wage from $.25 per hour in 1938 to $5.15 in 1997.1 Minimum wage laws were invented in Australia and New Zealand with the purpose of guaranteeing a minimum standard of living for unskilled workers. Most noneconomists believe that minimum wage laws protect workers from exploitation by employers and reduce poverty. Most economists believe that minimum wage laws cause unnecessary hardship for the very people they are supposed to help.
The reason is simple: although minimum wage laws can set wages, they cannot guarantee jobs. In practice they often price low-skilled workers out of the labor market. Employers typically are not willing to pay a worker more than the value of the additional product that he produces. This means that an unskilled youth who produces $4.00 worth of goods in an hour will have a very difficult time finding a job if he must, by law, be paid $5.15 an hour. As Princeton economist David F. Bradford wrote, “The minimum wage law can be described as saying to the potential worker: ‘Unless you can find a job paying at least the minimum wage, you may not accept employment.’”2

Several decades of studies using aggregate time-series data from a variety of countries have found that minimum wage laws reduce employment. At current U.S. wage levels, estimates of job losses suggest that a 10 percent in crease in the minimum wage would decrease employment of low-skilled workers by 1 or 2 percent. The job losses for black U.S. teenagers have been found to be even greater, presumably because, on average, they have fewer skills. As liberal economist Paul A. Samuelson wrote in 1973, “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 per hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”3 In a 1997 response to a request from the Irish National Minimum Wage Commission, economists for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) summarized economic research results on the minimum wage: “If the wage floor set by statutory minimum wages is too high, this may have detrimental effects on employment, especially among young people.”4 This agreement over the general effect of minimum wages is long-standing. According to a 1978 article inAmerican Economic Review, 90 percent of the economists surveyed agreed that the minimum wage increasesunemployment among low-skilled workers.5

Australia provided one of the earliest practical demonstrations of the harmful effects of minimum wage laws when the federal court created a minimum wage for unskilled men in 1921. The court set the wage at what it thought employees needed for a decent living, independent of what employers would willingly pay. Laborers whose productivity was worth less than the mandated wage could find work only in occupations not covered by the law or with employers willing to break it. Aggressive reporting of violations by vigilant unions made evasion difficult. The historical record shows that unemployment remained a particular problem for unskilled laborers for the rest of the decade.

At about the same time, a hospital in the United States fired a group of women after the Minimum Wage Board in the District of Columbia ordered that their wages be raised to the legal minimum. The women sued to halt enforcement of the minimum wage law. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court, inAdkins v. Children’s Hospital, ruled that the minimum wage law was price fixing and that it represented an unreasonable infringement on individuals’ freedom to determine the price at which they would sell their services.

In addition to making jobs hard to find, minimum wage laws may also harm workers by changing how they are compensated. Fringe benefits—such as paid vacation, free room and board, inexpensive insurance, subsidized child care, and on-the-job training—are an important part of the total compensation package for many low-wage workers. When minimum wages rise, employers can control total compensation costs by cutting benefits. In extreme cases, employers convert low-wage full-time jobs with benefits to high-wage part-time jobs with no benefits and fewer hours. David Neumark and William Wascher found that a 10 percent increase in minimum wages decreased on-the-job training for young people by 1.5–1.8 percent.6 Since on-the-job training is the way most people build their salable skills, these findings suggest that minimum wage laws also reduce future opportunities for the unskilled.

A particularly graphic example of benefits reduction occurred in 1990, when the U.S. Department of Labor ordered the Salvation Army to pay the minimum wage to voluntary participants in its work therapy programs. In exchange for processing donated goods, the programs provided participants, many of whom were homeless alcoholics and drug addicts, with a small weekly stipend and up to ninety days of food, shelter, and counseling. The Salvation Army said that the expense of complying with the minimum wage order would force it to close the programs. Ignoring both the fact that the beneficiaries of the program could leave to take higher-paying jobs at any time and the cash value of the food, shelter, and supervision, the Labor Department insisted that it was protecting workers’ rights by enforcing the minimum wage. After a public outcry, the Labor Department backed down.7 Its Wage and Hour Division Field Operations Handbook now contains a special section on minimum wage enforcement and the Salvation Army.8

 

(continued)

Minimum wage increases make unskilled workers more expensive relative to all other factors of production. If skilled workers make fifteen dollars an hour and unskilled workers make three dollars an hour, skilled workers are five times as expensive as the unskilled. Imposing a minimum wage of five dollars an hour makes skilled workers relatively more attractive by making them only three times as expensive as unskilled workers. This explains why unions, whose members have historically been highly skilled and seldom hold minimum wage jobs, invariably support legislation increasing minimum wages. As in the Australian case, unions also protect themselves against competitive threats by assiduously helping labor authorities find and prosecute suspected violators.

Many employers in the U.S. construction industry have found it less expensive to hire unskilled workers at low wages and train them on the job. By accepting lower wages in return for training, unskilled workers increase their expected future income. With high minimum wages like those specified for government construction by the Davis-Bacon Act, the cost of wages and training for the unskilled may rise enough to make employers prefer more productive union members. In effect, higher minimum wages reduce the competition faced by union members while leaving the unskilled unemployed. Of course, employers may also respond to minimum wage laws by decreasing overall employment, substituting machines for people, moving production abroad, or shutting down labor-intensive businesses.

While those rendered unemployed by a minimum wage increase are largely invisible, it is easy to calculate the increased income enjoyed by those who keep their jobs after an increase. This asymmetry has led many advocates to mistakenly assume that increasing the minimum wage is an effective way to fight poverty. Using 1997 Census data, D. Mark Wilson found that only 11.7 percent of minimum-wage workers were the sole breadwinners in their families, and that more than 40 percent of the sole breadwinners earning the minimum wage were voluntary part-time workers.9 Richard Burkhauser used 1996 U.S. Census data to identify the likely beneficiaries from the 1996 increase in the federal minimum wage. He concluded that the “20.9 percent of minimum wage workers who lived in poor families only received 16.8 percent of the benefits.”10

Additional evidence on the distributional effect of minimum wages comes from David Neumark, Mark Schweitzer, and William Wascher. Raising the minimum wage increases both the probability that a poor family will escape poverty through higher wages and the probability that another nonpoor family will become poor as minimum wage increases price it out of the labor market. They found that the unemployment caused by minimum wage increases is concentrated among low-income families. This suggests that minimum wage increases generally redistribute income among low-income families rather than moving it from those with high incomes to those with low incomes. The authors found that although some families do benefit, minimum wage increases generally increase the proportion of families that are poor and near-poor. Minimum wage increases also decrease the proportion of families with incomes between one and a half and three times the poverty level, suggesting that they make it more difficult to escape poverty.11

In the early 1990s, after a telephone survey of 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger challenged the consensus view that higher minimum wages shrink employment opportunities. Their results appeared to demonstrate that a minimum wage increase resulted in increased employment.12Because telephone survey data are notoriously prone to measurement error, Neumark and Wascher repeated Card and Krueger’s analysis using payroll records from a similar sample of restaurants over the same time period. The results from the payroll data showed that “the minimum-wage increase led to a decline in employment in New Jersey fast food restaurants relative to the Pennsylvania control group.”13After an extended academic debate, Card and Krueger retreated from their earlier position, writing that “the increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage probably had no effect on total employment in New Jersey’s fast-food industry, and possibly had a small positive effect.”14

Even without the results from the payroll data, the contrary results from the Card and Krueger study would have had a limited impact on economists’ belief that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. As labor economist Finis Welch pointed out, the consensus theory does not predict how any one firm or industry is affected by minimum wage increases.15 Even if nationally recognized fast-food restaurants did not reduce hiring in response to higher minimum wages, Card and Krueger were silent about what happened at less-visible businesses, such as small retailers and local pizza and sandwich shops.

 

(continued)

Furthermore, estimates of the overall effect of minimum wage increases often lead people to overlook the fact that regional and sectoral wage differentials average together to produce the national result. A federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour may substantially reduce employment in rural areas, where it exceeds the prevailing wage, but have little effect on employment in large cities, where almost everyone earns more. Regional studies leave little doubt that substantial increases in the minimum wage can shrink local industries and inhibit job creation in areas with market wages below the new minimum. The growth of the textile industry in the southern United States, for example, was propelled by low wages. Had the federal minimum wage been set at the wage earned by northern workers, the migration of textile workers to the South might never have occurred.

It is also easy to overlook the fact that raising the minimum wage applicable to a relatively small proportion of occupations will not necessarily increase measured unemployment. Some people will lose their jobs in covered occupations and withdraw from the labor market entirely. They will not be included in the unemployment statistics. Others will seek jobs at lower pay in uncovered occupations. Though the labor influx reduces wages in the uncovered sector, people do have jobs, and unemployment may not change. As minimum wage laws cover more occupations, however, the shrinking uncovered sector may not be able to absorb all of the people thrown out of work. The 1989 U.S. minimum wage legislation brought us one step closer to this possibility by extending coverage to all workers engaged in interstate commerce, regardless of employer size.

The fact that gross unemployment statistics do not necessarily reflect the harm done by minimum wage laws with limited coverage probably explains the popularity of the living-wage ordinances now in vogue in American cities with strong union ties. Living-wage ordinances set minimum wages for businesses and nonprofits that receive contracts or subsidies from local government. To arrive at the appropriate minimum living wage, advocates calculate the amount required to pay for a basket of goods containing “decent” housing, child care, food, transportation, health insurance, clothing, and taxes for various family sizes. The minimum is then set at the rate that produces enough money to buy the basket when someone works forty hours a week for a year. Initial empirical studies by Neumark suggest that the trade-off between wages and employment is the same for living wages as for minimum wages.16

In San Francisco in 2001, passage of a living-wage law raised the compensation of airport skycaps from $4.75 an hour to $10.00 an hour plus health insurance.17 By the end of 2002, the Economic Policy Institute, an advocacy group supported by labor unions and liberal foundations, reported that living-wage ordinances had set minimum wages ranging from $6.25 an hour in Milwaukee to $12.00 an hour in Santa Cruz, California.18 In September 2003, the California Assembly passed a $10 minimum-wage requirement for contractors doing business with the state.


By one reckoning, the total cost of the typical basket of worker necessities used to arrive at living-wage minimums exceeds the incomes of almost a third of all families in the United States.19 It will not be surprising, therefore, as the number of cities with “living-wage” laws expands, to see unskilled workers harmed by falling employment, fewer entry-level jobs, and a reduction in job-related training and educational opportunities.

 

About the Author

Linda Gorman is a senior fellow with the Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado. She was previously an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Further Reading

Brown, Charles. “Minimum Wage Laws: Are They Overrated?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 3 (1988): 133–145.
Burkhauser, Richard V., Kenneth Couch, and David C. Wittenburg. “A Reassessment of the New Economics of the Minimum Wage Literature with Monthly Data from the Current Population Survey.”Journal of Labor Economics 18, no. 4 (2000): 653–680.
Employment Standards Administration. U.S. Department of Labor. “History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law.” Online at:http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/coverage.htm.
Eccles, Mary, and Richard B. Freeman. “What! Another Minimum Wage Study?” American Economic Review 94 (May 1982): 226–232.
Forster, Colin. “Unemployment and Minimum Wages in Australia, 1900–1930.” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 2 (June 1985): 383–391.
Hashimoto, Masanori. “Minimum Wage Effects on Training on the Job.”American Economic Review 72, no. 5 (1982): 1070–1087.
Neumark, David, Mark Schweitzer, and William Wascher. “Will Increasing the Minimum Wage Help the Poor?” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Economic Commentary, February 1, 1999. Online at:http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/com99/0201.pdf.
Neumark, David, and William Wascher. “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment.” American Economic Review 90, no. 5 (2000): 1362–1396.
Neumark, David, and William Wascher. “Minimum Wages and Training Revisited.” Journal of Labor Economics 19, no. 3 (2001): 563–595.
Rottenberg, Simon, ed. The Economics of Legal Minimum Wages.Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981.
Welch, Finis. Minimum Wages: Issues and Evidence. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp., 1978.
Wilson, D. Mark. Increasing the Mandated Minimum Wage: Who Pays the Price? Backgrounder no. 1162. Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1998.

Footnotes

1.​

Employment Standards Administration, U.S. Department of Labor,History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law, 2003, online at:http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/coverage.htm.​

2.​

“Minimum Wage vs. Supply and Demand,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1996.​

3.​

Paul Samuelson, Economics, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), pp. 393–394.​

4.​

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Submission to the Irish National Minimum Wage Commission, Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers no. 28, 1997, p. 15.​

5.​

Kearl, J. R., et al., “A Confusion of Economists?” American Economic Review 69 (1979): 28–37.​

6.​

David Neumark and William Wascher, “Minimum Wages and Training Revisited,” NBER Working Paper no. 6651, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 1998.​

7.​

James Bovard, “How Fair Are the Fair Labor Standards,” Regulation18, no. 1 (1985), online at:http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg18n1d.html.​

 

8.​

Section 64c06: Salvation Army says: “The Salvation Army’s position is that individuals in its rehabilitation program (called ‘beneficiaries’) are not employees under the FLSA. Although WH may not agree with this position, do not initiate C/As until receiving clearance from both the RA and the Child Labor and Special Employment Team, NO/OEP. Advise beneficiaries who complain that this WH policy has no effect on their private-action rights under section 16(b) of the FLSA” (http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/FOH/ch64/64c06.htm).​

9.​

D. Mark Wilson, Increasing the Mandated Minimum Wage: Who Pays the Price? Backgrounder no. 1162 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1998).​

10.​

Richard V. Burkhauser, Written testimony before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, 106th Congress, April 27, 1999. See also Richard V. Burkhauser, Kenneth A. Couch, and Andrew J. Glenn, “Public Policies for the Working Poor: The Earned Income Tax Credit Versus Minimum Wage Legislation,” Research in Labor Economics 15 (1996): 65–109; Richard V. Burkhauser, Kenneth A. Couch, and David C. Wittenburg, “Who Gets What from Minimum Wage Hikes: A Re-estimation of Card and Kreuger’s Distributional Analysis in Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 49, no. 3 (1996): 547–552.​

11.​

David Neumark, Mark Schweitzer, and William Wascher, “Will Increasing the Minimum Wage Help the Poor?” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Economic Commentary, February 1, 1999, online version at:http://www.clevelandfed.org/Research/Workpaper/2004/WP04-12.pdf.​

12.​

David Card and Alan B. Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” American Economic Review 84, no. 4 (1994): 792. A later book expanded on these results, see David Card and Alan B. Krueger, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).​

13.​

David Neumark and William Wascher, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment,” American Economic Review 90, no. 5 (2000): 1390. Researchers from the Employment Policies Institute also reported finding data errors in the Card and Krueger sample. In one Wendy’s in New Jersey, for example, there were no full-time workers and thirty part-time workers in February 1992. By November 1992, the restaurant had added thirty-five full-time workers with no change in part-timers. See David R. Henderson, “The Squabble over the Minimum Wage,” Fortune, July 8, 1996, pp. 28ff.​

14.​

David Card and Alan B. Krueger, “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply.” American Economic Review 90, no. 5 (2000): 1419.​

15.​

American Enterprise Institute, “The Minimum Wage and Employment: What Research Shows,” conference summaries, Washington, D.C., August 1995, online at:http://www.aei.org/cs/cs5365.htm.​

16.​

David Neumark and Scott Adams, “Do Living Wage Ordinances Reduce Urban Poverty?” NBER Working Paper no. 7606, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2000; David Neumark, How Living Wages Affect Low-Wage Workers and Low Income Families (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2002).​

17.​

Adam Geller, “‘Living-Wage’ Laws Raise Pay for Poor but May Cost Jobs,” Associated Press, September 1, 2001, online at:http://projects.is.asu.edu/pipermail/hpn/2001-September/004534.html.​

18.​

The Economic Policy Institute received $90,000 from the NEA in 2000–2001 (Education Policy Institute,http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:fYjj4PUYjiYC:www.educationpolicy.org/NEAreport2000.htm+%22Economic+Policy+Institute%22+%22Form+990%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8), and $200,000 from the Joyce Foundation (2001 Annual Report,http://www.joycefdn.org/pdf/01_AnnualReport.pdf). For a complete list of supporters in 2000, see the institute’s annual report at: http://www.epinet.org/ar2000/AR00_RS3.htm. The rate is $11.00 if health benefits are included in the wage package.​

19.​

Economic Policy Institute, Basic Family Budget Calculator, online at:http://epinet.org/, under Poverty and Family Budgets section. Fraction below living wage minimums from Heather Boushey, Chauna Brocht, Bethney Gunderson, and Jared Bernstein, Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2001), table 5.​

 

DEBUNKED

 

You are asking them to read? Studies clearly show that 38% of the time 38% of "conservatives" who are 38% republican "don' no 'ow ta reed".

They are too busy licking themselves.

 

I guess when you live in a vacuum "the opinion of economists" holds more water than the reality out here in the real world.

 

Tell me something I don't know. So you refuse to read the OP but have no issue making a comment anyway. Why would anyone bother to respond to your stupid posts? I know I certainly won't waste my time doing so.

 

In what way...specifically?

 

Is that a Eureka or a Hoover? Or maybe one of those fancy Dyson vacuums?

 

Exactly what he said. He didn't read it. He "doesn't have time".

 

Your entire post says nothing more than this study has found raising the minimum wage does not decrease employment - over and over. Funny, but when an independent group actually put facts into it, they came to an entirely different conclusion.

 

Oh, so NOW you've read it. So tell me this, according to the article, why doesn't raising the minimum wage reduce employment?

 

Read the CBO report. It explains it all - in reality.