Originally published on TheNewYorkTimes.com
Researchers whose findings last year pointed to a downside from raising the minimum wage have taken another look and the reality is more nuanced.
A research team including economists from the University of Washington has put out a paper showing that Seattle’s recent minimum-wage increases brought benefits to many workers employed at the time, while leaving few employed workers worse off.
On their own, these results appear unremarkable. Large stacks of academic papers have shown that, for the average worker, a minimum-wage increase does more good in raising pay than it hurts by prompting some employers to cut back on hiring or hours.
But this new paper, issued Monday, has a unique pedigree: Last summer, the same authors released a paper showing that Seattle’s minimum-wage increases had large costs for workers. Because employers reduced hours in response to the city’s rising minimum wage in 2016, the researchers found, average pay fell by an eye-popping $125 a month, or about 6.6 percent. (They did not observe such effects for a minimum-wage increase the year before.)
