LA columnist shoots down anti-Seattle minimum wage arguments
Feb 24, 2016, 7:33 PM | Updated: Feb 25, 2016, 4:35 pm
Ivar's Restaurants upped its wages to $15 in advance of Seattle's move. It raised its prices to accommodate the higher wages. (AP)
(AP)
There have been many people who have commented on Seattle’s move toward a $15 minimum wage, but one person broke away from the pack to say that people should just keep their mouths shut — at least until there is actually something to say.
“Critics of the Seattle minimum wage are, at best, jumping the gun,” Los Angeles Times economic columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote in his latest piece, “Why do conservatives keep saying Seattle’s minimum wage hike has failed – without data?”
Related: Critic of $15 minimum wage says Seattle is losing jobs
The debate over Seattle’s $15 minimum wage — a wage that began increasing April 1, 2015 — has been watched closely as other cities consider similar ideas. Los Angeles, for example, is making its own move to $15 by 2020. In July, the minimum wage in Los Angeles will experience its first bump from $10 to $10.50.
Hiltzik notes that Forbes’ Mike Patton was among the first out of the gate to assert the wage hike failed, and blamed it for the area unemployment rate spiking in April 2015 — though, Patton failed to note that the unemployment rate he cites always spikes each April. After adjusting for seasonal variation, that unemployment rate goes away, Hiltzik writes.
Patton isn’t alone. Hiltzik also set his sights on Mark J. Perry with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Perry has posted a series of blogs on the Seattle wage issue, consistently claiming the hikes are causing unemployment, despite experts coming out just as often to say his data is unreliable. For example, Perry made claims that Seattle’s initial wage raise caused unemployment to spike in the city, however, he used numbers from Seattle … and surrounding cities and counties — who have had no wage hikes — to make his claim.
In fact, Jacob Vigor with the University of Washington told Hiltzik that there is no current data to make any claim about Seattle’s minimum wage. That’s not to say the hikes are not having a positive or negative effect on employment, rather, there is no data to tell us either way. And Vigor has been tasked with watching the Seattle minimum wage raises over the coming years.
When Hiltzik pressed Perry on the matter, even he had to admit that it will take years to determine the full effect of the $15 minimum wage.
