Seattle’s decision to hike its minimum wage up to $13 an hour—on its way to $15—ended up costing its low-wage workers time on the job, hundreds of dollars of annual income, and a shot at a better livelihood.
That is a reasonable conclusion one could draw from a blockbuster, if not yet peer-reviewed, new study on the city’s famed minimum-wage increases. The research, performed by a group of academics from the University of Washington, looks at detailed data on the earnings and hours of workers affected by the hike of the wage floor from $9.47 an hour to $11 in 2015, and from $11 an hour to $13 an hour in 2016. It concludes that, for low-wage workers, that second wage increase reduced hours worked by nearly 10 percent and earnings by an average of $125 a month. The findings, though preliminary, call into question years of economic research and the decisions of dozens of states and cities to bump their wage floors up.
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