Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage law in 2014. Here’s how it’s turned out so far..."We thought with higher wages it would be easier to get people to take more hours, but it’s been the opposite,†said Jasmine Donovan, president of Dick’s. She added that the company has had to raise prices for the first time in its history because of the cost of labor alone, whereas in the past, food costs drove such hikes.
Seattle’s law, which gradually increases its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 from just over $9 an hour in 2014, is now at the forefront of a national debate over the impacts of progressive wage increases. It comes at a time when top Democratic presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are calling for a $15 per hour federal minimum wage as they try to appeal to working-class voters. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour and has not been increased in over a decade.............
............One of the challenges of measuring Seattle’s experience with the minimum wage hike is that the city’s economy is in a period of robust growth. Since the wage increase began in 2015, Seattle/Tacoma’s job growth has slightly outpaced the state of Washington as a whole, at 12.9%. The city’s population has increased some 13% over 2015, according to the Washington state Office of Financial Management. Average hourly earnings were $39.38 in October, an increase of 14.5% from the same month in 2015.
That prompts a question: Are higher wages necessary due to the hot economy, or has the economy continued to grow due to higher pay?...........
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/seattle-passed-a-15-minimum-wage-law-in-2014-heres-how-its-turned-out-so-far.html
