Critiquing Minimum Wage Laws Is About Protecting the Working Man (or Woman)

By Lydia White

A team of researchers from the University of Washington produced a study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, that measures the effects of Seattle’s minimum wage requirement of $13 per hour.

The study* found that the city’s mandates resulted in 3% higher hourly wages, but 9% fewer hours worked. As a result, the average low-wage employee lost around $125 per month. For low-income households especially, an annual loss of $1,500 is significant.

Jacob Vigdor, one of the study’s authors and a professor at UW, said, “Traditionally, a high proportion of workers in the low-wage market are not experienced at all: teens with their first jobs, immigrants with their first jobs here.”

Low-skilled, low-paying jobs provide the opportunity to acquire knowledge and experience, setting up workers for their next, potentially higher-paying jobs. The least skilled are further disadvantaged when artificially high price floors are implemented. Employers instead search for only the most qualified candidates, leaving more teens jobless, as Cascade Policy Institute’s study on the effects of the minimum wage on youth reported last December.

When economists warn against the costs associated with the minimum wage, it’s not to protect greedy capitalists; it’s to protect the worker from being priced out of the market.

For the benefit of all Oregonians, political leaders should learn from our northern neighbors and repeal the state’s onerous three-tiered minimum wage law.

*The study used a “relatively conservative” $19 per hour low-wage threshold to account for the spillover effect of “miscoding jobs lost when they have really been promoted to higher wage levels….”

Lydia White is a Research Associate at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.