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An article in Australian newspaper The Age describes a paper just released by the Reserve Bank of Australia which has found that periodic increases in the Minimum Wage (also known as the "Award" wage in Australia) did not negatively affect the level of employment in each respective industry:
The paper, published by the central bank's economic research department on the final day the Fair Work Commission hearings had to decide if 2.3 million Australians will get a pay rise in July, found "no evidence that small, incremental increases in award wages had an adverse effect on hours worked or the job destruction rate".
It used a sample of 32,000 jobs between 1998 and 2008, when award wages were increased by a flat dollar amount each year, to find jobs with larger award wage rises had larger increases in hours worked than jobs experiencing a smaller award wage rise.
"I am able to rule out adverse effects on hours worked. I also find that award wage increases do not have a statistically significant effect on the job destruction rate," said researcher James Bishop.
"If anything, the point estimates suggest that the job destruction rate actually declines when the award wage is increased."
[...] The RBA paper said their results may not "necessarily generalise to large, unanticipated changes in award wages", cautioned it only included adult positions, and that the consequences of wage increases may "be borne by job seekers, rather than job holders".
"There will always be some point at which a minimum wage adjustment will begin to reduce employment," the paper stated.
Naturally, this is proving problematic for some politicians who have been advocating against increases in the minimum wage due to fears that this will harm business.
Link to Abstract and Paper (pdf).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @02:07AM (2 children)
Notice that things didn't improve [wikipedia.org] until FDR started drafting people for the Second World War.
Didn't improve under FDR, let us note, until he got us into a world war.
Think about that. He put more than 10% of the US to work and unemployment barely twitched.
Eh, not much kick-starting (it's like 200-300 since 1985). I bet there's more such (and more successful) cooperatives created by workers who didn't use public funds to kick-start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @09:25PM (1 child)
First, the direct link to the graphic is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/US_Unemployment_1910-1960.gif [wikimedia.org]
Nitwit.
...and your ability to read a graph is as crappy as all of your other self-perceived "knowledge".
Allowing for some initial inertia in the feedback loop, the graph shows EXACTLY what I described.
Get an education and get a life outside of parroting the ignorant babble heard on Faux Noose.
Outside Reactionary circles, no one thinks that doubling down on the stupid is the same as improving your debating position.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:55AM
I'm not going to direct link to graphs from Wikipedia. Sorry. You lose important context, such as the articles where the graph came from. I grant I could have linked to a better source [wikimedia.org].
No, it doesn't. Note the rebound in unemployment during the second span of recession despite FDR supposedly taking more than 10% of the adult population off the labor market (or perhaps, because of). Peak unemployment was a bit under 21% in 1934 and it never fell below 14% until 1940 when massive conscription for the Second World War was underway.
And of course, we have the usual blame displacement. When FDR wasn't listening to Wall Street, he took too long with his policies. The problem here isn't the lag in his policies, but rather the lack of long term effect. One sees a near immediate drop of 7% in unemployment which is sort of what you'd expect from scooping up so many people for government programs. But then it bounces back up 4%, almost to where it was before.
You misspelled "Fox News", hurr hurr. And I'd be quite interested in knowing where Fox News interprets unemployment charts from the Great Depression. Sounds more interesting than their usual fare.