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The NYT reports that in a unanimous vote, the Seattle City Council went where no big-city lawmakers have gone before, raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum, and pushing Seattle to the forefront of urban efforts to address income inequality. "Even before the Great Recession a lot of us have started to have doubt and concern about the basic economic promise that underpins economic life in the United States," says Council Member Sally J. Clark. "Today Seattle answers that challenge." High-tech, fast-growing Seattle, population 634,535, is home to Amazon.com, Zillow, and Starbucks. It also has more than 100,000 workers whose incomes are insufficient to support their families, according to city figures and around 14% of Seattle's population lives below the poverty level. Some business owners have questioned the proposal saying that the city's booming economy is creating an illusion of permanence. "We're living in this bubble of Amazon, but that's not going to go on," says businessman Tom Douglas. "There's going to be some terrific price inflation."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday June 05 2014, @03:08PM
That would be every single city on the planet. It's not that the only reason somebody goes there is to have minimum wages, it's that the businesses that serve the other businesses that really drive the growth of the city survive on minimum wage workers.
Consider, for example, New York City, not exactly a hopeless case: Sure, it's the Wall Street types bringing in huge gobs of money that makes the whole thing work. But one reason the Wall Street types are comfortable working in New York City is because there's somebody to make and deliver their coffee and 3-martini lunches and Chinese takeout for them, and somebody to keep their building clean, and security guards to keep everyone reasonably safe, and so forth. And those businesses might be serving an upper-crust and not be as price sensitive and be able to pay their people pretty well for their services, but the people who do those jobs need to live somewhere and eat and somehow get to work and take care of their kids, so they in turn need a bunch of businesses that are very price sensitive, and pay their people minimum wage.
Now, I think overall this will work out well for Seattle, but it's not a sure bet, and that's part of why.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday June 05 2014, @03:31PM
How wrong I was when I didn't believe them telling me America is an alien planet.
I guess a single counterexample [theatlantic.com] would suffice?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3) by khallow on Thursday June 05 2014, @11:04PM
Ok, where is that single counterexample? I note that there are numerous reasons why your link is not an actual counterexample. First, it has nothing to do with minumum wage, but rather the equally dubious idea of paying people to work less (maybe same wage per unit hour but greater non-wage benefits per hour). Second, it hasn't actually been implemented. This idea still has to sneak past the people with common sense. Third, even if it is ever implemented, we'll have to run the experiment for a few years at least in order to see how badly it fails. And fourth, by then, you'll have completely forgotten about your "counterexample".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06 2014, @04:18AM
How is it that the "counterexample" gets modded up to +5 when even a cursory glance at the link shows that it is not an example at all?
Please mod parent up.
(Score: 2) by hoochiecoochieman on Thursday June 05 2014, @04:27PM
Well, just in case, I went for some fact-checking. And guess what? You're wrong. At least at the country level. Please compare these two indexes and try to find that relation you're talking about.
The relation is not clear, but if there's any, I'd say it's quite the opposite, places with higher minimum salaries tend to be more competitive. Which makes sense, because you're not very competitive when you're starving.
Global Competitiveness Report [wikipedia.org]
List of minimum wages by country [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by khallow on Thursday June 05 2014, @11:07PM
The Global Competitiveness Report has nothing to do with competitiveness. It's not a serious metric either. Finally, I bet they have several dubious measures tied directly to the minimum wage which would be a case of circular reasoning.