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from the consumers-with-more-money-to-spend dept.
NPR (formerly National Public Radio) reports:
By a 44-5 vote, Chicago's City Council set a minimum-wage target of $13 an hour, to be reached by the middle of 2019. The move comes after Illinois passed a nonbinding advisory last month that calls for the state to raise its minimum pay level to $10 by the start of next year.
The current minimum wage in Chicago and the rest of Illinois is $8.25. Under the ordinance, the city's minimum wage will rise to $10 by next July and go up in increments each summer thereafter.
[...]The bill states that "rising inflation has outpaced the growth in the minimum wage, leaving the true value of lllinois' current minimum wage of $8.25 per hour 32 percent below the 1968 level of $10.71 per hour (in 2013 dollars)."
It also says nearly a third of Chicago's workers, or some 410,000 people, currently make $13 an hour or less.
[...][In the 2014] midterm elections, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota approved binding referendums that raise their states' wage floor above the federal minimum.
Media Matters for America notes that The Chicago Tribune's coverage tried to trot out the *job-killer* dead horse once again, to which the response was
According to a March 2014 report(PDF) prepared for the Seattle Income Inequality Advisory Committee titled "Local Minimum Wage laws: Impacts on Workers, Families, and Businesses", city-wide minimum wage increases in multiple locations--Albuquerque, NM; Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC--produced "no discernible negative effects on employment" and no measurable job shift from metropolitan to suburban areas.
Related:
Seattle Approves $15 Minimum Wage
Mayor's Minimum Wage Veto Overridden by San Diego City Council
States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday December 08 2014, @08:33PM
I thought the point of raising the minimum wage was to drive the people looking for minimum wage jobs elsewhere. Particularly for something the size of a city, a raise in the minimum wage encourages businesses requiring those workers to relocate outside of the city borders. Additionally, the higher wage means better qualified applicants would be willing to perform the jobs remaining in the city.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @08:56PM
better qualified applicants would be willing to perform the jobs remaining in the city
Unless you do not even have the means to pay to move somewhere else.
Min wage laws long term hurts the very people it is trying to help.
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/ [steshaw.org]
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap19p1.html [steshaw.org]
There is only one cure for low wages. That is more jobs, not limiting jobs people are willing to offer. Jobs are a commodity like bubble gum and socks. Scarcity and demand drive the price market for jobs the same as socks. You do not pay 500 dollars for a stick of gum. Why? Because it is common. The same with jobs. The more people than there are jobs the less demand there is for them. Less demand means less pay. You can game the system short term (min caps) because short term the market is sort of inelastic. But long term that never works. Within 2-3 years business owners *will* adjust. Either by going out of business or hiring less people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday December 08 2014, @08:58PM
encourages businesses requiring those workers to relocate outside of the city borders
Those businesses are welfare queens and the city has a net benefit if they leave.
Lets say it costs 2 units to live a minimal life. A honest .gov and honest business (LOL as if either exists) would pay 2 units. I pay 2 units total of product cost and tax. All is well with the world.
A welfare queen of a business will cry and moan that it can only pay 1 unit. Reality is they're just skimming off ever more profit. Now it costs 2 units to live and they only get 1 unit, and .gov isn't going to just let them die in the streets, however much of a neocon wet dream that would be. So .gov being incompetent skims off maybe 3 units of tax revenues and 1 unit of the 3 units goes to the employee, the rest to .gov salaries and waste. So the employee needs 2 units to live, and gets 1 unit from her welfare queen employer, 1 unit from gov. Meanwhile the welfare queen employer skimmed off an extra unit of profit. And the .gov social workers and program coordinators and tax collectors get paid 2 units worth of money in salaries. Sounds like everyone wins, right, oh whoops as one of the few remaining customers and few remaining taxpayers, I paid 5 units total of product cost and tax for only 2 units worth of product. What a horrible deal.
For the sake of argument, say it costs $13/hr to live in Chicago. Now you decide if you life big government or not. If you're a big government sympathizer type, you'll want the minimum wage to go back to $3/hr and let the .gov collect and redistribute wealth from the remaining taxpayers at the rate of almost $10/hr. It'll probably only cost them like $30/hr. That means as a taxpayer and a consumer you'll be paying $33/hr to keep that store clerk alive. If you believe in small government, you'll want the minimum wage to be about $13/hr so the employees don't rely on .gov anymore. That means as a taxpayer and a consumer you'll be paying a mere $13 to keep that store clerk alive.
Seems like a no-brainer decision, unless you're a big government supporter aka socialist, you'll support a higher minimum wage like a real free market capitalist.