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posted by janrinok on Monday December 08 2014, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
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

 
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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 10 2014, @05:49PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 10 2014, @05:49PM (#124793) Journal

    even if labor demand is inelastic in the short term, in the long term employers will find a way to use fewer employees. Maybe they'll work them harder. Maybe they'll force them to do unpaid overtime (illegal, but doable). Maybe they'll just shut down the restaurant during unpopular hours, or convert it to self service, or respond in any number of clever and hard-to-measure ways.

    ..as opposed to the current situation, where most employers are perfectly happy to hire people to sit around all day doing nothing? Even if the minimum wage was $1/hr, they'd still be trying to minimize their workforce. That's what businesses do. If they're not reducing costs, they're going bankrupt. Or getting bailed out....

    I do agree though that raising the minimum wage is not the ideal solution. The problem is unemployment -- as long as there's a significant number of people unemployed, businesses will always be able to find someone willing to work for less. We can directly limit how low their wages can get with a minimum wage, but it seems like a better and more fair approach would be to simply try to shrink the available labor supply, altering the supply/demand equation to give more power to labor. Either remove people from the job market and let them do something else (lower the retirement age; relax restrictions on social security benefits; increase funding to higher education) or remove them by hiring them for some other purpose (like fixing our public infrastructure).

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