Support NeoGAF

[dLMN8R]

Are second jobs common in the US? I live in the UK and don't know (and have never known) anyone that's worked 2 jobs. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but in my (albiet limited) experience it's pretty rare.

Seems like a pretty disheartening existence to have to work 2 shitty retail jobs just to pay the bills.

This is one of the most confusing things about people who act like "less hours" is an inherently bad thing.

Like, yeah? Are you sure about that?

For people who currently need to work 80+ hours a week across multiple shitty jobs just to make ends meet, I'm sure they'd love to be able to cut that down a little bit so they can see their family and...live their fucking lives.

Not to mention the fact that when people don't need to work multiple jobs, it makes those jobs open up for other people to take instead.

Just looked up some online order prices to see. Papa johns large pizza is $4 more in seattle. Panera sandwich is about $2 more. So increase seems to be 10-15% or so

I've lived in Seattle for nearly a decade, and prices have been higher here than elsewhere long before the minimum wage ever started going up.

Even in Kirkland - where the minimum wage wasn't increased like it was in Seattle (except for the statewide measure voters approved last year) - prices have always been noticeably higher. Not multiple times higher, but a percentage higher as you and others have pointed out.

It's simply because the overall economy has been better here for a long time - tech jobs, low unemployment, increased housing prices, higher land values, and so forth. Prices are higher because places can charge more and in some cases need to charge more for many factors - labor costs are just a small part of that.

Prices in cities and other places with an overall higher cost of living are always higher, regardless of the minimum wage. I was just in Las Vegas last week where the minimum wage is half what it is in Seattle, yet all of the food and drinks are at least double in cost of what they are in Seattle no matter where you go.

 

[Merchandise]

So are the increase in minimum wage and advent of people-replacing machines at McDonald's just two entirely unrelated events?

 

[midramble]

CEOs in the US make an absurd amount more than the guy getting bumped to 15 an hour. They can and should take the burden of cost in an increase, not the customers.

They should, but they wont. Or maybe they will a bit, but it will only be a part of the remediation, not the brunt. A lot goes into executive salary calculation/negotiation. Whole research teams come together to decide what to offer to an exec and what is expected of that exec. Chop the exec pay significantly (which probably wont cover a lot of the cost of raise anyways) and you'll be stuck with execs that have no idea what they are doing and run the company into the ground because of poor decisions/lack of experience.

 

[Straight Edge]

Those hours have to be worked, they can't not have shifts filled. Ask anyone who has worked a shitty entry level job whether there was ever a time that staffing was at anything other than the bare minimum. How would it lead to cut hours?

What? I worked at a drugstore for years. Over time we stopped staffing a dedicated cosmetics rep, an inventory coordinator, and then replaced assistant managers with key holders (glorified cashiers) in order to cut labor.

 

[Zen_Arcade]

Those hours have to be worked, they can't not have shifts filled. Ask anyone who has worked a shitty entry level job whether there was ever a time that staffing was at anything other than the bare minimum. How would it lead to cut hours?

Yeah, this isn't true at all. I've worked multiple jobs where the company has made current workers pick up the slack when the bosses don't want to fill a position. It's very common to just have people do multiple positions for the same pay.

At one point during my last job I was a data entry clerk, a secretary, and I had to help out the tech guy when he needed an extra set of hands to set something up. These were all individual jobs at one point but the company downsized and I was forced to fill in.

 

[TarNaru33]

Thank goodness I thought I was losing my mind. Someone that can see the bigger picture. This thread is hurting my brain.

You need to prove that the other industry is doing this.. Restaurant workers typically have their hours below 30 so they don't qualify for benefits anyways, even in areas where minimum wage is 7.25. You both are making good points as to why U.S's employment based healthcare is complete bullshit.

What? I worked at a drugstore for years. Over time we stopped staffing a dedicated cosmetics rep, an inventory coordinator, and then replaced assistant managers with key holders (glorified cashiers) in order to cut labor.

Yeah, this isn't true at all. I've worked multiple jobs where the company has made current workers pick up the slack when the bosses don't want to fill a position. It's very common to just have people do multiple positions for the same pay.

At one point during my last job I was a data entry clerk, a secretary, and I had to help out the tech guy when he needed an extra set of hands to set something up. These were all individual jobs at one point but the company downsized and I was forced to fill in.

You both are actually proving his point. Jobs will do whatever it can to do the most tasks with the least amount of labor cost possible. This is why they used salary based employees to work a lot, until Obama increased that threshold for example.

Whatever they can do, including cutting certain positions and having lower positioned people do part of that work is what they will do. If you guys want to stop them doing that, you should be advocating for stronger worker rights along with a higher minimum. How bad it happens depend on leadership, some leadership like to make a point politically by doing things like this, some leaders do it to squeeze out as much profit as they can even when they were previously making good profit.

 

[Kodros]

When I lived there, airport parking added a new fee specifically to cover the new $15 per hour wage hike in SeaTac. I forget exactly what the cost was.

 

[turnbuckle]

Hmm. The study still is preliminary and the article makes some big caveats, but this paints a different picture than the article in the OP.

lots more at the link.


https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-hike-may-have-gone-too-far/

In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline

Seattle’s minimum-wage ordinance was one of the earliest and most aggressive of the recent wave. In 2014, the city passed a law raising the city’s minimum wage — already among the nation’s highest, at more than $9 an hour — to $15 an hour over several years.2 Economists immediately saw the law as an opportunity to study the effects of an unusually high minimum wage, and the city of Seattle agreed to help fund a team of researchers to look into the policy’s impact.

The group’s first major report, released last year, looked at the first big increase under the law, in April 2015, in which the minimum wage went from $9.47 to $11 for large employers. The report found relatively little effect, for good or ill: The policy led to some lost jobs and hours, the report concluded, but those were more or less offset by the increased income enjoyed by workers. For workers who kept their jobs, the higher wage was a clear benefit; for low-wage workers as a whole, the impact was minimal. One reason for the muted impact: In high-cost Seattle, not many workers earned less than $11 an hour even before the law took effect.

Monday’s report looks at the impact of the second wage increase under the law: the January 2016 hike to $13 an hour for large employers. This time, the findings look very different: Compared to a counterfactual in which Seattle didn’t raise its minimum wage, the number of hours worked by low-wage workers (those earning less than $19 an hour) fell by 9.4 percent over the first nine months of 2016, and the number of low-wage jobs fell by 6.8 percent. Cumulatively, those add up to the losses of 5,000 jobs and 3.5 million hours of work. The average low-wage employee, they found, saw his or her monthly paycheck shrink by $125, or 6.6 percent.

The study is far from the last word on the impact of Seattle’s law, let alone the $15 minimum wage movement more generally. Indeed, just last week another study used similar methods to reach seemingly the opposite conclusion: A report from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Seattle’s minimum wage, “raises pay without costing jobs,” as a press release on the study announced.

The Berkeley study, however, looked exclusively at the restaurant industry. That has been a common practice in minimum-wage research, because the industry is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers. But the University of Washington study suggests a possible flaw in that approach: That research, too, found essentially no job losses in the restaurant sector as a result of the city’s minimum wage hike. That suggests that studies that focused on the restaurant industry might have missed larger effects in other sectors.

 

[BigDug13]

New news, new thread IMO. Especially when this directly counters the OP study.