“I hate to say it, but we have to leave it (the federal minimum wage) the way it is”, Trump said. Researchers found that from mid-2014 to the end of 2015, “the Seattle labor market was exceptionally strong” and the city’s “job growth rate tripled the national average”.
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Recommended: Are the rich getting richer? Given these trends, it’s no surprise that North Carolina has experienced significant long-term wage stagnation and rising income inequality.
Repeating an earlier position, Trump advocated for leaving the minimum wage up to individual states. This study suggests that the reality lies somewhere in between. “That’s not surprising because, while we’re finding their hourly wage rate is going up, if their hours are being cut, then the net effect on their earnings. would be ambiguous”.
The governor urged workers unions to ensure the removal of the exemption clause while reviewing the national minimum wage.
As for businesses, the study shows a slightly higher rate of turnover in Seattle, but the difference from a typical year is small. They also created a “synthetic” version of Seattle by looking at a set of zip codes from outside Seattle that, when added together, mimicked the behavior of Seattle before the ordinance. Under the law, businesses with fewer than 500 employees are scheduled to reach the $15 an hour wage in 2021.
So while these productivity gains have generated a three-decades-long “Golden Age of Corporate Profits”, very few of the fruits of this Golden Age have made its way into workers’ paychecks.
Workers in Seattle have felt the positive effects of the policy, Sage Wilson, a spokesperson for Working Washington, a worker’s advocacy organization, tells the Monitor.
Trump said raising the federal minimum wage by $2.75 – to $10/hour – would be reasonable. “We just can’t do it”.
But complaints by opponents of a minimum wage hike that it will put companies out of business are not backed up by the study, either. The researchers “caution that these results show only the short-run impact of Seattle’s increase to a wage of $11/hour” and that it will take many years for the full effect of raising the minimum wage to be seen. A $15 minimum, like the one Hillary Clinton is proposing, would hurt businesses owners in the south and midwest, he said. But her annual salary was so low that she was still able to qualify for Medicaid, which is available to most people in OH with annual earnings up to 138 percent of poverty, or about $27,000 for a family of three in 2015. Higher wages pretty much fit into Trump’s economic plan as in the higher tariffs environment, a better-earning consumer would push both inflation and the broader economy higher, allowing for the long-overdue normalization of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. As of January 1, 2017, California, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut and DC will have minimum wages of $10/hour or more.
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However, Wilson questioned the effectiveness of the “synthetic Seattle” model, saying Seattle had a smaller recession and quicker recovery than the surrounding area, which may explain the faster growth “synthetic” Seattle experienced. I know it’s not very Republican to say.
