New York SBDC Research Network

From Fortune magazine: For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered. This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years. The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down. Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that. The re...

From:  BLS Reports In 2016, 79.9 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.7 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 701,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.5 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 2.2 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.7 percent of all hourly paid workers. The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 3.3 percent in 2015 to 2.7 percent in 2016. This remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis.  This report presents highlights and statistical tables describing workers who earned at or below the federal minimum wage in 2016. The data are obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a national monthly survey of approximately 60,000 h...

From FiveThirtyEight : The new year brought raises — sometimes big ones — to millions of low-wage workers. It also begins the country’s first large-scale experiment in the economic effects of a double-digit minimum wage. According to data collected by the National Employment Law Project, a workers-rights advocacy group, 19 states and 21 local jurisdictions raised their minimum wages at the start of 2017. Many of those increases were small cost-of-living adjustments, but some of them were dramatic. Arizona, where voters approved a wage hike on Election Day, raised its minimum wage by nearly $2 an hour, to $10 from $8.05... Some cities set the bar even higher... Low-wage workers are understandably cheering the increases. So is the union-backed "Fight for $15" movement, which defied the odds to put the minimum wage back on the political agenda. Economists, though, are watching more warily. Researchers disagree about how minimum-wage hikes affect the economy, but most stud...

On Wednesday night, the Massachusetts House passed a bill that will raise the state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2017. The Senate already passed that wage level, and after a procedural vote there it will head to Gov. Deval Patrick (D), who is expected to sign it into law... An $11 wage is the highest passed by any state this year. Eight other states have increased their wages so far... While some worry that higher minimum wages will hurt jobs or businesses, states that already had high wages haven’t had that experience. Washington, which has the highest current wage at $9.32 an hour, experienced the biggest increase in small business employment last year... More from Think Progress .