Search the archive.

I am, like all non-management Vox staff, a Writers Guild of America, East member, and a former member of Vox’s union bargaining committee, so I empathize with the urge to be optimistic about the future of organized labor, especially at a time when my comrades in the film and TV industries are striking for a better contract. I stand in solidarity with them and hope they get an excellent contract.

But I think it’s even more important to be honest about the situation. Organized labor is not booming, rebounding, or in a resurgence of any kind. Instead, it is in decline, as it has been for many years.

Labor unions spent more than to help get President Joe Biden, a self-described "," into the White House. Now, they're looking for a return on that investment. Specifically, passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which cleared the House earlier this year but remains stalled in the Senate with all Republicans and three Democrats refusing to support it—despite Biden's calls for its passage . The bill is a grab bag of big labor agenda items that would extend some of California's awful independent contractor regulations nationwide, in the 27 states that have passed them, and expand the powers of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), among other things. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, the legislation as a "game-changer" for labor unions. And several major unions have threatened to from the Democratic senators who continue to be the main stumbling blocks for the bill. Unions are playing hardball over the PRO Act because they see it as a vital lifeline—a way to extract more revenue from America's workforce at a time when the overall number of unionized workers . A high-profile defeat earlier this year in the first attempt to unionize an Amazon distribution center only makes it more clear: given the choice, workers mostly don't want to be part of a union. So why not ? "Labor unions want the PRO Act to stop plummeting membership and increase revenue from dues," says Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank. He's also the author of that digs into the depths of the PRO Act, concluding that the legislation "empowers unions at the expense of workers." Backers of the PRO Act say the bill is about empowering workers. In published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shortly before last year's presidential election, Biden and Trumka argued that the PRO Act was necessary to "dramatically enhance the power of workers to organize." They touted aspects of the legislation to beef up the NLRB's authority to "actively encourage collective bargaining." But if workers were as eager to join unions as Trumka and Biden seem to think, they wouldn't need a powerful federal bureaucracy to encourage that outcome, Higgins argues. Less than of American workers are members of a union right now, down from a high of 35 percent in the 1950s. What's happened in recent decades? Unionization hasn't been outlawed. The NLRB wasn't abolished. But faced with more economic opportunities and an increasing number of states passing laws that free workers from being required to join a union to hold certain jobs, workers have voluntarily opted out of unionization. The PRO Act is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for unions to stomp out those trends. By duplicating California's disastrous rules that significantly narrow the definition of independent contracting work, the bill would to set their own hours. By forcing employers to turn over private information about their employees, the bill would invade workers' privacy. And by giving the NLRB the power to in some circumstances, the bill would allow unions to "win" elections . Perhaps most significantly, given Biden's , the passage of the PRO Act would significantly hinder the completion of large-scale infrastructure projects, as Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group, has . The PRO Act isn't really about empowering workers or changing the dynamics of the American workplace or building modern infrastructure. It's about directing federal power and resources to boost flagging labor unions, which have invested huge sums of money in the political system to get to this moment. "Federal labor policy should be aimed at maximizing worker freedom," says Higgins, "not growing union power."

As the economy continues on the path of a K-shaped recovery, Congress should be pursuing policies that will elevate businesses and workers on the bottom part of that K. Instead, Democrats are pushing legislation designed to help their friends in organized labor and cause more damage. This legislation is called , but there is nothing positive about it. To put it succinctly, the PRO Act represents a radical rewrite of American labor law that would threaten worker privacy, force workers to pay union dues or lose their jobs, and undermine free speech rights. The bill first surfaced in 2019, although it to advance beyond . Now that Democrats have unified control, the prospect of the PRO Act becoming law has become more realistic. The rationale for organized labor’s push for this legislation is fairly simple. Union membership has been steadily declining since the 1950s, and rather than attract new members by convincing people to join, labor leaders want Congress to stack the deck in their favor by disrupting the careful balance in U.S. labor law. The PRO Act would do so in many ways. At the top of the list, the PRO Act would effectively overturn right-to-work laws that have been democratically passed in 27 states. Under right-to-work laws, workers in unionized businesses can opt out of paying unwanted union dues. Under the PRO Act, a worker who makes that choice is likely to be fired. The bill also would do an end-run around the current system of private ballot union representation elections. Instead, it would encourage “card check” voting where union organizers would approach individual workers and demand that they publicly sign a card in favor of the union. Even worse, when unions “win” such a rigged process, the federal government is empowered to impose a collective bargaining contract on an employer. Should that occur, workers would be denied the opportunity to approve the agreement, even though it impacts their wages and working conditions. Incredibly, the employees who would have to live with that contract would get no vote on it. And if you don’t want to pay union dues to support an unwanted contract, well, see the paragraph above about keeping your job. Employers also would be stripped of fundamental legal rights under the PRO Act, losing their standing in cases before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Yet, if they fail to follow an NLRB decision they could also be fined—up to $100,000 in some cases—and their officers held personally liable for alleged violations. And worker privacy would also come under threat, as the PRO Act would put into legislation a requirement that employers give unions personal information about their workers, such as home addresses and phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, shift locations, and work schedules. As for those working as independent contractors, the PRO Act would turn most of them into employees by adopting California’s on worker classification. Independent contractors would lose flexible work arrangements and see fewer earning opportunities. They would, however, suddenly be eligible for union card check campaigns and subsequent payment of union dues. Put simply, the PRO Act would be bad for workers, employers, and the economy. It’s a union wish-list, a grab bag of harmful policies that would completely undermine today’s balance in labor law. Members of Congress who support this bill will certainly have a lot to answer for if it should ever become law.

Labor Day is an opportunity to celebrate the incredible contributions ordinary workers make to the economy. Nearly Americans work to create the most advanced economy the world has ever known. Yet this prosperity is threatened by radical labor legislation known as the that amounts to a Democratic declaration of war on small businesses and workers. The Pro Act would especially hurt Hispanics, who are disproportionately entrepreneurial and more susceptible to the legislation’s harmful regulations. and Democrats in Congress have included aspects of the Pro Act, which passed the House of Representatives in March, in their pending . Senate budget reconciliation rules prevent the worst aspects of the Pro Act from becoming law. But the bill’s fiercest congressional champion, Senate Budget Chairman (I-Vt.), will try to include as much of it as possible. The Pro Act would subject independent contractors to strict labor criteria that involves proving that their jobs aren’t under the direction or control of those who hired them, among other burdensome rules. This new scrutiny could make millions of independent contracting positions illegal, threatening the livelihoods of entrepreneurs who earn some or all of their income through contracting. Hispanics, who start businesses more often than Americans as a whole, are especially vulnerable. Since contractors can set their own hours and working conditions, this form of work is particularly attractive for single mothers who are trying to balance work and family responsibilities. The Pro Act also wages war on America’s successful franchise system, which has offered Americans a ticket to the middle class as small business owners. The bill codifies an Obama-era joint employer standard that makes franchisors jointly liable for their franchisees’ employment decisions. To ward off potential lawsuits as joint employers, franchisors would have to curtail franchise opportunities, limiting them to the most qualified applicants and reducing business opportunities for Hispanics who often have to work harder for the same credentials. Minority-owned franchisees tend to operate in minority-owned neighborhoods and hire minority workers, meaning this Pro Act provision also would reduce minority job opportunities. The Pro Act also would eliminate right-to-work provisions, which allow employees in 27 states to keep their jobs even if they don’t want to belong to a union and pay dues to union bosses. Right-to-work protections are especially important for minorities who . Right-to-work protections offer them the freedom to be judged by their employers based on merit and work ethic, rather than sclerotic union seniority agreements. Right-to-work states have , offering lifelines to job seekers in underserved communities. Why do President Biden and Democrats in Congress support legislation that would hurt Hispanic small businesses and workers by curtailing independent contracting, franchising and right to work? Because their labor boss paymasters demand it. Big labor unions donated over to Democrats and liberal groups in the last election cycle, including to Biden’s election campaign alone. The Pro Act is their return on investment. The Pro Act would line union bosses’ pockets at the expense of small businesses and employees by 1) turning independent contractors into unionizable employees, 2) making it possible to unionize entire franchise brands (rather than merely independent franchises), and 3) forcing employees who don’t want to be part of a union to pay dues. The Pro Act allows coercive unionization practices such as card check, exposing vulnerable workers to Chicago-style organizing tactics. No wonder unions have made the Pro Act , going so far as of the filibuster to pass it. The only thing preventing Democrats from selling out small businesses and workers to union bosses by passing the Pro Act is Republicans. Senate Republicans should campaign — especially around Labor Day — on defeating this anti-worker, anti-small business, and anti-Hispanic legislation that would strike a devastating blow to the opportunity economy and devalue American labor.

Program for Public Consultation 23 (organization in conjunction with the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland that develops policymaking simulation surveys with input from senior congressional staffers from both parties and outside experts from across the political spectrum), 04/06/2023, School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, “Two-Thirds of Voters Favor a $15 Federal Minimum Wage, $12 Gets Bipartisan Support”, https://publicconsultation.org/uncategorized/two-thirds-of-voters-favor-a-15-federal-minimum-wage-12-gets-bipartisan-support/

An in-depth study conducted by the Program for Public Consultation (PPC) at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy finds that two-thirds of American voters favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15, including a majority of Democrats but less than half of Republicans. However, there is bipartisan majority support for a $12 minimum wage.

Bourne ’18 [Ryan Bourne; Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato ; 4/22/18; “A Jobs Guaranteed Economic Disaster,” https://www.cato.org/blog/jobs-guaranteed-economic-disaster]

Crowd‐​out In reality, the fiscal costs are likely to be much, much higher, and the economic welfare losses even more significant, because in the labor market and broader economy, a public jobs guarantee program would significantly crowd out productive private sector activity. This type of policy will radically alter behavior of both workers and businesses, and so the supply and demand for labor. The Census shows that, among those who worked in 2016, 70+ million Americans earned under $32,500 (the full‐​time job guarantee salary would be $31,200). Yes, not all of these would seek out positions on the jobs guarantee program. But a large proportion would, especially those employed in uncertain roles with low levels of job security. In fact, some even paid more than $31,200 might consider leaving their jobs to pursue guaranteed roles if they perceive better working conditions or an easier worklife (asked under what conditions someone would be fired from such a role, the Levy Institute paper suggests that you would be sacked for failing to go to work, but that your performance would not be judged by “private sector ‘efficiency criteria’”, for example.) It’s not inconceivable then that over 25 percent of the labor force could find itself part of the scheme. This crowd‐​out is likely to be particularly acute in low productivity regions, and (ironically) after economic downturns. A nationwide jobs guarantee program paying $15 an hour will be particularly attractive to workers in low wage regions, and by setting a de facto wage floor the program will prevent private investment in regions on the basis of cheap labor. Though no doubt there would be some demand spillovers from well‐​paid jobs, the net consequence is highly likely to be weaker private sector job creation in poor regions, which has been the experience of countries such as Britain with a nationwide minimum wages and public sector national pay bargaining. Proponents of the scheme see “higher labor standards” as a good thing, but absent productivity improvements, policies which raise labor costs significantly will reduce the quantity of workers demanded. There’s good reason to expect the policy will reduce the efficiency and productive potential of the economy too. Taxes will eventually need to be raised to cover the net cost of the program. In infrastructure and care giving provision, costs will rise – because nobody would now work in these directly substitutable sectors for less than the wage and conditions offered in the job guarantee program. This will waste resources, and there’s highly likely to be overinvestment in lots of relatively low value ventures and programs to ensure workers are employed, especially given the explicit aim is to provide employment rather than deliver projects at low cost. Throwing resources at regions with higher levels of unemployment and after recessions too will work directly against market signals and deter the mobility of labor (in geographic and industrial terms) and capital to its most productive uses given prevailing market conditions. This is important: yes, employment is highly likely to have some positive externalities; but the real driver of better living standards over time are productivity improvements, discovered by market‐​based activity. Proponents of this policy seem to put an enormous weight on the idea that time out of the labor market has huge scarring consequences which could be ameliorated by any type of temporary employment. But the literature on this shows that temporary jobs do not provide the workers with skills to improve longer‐​term labor market outcomes. Corruption and incentives As if all these consequences were not bad enough, such a program will be ripe for corruption and political interference at the government, provider and individual level. Senator Sanders’ plan would be administered by the Department for Labor, with local and state governments submitting projects to regional offices for consideration. There’s a huge question mark on whether projects will be considered on economic grounds, when there might be an incentive for make‐​work schemes to aid particular politicians or indeed to put resources towards “public good” causes or NGOs more in line with the ethos of the governing party. For Democrats this might be for environmental issues. For Republicans it might be, say, for a wall on the southern border. NGOs and local public bodies themselves will have incentives to apply for federal funds for projects that would otherwise have occurred anyway, and to maximize the number of applications. Pork barrel projects would proliferate. What is more, at the individual level, the guarantee coupled with the purported unwillingness to judge worker performance on a commercial basis will incentivize low levels of work effort on the margin. Conclusion The Jobs Guarantee then is an extremely large and costly endeavor, which would have major economic consequences and risk a large federal politicization of the labor market and public project delivery. The US does have serious labor market issues to contend with — not least depressed labor participation and a weak productivity outlook — but are things really so bad that they require such a risky and extensive policy response? Well‐​paid jobs and low levels of real unemployment are outcomes desired by all. But attempting to achieve that through this program amounts to cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, undermining what matters far more for living standards: efficiency and productivity.

Vries 23 [Klaas de Vries; Senior Economist with The Conference Board, master’s degree in history from the University of Groningen and continues his coursework in economics; 3/3/23; “Slower US Labor Productivity Points to Slower Economic Growth Ahead”; https://www.conference-board.org/topics/recession/Slow-US-labor-productivity]

Labor productivity growth is often seen as the ultimate source of economic growth and improvement in standards of living. Therefore, recent weak readings in the US have become a cause for concern. After a steep rise in 2020, labor productivity growth moderated in 2021 and declined sharply in 2022, the worst decline in the post-WWII era.1 On the one hand, there may be more noise than a tangible signal in these data, given a labor market recovery that trailed the real GDP recovery, particularly in 2022. On the other hand, even if this noise is reduced, productivity did poorly in 2022. Labor productivity growth in 2023 is expected to decline again given the expected recession later in the year and ongoing chronic labor market shortages. Labor productivity growth may return in 2024 and beyond; we project it to expand moderately at rates higher than those in the decade that preceded the pandemic. Insights for What’s Ahead • US labor productivity declined in 2022 and is forecast to decline again in 2023. Labor productivity is not measured directly, but rather derived from changes in GDP and total hours worked. Total hours worked grew well above average in 2022, while output growth moderated and even declined in the first two quarters of 2022. • The weak 2022 reading compares with a small pandemic boost to productivity growth in 2020 and 2021. Labor productivity expanded at a rate that was well above average in 2020. Weaker growth in 2021 and the decline in 2022 are partly a result of “payback” from this surge. However, there is some evidence that underlying productivity growth was relatively strong in 2020 and 2021, extending an upward moving trend from previous years. • Weak labor productivity points to slower economic growth ahead. Slow productivity growth worsens labor shortages: it increases the demand for workers which is already elevated due to ageing and early retirement. Slow productivity growth also deepens inflationary pressures. If employers are not able to compensate higher wages with increased revenue from higher productivity, higher costs will likely be passed on to consumers. This may lead to further inflationary pressures across the economy, which may necessitate stricter monetary policy and hence lower economic growth.

Jayachandran 20 [Seema Jayachandran; Seema Jayachandran is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Princeton University; 6/18/20; “How a Raise for Workers Can Be a Win for Everybody”; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/coronavirus-minimum-wage-increase.html]

Two new studies show that giving pay raises to low-wage workers is good for consumers, too. That finding could add momentum to efforts to help grocery store clerks, nursing home workers and delivery drivers who are being paid a minimum wage despite their efforts being so essential during the current pandemic. The new research shows that raising the minimum wage improves workers’ productivity, which translates into businesses offering higher-quality service. Because many customers are willing to pay more when quality improves, a company can raise its prices without losing sales volume. That means that profits need not suffer even though employee salaries increase. Moreover, because companies are getting better performance from workers in return for paying them more, a higher minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. With a more productive work force, more economic value is being created and there is more money to go around, so a higher paycheck for one person does not imply another person’s loss. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not increased since 2009, though Democrats in the House of Representatives have tried to raise it. State and local governments can set their own minimum wage, provided that it is above the federal rate. For example, Ohio’s minimum wage is $8.70 an hour and New York state’s is $11.80. San Francisco’s is $15.59 an hour. The two new studies, one focused on nursing homes and the other on department stores, looked at the effects of minimum wage changes made at various levels of government. While they are both still working papers and have not appeared in scholarly journals, they were conducted rigorously, by my estimation, and the evidence they offer deserves consideration in the debate on the minimum wage, particularly during our current health and economic crises. The nursing home study, by the economist Krista Ruffini, a visiting scholar at the Minnesota Federal Reserve, has direct implications in the current pandemic. The improvements in quality it found may be a very a big deal: They imply fewer medical complications and, perhaps, a longer life for patients. Ms. Ruffini analyzed hundreds of increases in the minimum wage across the United States from 1990 to 2017. In each case, she compared employment in neighboring counties that suddenly had different minimum wage levels. Her method expands on a landmark study by David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Alan Krueger, the former presidential adviser and Princeton economist, who found no drop in fast-food employment when New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992 above the level paid across the state line in Pennsylvania. Similarly, Ms. Ruffini found little change in employment levels in nursing homes. Many employees were paid the minimum wage or somewhat more than that. Even in cases of the workers — nursing assistants — who had been paid more than the minimum wage, an increase in that base wage rippled through the labor market and still raised their salaries. Ms. Ruffini’s most startling finding was that higher minimum wages reduced mortality significantly among nursing home residents. Her research suggests that if every county increased its minimum wage by 10 percent, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year, or about a 3 percent reduction. How did pay increases translate into better patient health and longer lives? It appears that with better pay, jobs in nursing homes became more attractive, so employee turnover decreased. Patients benefited from more continuity in their care. In addition, the better paid employees may have simply worked harder, perhaps because they cared more about holding onto their jobs. Economists say they have been paid an “efficiency wage”: Employees become more productive when their wages are higher. The higher wage may also have attracted more skilled or industrious people to the job, but this seems to account for at most a small portion of the improvements in patient health. A crucial finding is that the benefits for workers and patients did not come with any apparent downside to nursing homeowners. Their profits remained steady because they were able to defray their increased costs by charging higher fees. That’s one reason these results might not apply in all industries. There are few alternatives to using a nursing home, so if the industry raises prices, it will not lose too many customers. But, equally important, patients were not charged more for the same service: Quality improved in measurable ways as wages rose. What unlocked these gains was government action: All nursing homes in a community had to pay employees more. That eliminated competitive disparities that might have made individual operators reluctant to raise wages unilaterally. Similar effects turned up in a second study, this one focused on department stores. It found that a higher minimum wage increased employee performance, with no significant change in store profits. A team of economists — Decio Coviello at the University of Montreal and my colleagues, Erika Deserranno and Nicola Persico at Northwestern University — used data for 2012 to 2015 from a department store chain that operated 2,000 stores across the United States. They did not disclose the name of the chain. The researchers measured job performance directly by calculating sales revenue per hour. Each week, an employee was paid either a commission, if her sales were good, or the local minimum wage. Most workers were paid the minimum wage at least some of the time. When the minimum wage increased, their job performance improved. The study has an important implication during a crisis like this one: When the labor market was weakest, a higher minimum wage led to the biggest improvements in job performance. A period of economic distress is precisely when workers really want to hold onto their jobs, so the “efficiency wage” effect is large. Supporters of raising the minimum wage usually make their case based on fairness and equity. That rationale is important, but the central finding of these studies — that a higher minimum wage can boost work force productivity and save lives — is a powerful one, too.

Smith 19 [Noah Smith; Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and was an assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University; 3/19/19; “Opinion: Why I’ve come to believe a federal job guarantee is asking for trouble”; https://www.mcall.com/2019/03/24/opinion-why-ive-come-to-believe-a-federal-job-guarantee-is-asking-for-trouble/]

I was once very supportive of the idea of a federal job guarantee, but I’ve changed my mind. Although the economics of the idea are sound, the implementation of the program matters crucially. And it’s becoming clearer that the politics surrounding the job guarantee would lead to significant problems. The basic idea of having the federal government act as the country’s employer of last resort is a good one. Although the economy occasionally puts the entire labor force to work, regular recessions mean that there are usually lots of people who want to find jobs but can’t. This can be seen by looking at a broad measure of unemployment: The wasted labor of these unemployed and underemployed people represents a real resource that could be put to work for the economy. Even if government jobs fixing sidewalks, cleaning public spaces and making art were only marginally productive, that would still be better than having people sit at home playing video games as their skills and work ethic steadily deteriorate. During the Great Depression, the New Deal had success with a raft of programs designed to give jobs to the unemployed — the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration. Furthermore, there’s a good chance that a job guarantee would provide people with more dignity than programs that just give people cash. As long as the jobs weren’t obviously pure make-work, they could allow people to feel more valuable to society. But there’s a very good chance that the politics of the modern day would turn a job guarantee into something very different from the New Deal — and make it much less beneficial for the economy. First, there’s the question of whether people could be fired from the new program. It’s easy to imagine good reasons to fire someone from a government job — starting fights, for example, engaging in criminal activities or simply refusing to work. Even if a job guarantee allowed workers to be fired for egregious offenses, there would doubtless be intense public scrutiny of firing decisions, especially on social media. That would put immense pressure on the administrators of the federal jobs program to avoid firing even those who deserved to be fired. The likely results would be a drop in productivity as some people realized they didn’t have to work to collect paychecks, increased resentment among those who felt morally obligated to put in a hard day’s labor, and disruption of the workplace due to toleration of disruptive or criminal behavior that would never be permitted at private companies. Even more troubling, there’s the possibility that the guaranteed federal jobs could cannibalize the private sector and make the economy less productive. The New Deal jobs programs were undertaken at a time when the economy had a huge amount of unemployment, and there was little chance that workers with private sector jobs would jump ship. But in the absence of very high unemployment like that of the Great Depression, a job guarantee will compete with private companies. And the job guarantee would often win that competition. Modern proposals would require that the federally guaranteed jobs be good jobs, with good pay and benefits. For example, here is the relevant text from the Green New Deal resolution recently introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” This sounds better than many of today’s low-wage jobs. Competition from these government-sponsored jobs would have an initially healthy result. It would force private companies to raise wages and increase benefits in order to keep up with the government. But as private-sector jobs improved, activists’ notion of what constitutes a good job would increase, and they would call for steadily higher wages and benefits for government work. Eventually this would exceed private companies’ ability to pay, so the job guarantee would come to represent the benchmark in the labor market and make up an ever-larger slice of the economy. This would reduce productivity, since government jobs would likely generate less real value than private-sector jobs. Economists have found evidence that the beneficiaries of short-term government jobs tend not to go on to find work in the private sector after the programs end, suggesting that guaranteed jobs would be low-productivity work. As activists forced government wages and benefits higher, the private sector would find itself deprived of cooks, janitors, housekeepers, cashiers and the other people who make a modern economy run. In a worst-case scenario, this would be a one-way ratchet to a peculiarly dysfunctional form of communism. So although a job guarantee could potentially be a good thing, politics seem likely to make it bad. A better idea is to use private-sector employment subsidies to encourage companies to hire more unemployed and underemployed workers — an approach that the data suggests is much more effective in terms of building long-term worker skills. Additionally, a combination of wage subsidies, minimum wages and increased worker bargaining power could help private-sector workers capture a bigger share of the value they create.

David Cooper 19 (director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN)), “Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers,” 02/05/2019, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2024-would-lift-pay-for-nearly-40-million-workers/#:~:text=Gradually%20raising%20the%20minimum%20wage,a%20raise%20of%2020.9%20percent.

This report finds that:

Economists have conducted hundreds of studies of the employment impact of the minimum wage. Summarizing those studies is a daunting task, but two recent meta-studies analyzing the research conducted since the early 1990s concludes that the minimum wage has little or no discernible effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers.

The most likely reason for this outcome is that the cost shock of the minimum wage is small relative to most firms' overall costs and only modest relative to the wages paid to low-wage workers. In the traditional discussion of the minimum wage, economists have focused on how these costs affect employment outcomes, but employers have many other channels of adjustment. Employers can reduce hours, non-wage benefits, or training. Employers can also shift the composition toward higher skilled workers, cut pay to more highly paid workers, take action to increase worker productivity (from reorganizing production to increasing training), increase prices to consumers, or simply accept a smaller profit margin. Workers may also respond to the higher wage by working harder on the job. But, probably the most important channel of adjustment is through reductions in labor turnover, which yield significant cost savings to employers.

Center for American Progress 18 (independent, nonpartisan public policy research organization), “Blueprint for the 21st Century; A Plan for Better Jobs and Stronger Communities,” 05/14/2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/blueprint-21st-century/#:~:text=The%20Blueprint%20for%20the%2021st%20Century%2C%20or%20Jobs%20Blueprint%2C%20proposes,of%20bargaining%20power%20of%20those

While some suggest that minimum wage increases will lead to job losses, companies can adjust to the increased labor costs through a variety of ways. First, minimum wage increases tend to decrease employee turnover rates, which are very high in lowwage industries. Since replacing employees and training their replacements is a costly endeavor—costing about one-sixth of a low-wage workers’ annual salary—this reduction in turnover saves employers a significant amount. For example, Michael Reich, Sylvia Allegretto, and Anna Godoey estimate the reduction in turnover absorbs about 15 percent of the increased payroll costs resulting from Seattle’s minimum wage increase.262 Paying higher wages can also increase worker productivity. Studies show increased wages can lead to more productive workers by increasing motivation, reducing absenteeism, and reducing workers’ financial stress.263 Employers can also adjust for increased minimum wages by raising prices. But since not all workers receive pay increases from minimum wage hikes and labor costs make up only a subset of total operating costs, these price increases tend to be small.264

Tyler Jones 23 (interim communications chair for the Lower Shore Progressive Caucus), “Opinion: Lawmakers should tie minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index to help narrow the income gap”, 03/04/2023, Maryland Matters, https://www.marylandmatters.org/2023/03/04/opinion-lawmakers-should-tie-minimum-wage-to-the-consumer-price-index-to-help-narrow-the-income-gap/

Indexing the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index is an essential component of The Fair Wage Act. The Act, which fulfills Governor Moore’s promise to accelerate the implementation of the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage, will provide low-wage workers with a much-needed boost in income and will help to narrow the income gap.

Adam King 21 (Post-Doctoral Visitor in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Ontario and Senior Researcher at the Canadian Labour Congress), “Critical reflections on the job guarantee proposal,” 02/09/2021, Studies in Political Economy 101(3), pg 230-244

Contemporary proponents of a job guarantee—both academic and activist—highlight a federal jobs program’s supposed potential to not only provide unemployed workers with gainful employment at a living wage but also serve as a means of raising the wages of private sector workers outside the JG program. They claim that this could be accomplished by the JG program absorbing the pool of the unemployed workers and thus eliminating the downward wage pressure that structural unemployment generates.24 Minsky previously argued for a “tight full employment labour market” maintained through an “employer of last resort” policy used to flexibly absorb the unemployed over the course of the business cycle.25 In this telling, the jobs program would improve the bargaining power of the working class by setting a higher floor for the bottom of the labour market, thus compelling private sector employers in need of workers to offer wages higher than those of the JG program to attract workers away from it.

There is another vulnerable subgroup of workers who may be excluded. In many states, individuals with criminal convictions are ineligible for public housing, food stamps, and cash assistance. Such exclusions are arguably unjust per se, and given the racial inequalities of the criminal justice system, they have a clear disparate impact on the basis of race. I find it very difficult to believe that the U.S. Congress will extend a UBI to formerly incarcerated individuals, for example. In the unlikely event that Congress does, I fully suspect that many states would devise ways to ensure that those individuals' pay back the UBI in some fashion. For example, they could devise special assessments to compensate the state for the costs of their incarceration. In either case, the result would again be to create a pool of easily exploitable laborers - and again, a heavily racialized one.

This is of course not what UBI advocates want. But it again suggests that the policy may have less impact on low-wage workers than many would like. If the goal is to increase take-home pay and the quality of work, minimum wage hikes, and other due process rights will likely be far more effective.

Olivia Dinwiddie 22 (Faculty Fellow at the Saint Louis University School of Law), “THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF INCOME SECURITY DURING COVID-19 AND BEYOND,” 2022, The ABA Journal of Labor & Employment Law 36(2), pg 363-385

In the 2020 election cycle, Fight for $ 15 backed Amendment 2 on the Florida ballot, an initiative to raise Florida's minimum wage up from $ 8.56 an hour to $ 10 an hour by September 2021, and then an increase of an additional $ 1 per hour each year until 2026, incrementally bringing Florida's minimum wage to $ 15 an hour over the next five years. 112 The result? Coming from "a red state with two Republican Senators, a Republican-controlled state legislature, and a Republican governor who opposed the minimum wage hike," it might be surprising that Amendment 2 passed with sixty percent of the vote. 113

Derenoncourt, Montialoux, Bahn and 20 [Ellora Derenoncourt; Ellora Derenoncourt is an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University and a member of the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Economics, he received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Claire Montialoux is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Montialoux earned her Ph.D. in economics from CREST in Paris, France. Her research interests include topics in labor economics, public finance, and political economy, Kate Bahn is the chief economist at The Urban Institute. Previously, she was the director of labor market policy and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her areas of research include gender, race, and ethnicity in the labor market, care work, and monopsonistic labor markets. Before Equitable Growth, Bahn was an economist at the Center for American Progress, and she served as the executive vice president and secretary for the International Association for Feminist Economics. Bahn received her Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.; 10/29/20; “Why minimum wages are a critical tool for achieving racial justice in the U.S. labor market”; https://equitablegrowth.org/why-minimum-wages-are-a-critical-tool-for-achieving-racial-justice-in-the-u-s-labor-market/]

A higher federal minimum wage would help regional wage dispersion and reduce the racial wage gap In the United States, earnings across states and territories range from the highest median wage of $35.74 in the District of Columbia to $15 in Mississippi to the lowest median wage of $10.13 in Puerto Rico. This is due to a wide variety of factors, including differences city and state minimum wage statutes above the federal minimum wage and industrial composition between states that influence median earnings in those states. Twenty-nine states boast minimum wages today that are higher than the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and 48 localities have adopted minimum wages higher than their state minimum wage or the federal minimum wage. Wages are also lower in states that have so called right-to-work laws and have lower union density. These states also tend to have more resistance to minimum wage increases. A higher federal minimum wage would help establish a floor across the nation, rather than institutionalize regional wage dispersion. Variations in wages across states and regions immediately lead to arguments over whether a higher federal minimum wage will actually harm workers in states with lower median wages, since the increase to the minimum wage would be a more substantial relative increase, compared to states that have independently raised their minimum wages above the federal floor. But as Derenoncourt and Montialoux’s research on the history of the federal minimum wage increase in 1967 shows, a significant national wage increase may be sustainable since the expansion of minimum wages to previously uncovered industries was, in effect, an infinite increase above the prior minimum of $0. The ability to significantly increase minimum wages without roiling U.S. regional labor markets is further supported by additional research. This research finds that increases of nearly 40 percent in the federal minimum wage, which would be similar in magnitude to the increases in the minimum wage that Seattle enacted between 2013 and 2016, would likely not have had a disemployment effect at the time on a national scale while also alleviating the worst earnings losses experienced during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and afterward. This finding points to the conclusion that a higher minimum wage would be an effective tool for mitigating the racially disparate negative economic consequences of the coronavirus recession, too. A higher federal minimum wage would reduce poverty rates for Black and Latinx families Black and Latinx workers are significantly more likely to be paid poverty-level wages than White workers. This is why minimum wage levels are an especially important tool for raising the earnings and decreasing the economic precarity of the working poor. And it is no surprise that states with the highest poverty rates are also among those that have not independently increased their minimum wage above the federal floor. Amid the coronavirus recession, millions of families fell into poverty after the financial relief provided by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act largely diminished with the expiration of the $600 plus-up in unemployment benefits at the end of July. These patterns will persist unless robust and inclusive economic policies, including an increased federal minimum wage, are part of the efforts to rebuild the economy centering racial justice. Furthermore, the real value of the federal minimum wage declined beginning in the late 1970s to the late 1980s, just as the convergence of the racial wage gap began to stutter. Currently, the minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, when it rose from $6.55 per hour to its current level of $7.25 per hour. In fact, the highest value of the minimum wage was at the time of the 1967 expansion. At that time, the federal minimum wage was nearly $10 per hour in 2017 dollars. (See Figure 2.) Expansion in minimum wage coverage and real values of the minimum wage, 1938-2018 (2017 dollars) The U.S. economy, of course, is much larger and more productive than it was in the 1960s, yet low-wage workers are not sharing in those gains. Had the 1968 minimum wage kept up with inflation and productivity growth, it would actually be $24 per hour today. Raising the minimum wage would turn back the declining real value of the minimum wage, reduce racial wage gaps as long as Black and Latinx workers are more likely to be low-wage workers, and reduce the higher likelihood of poverty for Black and Latinx families.

Levitz 23 [Eric Levitz; Eric Levitz is a features writer for Intelligencer. He covers politics and economics; 5/13/23; “New Study Finds a High Minimum Wage Creates Jobs”; https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/new-study-finds-a-high-minimum-wage-creates-jobs.html]

In fact, not only did these historically large minimum wage hikes fail to put all fast food workers out of job, but a new study indicates that they actually induced job growth. In “High Minimum Wages and the Monopsony Puzzle,” a team of economists at the University of California, Berkeley examined 47 large U.S. counties where the minimum wage had reached $15 an hour by the first quarter of 2021, and compared their wage levels and employment figures to those of similar counties that hadn’t raised the minimum wage since 2009. They focused specifically on fast-food workers, so as to avoid the complexities introduced by the tipped-wages common among servers at more upscale restaurants. Their results will shock Saltsman and his ideological sympathizers. First, raising the minimum wage successfully increased hourly pay for workers in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution without reducing wages for those in the middle. Had New York and California failed to pass minimum wage increases, this narrowing of the gap between the bottom and middle rungs of the income ladder would not have occurred. Second, the implications for employment were very slightly positive: Counties that enacted minimum wages saw more job growth, not less. Now, a conservative economist might counter that one reason why these minimum wage hikes didn’t increase unemployment is that New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles already had fairly high market wages, and saw considerable “natural” wage growth over this period. If researchers had focused narrowly on the impact of state-level minimum-wage hikes on relatively low-wage counties in upstate New York or inland California, they probably would have discovered substantial employment effects. Happily, the Berkeley economists thought of this. To correct for the possibilities 1) that high-wage cities are disproportionately likely to enact large minimum wage increases and 2) that high market wages attenuate the employment implications of high minimum wages, they isolated the impact of state-level minimum wages on counties that had neither enacted local minimum wage increases nor enjoyed above-average market wages. When they narrowed their lens, the researchers did in fact find that the employment impacts of minimum wage hikes became more profound: Rather than producing a slight increase in job growth, high minimum wages were associated with substantial increases in employment.

Center for American Progress 18 (independent, nonpartisan public policy research organization), “Blueprint for the 21st Century; A Plan for Better Jobs and Stronger Communities,” 05/14/2018, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/blueprint-21st-century/#:~:text=The%20Blueprint%20for%20the%2021st%20Century%2C%20or%20Jobs%20Blueprint%2C%20proposes,of%20bargaining%20power%20of%20those

Raising the minimum wage can also help boost the economy. There is increasing evidence that the U.S. labor market does not actually reflect the textbook case of a perfectly competitive market, where wages are set by the market so that employees are paid wages that closely mirror their productivity.260 Instead, firms have market power and can, to some extent, determine the wage they will pay instead of taking wage levels determined by the market—also known as labor market monopsony. Under monopsony, firms can choose to keep wages artificially lower than they would be in a competitive market. This keeps employment and output lower than it would be if employers lacked market power but allows for higher firm profits due to paying lower wages. When monopsony exists in labor markets, wage increases—whether caused by raising the minimum wage, reductions of barriers to entry for firms, limiting noncompete agreements, or collective bargaining—can actually serve to boost employment and output.

Brishen Rogers 17 (Associate Professor, Temple University Beasley School of Law), “What the Minimum Wage Debate Gets Wrong,” 08/03/2017, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brishen-rogers-min-wage/

But as the late Iris Young put it, “the subject of social justice is wider than distribution.” A just state will not simply guarantee equal rights and a fair distribution of material resources, but will also combat pernicious forms of “private” power that lead to oppression and rigid status hierarchies. Young is far from alone. Elizabeth Anderson has argued that an egalitarian politics must ensure “equal citizen[ship] in a democratic state,” Martin O’Neill has argued that it must eliminate “stigmatizing differences in status,” and Nick Bromell has defended the “democratic value of dignity.” For now, call this an ideal of “equal economic citizenship.”