Seattle seeks to push minimum wage to $15!

[DC Al Fine]

Let the shift to capital from labour begin

[DC Al Fine]

My condolences to the soon to be unemployed young and minorities if this goes through.

Yea.  I guess ownership is just going to flip all those burgers and work all those registers themselves.  Why not?  I mean, they're so great and so wonderful and so amazing because they make all that money and we all want to be just like them!

Nah, what they'd do is make do with less. Fire as many employees as they could while still keeping the place open, raise prices where they could, and maybe shut down a day or cut back on the hours when they're open. Expecting them to just take it and pay higher wages without cutting back would be naive.

I've put in plenty of time in food service. Management already schedules as few people as possible. They don't have people on the clock just for the heck of it or out of benevolence. They always have as few as possible to meet demand. The point of this exercise is to increase demand, so that management will, in turn, have to hire more people. Labor usually runs <20% of sales, but that includes at least one salaried manager. Hourly folks are at most 15% of sales. It's not like a Big Mac would need to cost $10 to cover the difference. There are several countries with a high minimum wage, and most have notably lower unemployment than we do. To say nothing of all the tax money we have to spend to help these folks and all the shady crap they have to do to make ends meet.

That assumes that there's a fixed amount of labour to meet demand. Busineses don't need to use the minimum amount of labour to meet demand, they'll use the least expensive combination of labour and capital to meet demand. i.e. You'll see more of those auto checkout things at the grocery store.

On another note, at $15/hr, this minimum wage will affect a lot more than the typical minimum wage jobs. Call centre jobs, clerks, and the like will be affected as well.

[DC Al Fine]

This thread is pathetic. Yes a rising minimum wage could cost job, if Seattle was dominated by low wage and low skill production jobs. Instead most people who work for minimum wage is in the service sector, and service job are where people need it. The suggestion that McDonald would move their shops from the more densely populated parts of Seattle to outside the city limit because a raise in minimum wage are as pathetic as it's idiotic. "The minimum wage is rising, let move away from our customers to a thinly populated area, that will teach them!".

1) As Ernest suggested, most of this movement will happen on the margin, with most of the movement being around the outskirts of the city. Obviously downtown Seattle McDonald's won't move, but just inside the city limits McD's might become just outside the city limits McD's

2) There is a huge incentive for low wage employers to shift from labour to capital i.e. self serve pop machines, auto-checkouts etc.

3) At $15/hr, this increase affects a lot more than fast food workers & grocery store clerks.