In A Measure of Fairness, Pollin, Brenner, Wicks-Lim and Luce report their research on two kinds of wage laws: state minimum wage laws, and municipal laws that set a living wage higher than the federal and state minimums.
In 2007, Congress mandated that the federal minimum wage rise to $7.25 an hour by 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have raised their minimum wages higher than that; seven states and D.C. have a minimum of at least $9.00 (see map and data)
Municipal laws that set a wage higher than both the federal and state minimums are usually narrow in scope, applying only to businesses with municipal contracts. San Francisco and Santa Fe are two cities with broader living-wage laws.
The authors identify two different ways of defining a reasonable living wage, one focusing more on benefits and the other on costs:
First, what is a wage rate that is minimally adequate in various communities, in the sense that it enables workers earning that minimum wage and the family members depending on the income produced by this worker to lead lives that are at least minimally secure in a material sense? What wage rate, correspondingly, can allow for a minimally decent level of dignity for such workers and their families?
The second, equally legitimate, question…asks, How high can a minimum wage threshold be set before it creates excessive cost burdens for businesses, such that the “law of unintended consequences” becomes operative?
High on the list of unintended consequences would be job losses if businesses chose to lay off workers or leave a city or state rather than accept higher wage costs.
The authors also identify two ways of studying these issues: prospective research that tries to anticipate the consequences of proposed laws, and retrospective research assessing the actual consequences of existing laws. Except for the last section, the findings described below are from prospective studies.
Benefits to workers and families
Who benefits from wage laws? The answer might seem to be obvious, but some critics have questioned the need for such laws on the grounds that the lowest-wage workers are rarely major breadwinners, but are often younger workers whose wages will probably go up before long anyway. The authors find that the laws primarily benefit the people they are intended to benefit: low-income workers who are “well into their long-term employment trajectories,” with a high proportion of primary breadwinners and other major contributors to family income. In addition, the laws have important ripple effects, tending to raise the wages of workers who are already a little above the legal minimum. For example, the authors estimated that 20% of the people of Arizona would receive some income benefit from a proposed minimum-wage increase, including workers and members of their families.
Several of the research reports are from studies of a proposed city-wide minimum of $10.75 for Santa Monica. It was passed by the city council in 2001 but repealed by the voters in 2002. In order to evaluate its probable effect on incomes, the authors gave careful consideration to poverty thresholds and basic economic needs. First, they drew on research by the National Research Council on more realistic poverty thresholds than those established by the federal government. “The commission’s report…presented eight separate studies using different methodologies for coming up with alternative poverty measures. If we simply calculate the average of these eight alternative poverty lines, this average is 42 percent above the official poverty line.” Considering that the cost of living in the Los Angeles area is about 25% above the national average, they decided to use 160% of the federal poverty line as the poverty threshold for their research.
By that standard, a family consisting of one adult and two children would need an income over $21,475 to escape poverty, which corresponds to a full-time hourly wage of $10.32. A family with two adults and two children would need an income of $27,030, corresponding to a full-time hourly wage of $13.00 with only one adult employed. (All figures were in 1999 dollars, so would have to be somewhat higher today.)
The authors also drew on research by the California Budget Project, which constructed a “basic needs” budget for Los Angeles and other California regions. The CBP described this as “more than a ‘bare bones’ existence, yet covers only basic expenses, allowing little room for ‘extras’ such as college savings or vacations.” By that standard, a family with one adult and two children would need an income of $37,589, or a wage of $18.07 an hour. A family with two adults and two children would need a little less, $31,298, or a wage of $15.05, if one adult stayed home and provided child care. With both adults employed full-time, however, they would need $45,683 because of child care and other costs, but each job would only have to pay $10.98 an hour to generate that income.
To assess the impact of the proposed $10.75 hourly wage, the authors construct two very specific “prototypical family types.” The first is a three-person family whose primary breadwinner earns $8.00 an hour and contributes 70% of the family income. A raise to $10.75 increases the family income from $19,430 to $24,105, an increase of 24.1%. This takes the family from 10% below the adjusted Los Angeles poverty line to 12% above it. It also takes the family from 48% below the CBP “basic needs” budget to only 36% below it.
The second prototypical family is a four-person family with a low-wage worker earning $8.30 an hour and contributing 50% of the family income. A raise to $10.75 increases the family income from $29,880 to $34,290, an increase of 14.8%. (The other adult earner is not assumed to have an hourly rate low enough to be covered by the minimum-wage increase.) This takes the family from 12% above the adjusted Los Angeles poverty line to 29% above it. It also takes the family from 35% below the CBP “basic needs” budget to only 25% below it.
However, some of the increased income from higher wages would be offset by higher taxes and lost tax credits. (It wouldn’t be offset by loss of food stamps or medical benefits, since neither prototypical family was poor enough to qualify for those in the first place.) The authors calculate that the offsets amount to 40% of the income gains for the first family and 27% of the income gains for the second family.
Costs to business
Most legally mandated wage increases are not dramatic, and their impact is limited by the number of workers whose wages are already at or near the new minimum. Typical of the research reported here is the authors’ finding that a Santa Fe living-wage ordinance would increase average costs relative to business revenue by about 1%. The impact is often two or three times greater for businesses with more low-wage workers, especially in the food service and hotel industries.
Affected businesses can handle the added labor cost in many different ways. Perhaps the most obvious is to raise prices. Although that poses some risk of lost business, the damage is limited if the price increases are small, competitors are also raising their prices, consumers are interested in quality more than price, and possibly that consumers prefer to patronize businesses that treat their employees well, as some research indicates. In addition, some businesses, especially retail businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, may gain business because better-paid workers have more money to spend.
Another way that businesses absorb higher labor costs is through increased productivity. Higher wages tend to reduce turnover, which reduces the costs incurred in recruiting, selecting, hiring and training new workers. Based on their research in Santa Fe, the authors suggest that 40% of the cost of higher wages can be recovered in higher productivity.
Businesses can also absorb higher labor costs by redistributing income within the firm. This can be done in a rather subtle fashion, simply by letting low-wage workers have a larger share of productivity gains, while holding higher incomes steadier. Perhaps that is only fair, considering that the country has been doing the opposite for some time: “The fact that the minimum wage has been falling in inflation-adjusted collars while productivity has been rising means that profit opportunities have soared while low-wage workers have gotten nothing from the country’s productivity bounty.” If paying a higher wage forces a business to accept slightly lower profits, the damage to its competitive position is limited by the fact that its competitors may be facing the same problem.
Two more drastic responses to increased costs are to lay off workers or relocate to another city or state. The businesses most likely to relocate are those with a customer base that is not tied to a specific location, and with a substantial increase in labor costs. But many of the businesses that rely on low-income labor also have strong ties to a particular place, such as many restaurants and hotels.
The authors’ summary of their New Orleans research is typical of their conclusions:
Our results suggest that the New Orleans firms should be able to absorb most, if not all, of the increased costs of the proposed minimum wage ordinance through some combination of price and productivity increases or redistribution within the firm. This result flows most basically from the main finding of our survey research–that minimum wage cost increases will amount to about 0.9 percent of operating budgets for average firms in New Orleans and no more than 2.2 percent of operating budgets for the city’s restaurant industry, which is the industry with the highest cost increase. This also suggests that the incentive for covered firms to lay off low-wage employees or relocate outside the New Orleans city limits should be correspondingly weak.
Retrospective studies
In a few cases, the researchers were able to evaluate the effects of wage increases that had already been in effect for some time. Mark Brenner and Stephanie Luce studied the effects of wage ordinances in Boston, Hartford and New Haven covering businesses with city contracts. Critics had predicted that fewer companies would bid on city contracts, and the reduction in competition would result in higher costs for the city. In fact, there wasn’t much difference: The number of bidders went down in New Haven, but went up in Hartford and stayed the same in Boston. Businesses did not lay off workers, but adjusted to the higher wages mainly by accepting lower profit margins.
Brenner, Wicks-Lim and Pollin did a study comparing states with and without minimum-wage laws higher than the federal minimum. They found no adverse effects of higher minimum wages on employment.
Wicks-Lim and Pollin studied the effects of Santa Fe’s citywide minimum wage on job opportunities for low-wage workers. Aaron Yelowitz had reported that unemployment rose once other factors were statistically controlled. Wicks-Lim and Pollin found that employment actually held steady, but that the rate of unemployment was higher than expected only because more people came into the labor market looking for work. They came “precisely because there were more jobs and better jobs in Santa Fe than elsewhere.” Pollin also reminds us that the United States used to have a higher minimum wage (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in the 1960s than it has today, with no apparent damage to employment or productivity.
In general, this book supports the conclusion that raising wages for low-income workers brings at least modest benefits to workers, while imposing modest costs on employers and consumers. For workers, the benefits are partly offset by higher taxes and reduced benefits for the poor. For employers, the costs are partly offset by price increases, higher productivity, and redistribution of compensation among different levels of workers. Living-wage initiatives are one effective way of addressing extreme income inequality and poverty. They are not a cure-all, however, and other measures like progressive taxation and direct public assistance remain important as well.
Beneath the Surface 