What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle
&gt; But a new paper by the same authors (Sci-Hub mirror) shows that the rising minimum wage generated major increases for the workers who had the most hours, whose hours were only cut a little, but still came out ahead thanks to the wage increase; workers with fewer hours saw no financial harm from the rising minimum wage, working fewer hours and bringing home the same sum; and they found some harm to people who had the smallest number of hours) (which may actually reflect stronger demand for workers and fewer workers in this category of very-low-hour work).<p>Is this actually reversing the claim? Or just making a narrower claim that the minimum wage hike increased <i>some</i> workers. Most claims around the negative effects of minimum wage say that workers will lose employment - not that those workers who remain employed will suffer. By restricting the conclusion to &quot;the workers who had the most hours, whose hours were only cut a little&quot; essentially dodges the question of whether the change benefited workers as a whole.<p>Ultimately, though, this is a subjective questions. If you have 10 workers, making $12.50 an hour and if you had the option of making 9 of them get $15.00&#x2F;hr but one of them gets fired is it a good outcome? The pool of workers are making a greater amount of money (it &quot;breaks even&quot; as other commenters have put it), but does that $2.50 an hour increase for 9 workers offset the negative of one of them getting fired? Maybe getting fired has less tangible effects that make the net increase not worth it. That fired worker may end up on the streets. Is instability of income is a greater problem than low income? I&#x27;m not saying there is any right answer here, my whole point is that it&#x27;s subjective to determine what outcome is better.