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40 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 8 Oct \ on: UC Berkeley Economists’ Study: Food Prices Steady After California’s $20/hr wage econ
That's because they all fired their staff and replaced them with robots. Haha
I am of course joking but you can't measure this in months. It takes years to truly measure the impact. In Canada in 2017 we had a big jump in min wage. The first 6-12 months our business just treaded water to keep things as is while we assessed how it would impact the market. In the end we ended up passing some onto the customers, reducing hours a bit and eating some of it out of profit margin and tried to make it up elsewhere. Fast food restaurants will automate some of these jobs out but it will take a couple years for that to play out.
You can come to whatever conclusion you want with these studies. I have first hand experience as a business owner and ultimately it doesn't really help employees as much as "economists" suggest. I even had employs complaining their pay didn't go up at all because the higher wages moved them to the next tax bracket.
As far as I can tell, it's not peer reviewed yet. It's a "working paper", meaning a paper circulated for feedback before publication in a peer reviewed journal.
News outlets have to stop calling a study "published by Berkeley" if it hasn't been peer reviewed.
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🤣 Article says no job loses, too. Kind of hard to believe business owners absorbed the increase, though.
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More likely they would reduce hours rather than fire people. You still need people to run your business. We didn't fire anyone but we did start reducing hours and as people left for other jobs we would replace them with people who would get a few hours less per week.
If I had someone working p/t 24 hours a week and they left for another job. I might give the new hire 20 hours. That's the job now, get it done. You are making more you should produce more. Didn't always work out well but customers also had to understand if they weren't will to absorb a price increase then we needed to reduce our labour costs, it couldn't all come out of profit.
It was a very challenging time for a couple years. Spent way too much time hiring and training people and fighting fires rather than growing the business.
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