Mark D. Brenner

Measuring the Impact of Living Wage Laws: A Critical Appraisal of David Neumark's How Living Wage Laws Affect Low-Wage Workers and Low-Income Families

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), David Neumark (2002) finds that living wage laws have brought substantial wage increases for a high proportion of workers in cities that have passed these laws. He also finds that living wage laws significantly reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers. We argue, first, that by truncating his sample to concentrate his analysis on low-wage workers, Neumark’s analysis is vulnerable to sample selection bias, and that his results are not robust to alternative specifications that utilize quantile regression to avoid such selection bias. In addition, we argue that Neumark has erroneously utilized the CPS data set to derive these results. We show that, with respect to both wage and employment effects, Neumark’s results are not robust to more accurate alternative classifications as to which workers are covered by living wage laws. We also show that the wage effects that Neumark observes for all U.S. cities with living wage laws can be more accurately explained as resulting from effects on sub-minimum wage workers in Los Angeles alone of a falling unemployment rate and rising minimum wage in that city.

Intended versus unintended consequences: Evaluating the New Orleans living wage ordinance

In February 2002, citizens of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, endorsed with a 63 percent majority a ballot initiative that proposed to raise the minimum wage within the city by one dollar above the federal minimum wage. If this proposal were implemented, it would mean that all workers in New Orleans, with the exception of those in job categories that are explicitly exempted from the law, would have to be paid at least

Women and Class: What Has Happened in Forty Years?

6.15 an hour, 19.4 percent above the current national minimum wage of

Intended vs. Unintended Consequences: Evaluating the New Orleans Living Wage Proposal

5.15. The New Orleans law would also mean that workers within the city would get raises each time the federal minimum increased in order for New Orleans workers to maintain its one dollar increment above the federal minimum. Despite overwhelming support from New Orleans voters, this measure will not be implemented as law, at least in the current political environment. In 1997, the Louisiana State Legislature had passed a law prohibiting New Orleans from implementing a living wage ordinance and, after a many-layered legal battle, in September 2002, the State Supreme Court upheld the Legislatures overriding authority in this matter.

Edited Transcript of Living Wage Conference Call, February 11, 2004

Forty years ago this summer, a group of women and men came together to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOWs mission was to fight for gender equality through education and litigation. While not the only group fighting for womens rights, it quickly became one of the best known and largest. Today, NOW has over a half million members and over 500 chapters throughout the country. NOW was founded at a time when women were entering the paid labor force in increasing numbers. NOW had its critics: many said it ignored race and class, others said it was too focused on liberal feminist legal strategies like passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Numerous other organizations representing working-class women and women of color developed, including the Coalition of Labor Union Women, 9to5, the National Organization of Working Women, and the Combahee River Collective. Together with a myriad of other groups these organizations helped build the womens movement of the 1960s and 1970sThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

'Flexible' Work Practices and Occupational Safety and Health: Exploring the Relationship Between Cumulative Trauma Disorders and Workplace Transformation

In February 2002, New Orleans endorsed with a 63 percent majority a ballot initiative to establish a citywide minimum wage one dollar above the federal minimum. We surveyed New Orleans businesses in 1999 to estimate this proposal’s costs. We present the main results from this survey. We then evaluate five means through which firms might adjust to cost increases—raising prices, improving productivity, redistribution of firms’ income, layoffs/labor displacements, and relocations. Because we find that the cost increases will be small for most firms—i.e. one percent or less of these firms’ operating budgets—we conclude that changes in prices, productivity and distribution are the likely primary means through which firms will absorb these costs. We also consider the likely benefits of the measure to some New Orleans businesses through an expenditure multiplier.

Workplace transformation and the rise in cumulative trauma disorders: Is there a connection?

Bartik: The purpose of this is to have a discussion on the living wage issue that will accompany this collection of articles on the living wage in Economic Development Quarterly. What I envision is not something where we would nitpick fine points of the articles but instead a talk about some of the broader issues that are raised by the articles and by the entire living wage issue. Let’s first talk a little bit about what people see are the most important areas on which this research on the living wage is really in agreement and what are the important areas where we really do disagree, and I’ll leave it open to anyone to start out on that topic. Pollin: I’ll speak up. I think there are some basic factual things that we can all agree on. The first fact that we could all agree on is that the national minimum wage at

Economic Analysis of Santa Monica Living Wage Proposal

5.15 is roughly 40% below where it was in real terms in 1968. If somebody walked into McDonald’s in 1968 and McDonald’s was obeying the law, they would pay someone somewhere on the order of

The Economic Impact of Living Wage Ordinances

8.30 to

Economic Analysis of the New Orleans Minimum Wage Proposal

8.40 an hour in today’s dollars, depending on how you measure inflation, as a minimum wage. The sharp decline in the minimum wage reflects broader trends in society: wage stagnation or decline for most nonsupervisory workers, increased inequality in wage income and wealth, and a basic problem of creating decent jobs. These are some facts that not too many people would disagree with. Yelowitz: The decent jobs thing seems more controversial. Pollin: Okay, I’ll pull that one off the list of agreements. If we can agree at least on some of these basic things about the minimum wage, I think we might agree also that there are real concerns, which I share, as to the efficacy of the minimum wage as a policy intervention or variations of the minimum wage such as the living wage ordinance. These would be the effects on employment, layoffs, and displacement. I think that we agree that there are concerns about the effects of living wage laws on business relocations. We can agree that there are potential effects on government budgets that may be harmful. I think that this group can broadly agree that we would adjudicate these questions through empirical methods, that there isn’t a theoretical model out there that is going to tell us exactly what is right and what is wrong. We are all committed to various forms of empirical research. It’s fair to say that up until at least a couple of years ago, the types of research we did was based on prospective evidence or modeling. We increasingly now use retrospective evidence, like actually observing what happened when living wage laws were implemented. This should be increasingly the focus of anyone researching living wage laws. Toikka: Bob, it’s hard to disagree with much of what you said because it’s so broad, talking about potential effects and so forth. What I’m struck with is how difficult this is as a research question. As someone who was trying to fund living wage research for a number of years, I find the typical response in academia is either “I’m not going to be able to get that published” or “I don’t have