CRITICS SAY $15 MINIMUM WAGE WILL HURT BUSINESS, RAISE UNEMPLOYMENT

“ ‘Fifteen [$15 minimum wage] is going to be extremely difficult for retailers to work into their business model,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. He said Internet competitors were already hurting many retailers, and ‘now you have the Legislature putting an additional burden on brick-and-mortar stores.’

“David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, estimated that raising the state’s minimum to $15 would reduce employment among the least skilled by 5 percent to 10 percent. Critics of minimum-wage increases predict that workers will be replaced by automation and that businesses will need to raise prices, hurting sales and causing more layoffs. ‘There’s no question that a minimum-wage increase will help more people than it hurts,’ he said. ‘But it takes a lot of people getting a $300 raise to offset someone losing their job.’”

Steven Greenhouse, “How the $15 Minimum Wage Went for Laughable to Viable,” The New York Times, April 1,2016. Steven Greenhouse, a visiting researcher at the Russell Sage Foundation, is a former labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times and the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.