Many business groups counter that increasing the minimum wage will hurt small businesses, already beleaguered by the pandemic. More than 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently or for the long term during the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association.
Increasing the minimum wage could lead employers to lay off some workers in order to pay others more, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine.
“There’s a ton of research that says increasing minimum wages can cause some job loss,” he said. “Plenty workers are helped, but some are hurt.”
A 2019 Congressional Budget Office study found that a $15 federal minimum wage would increase pay for 17 million workers who earned less than that and potentially another 10 million workers who earned slightly more. According to the study’s median estimate, it would cause 1.3 million other workers to lose their jobs.
In New York, State Senate Republicans had urged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, to halt increases that went into effect on Thursday, arguing that they could amount to “the final straw” for some small businesses.
While increases to the minimum wage beyond a certain point could lead to job losses, Ms. Bahn of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth argued that “we are nowhere near that point.”
Economic research has found that recent minimum-wage increases have not had caused huge job losses. In a 2019 study, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that wages had increased sharply for leisure and hospitality workers in New York counties bordering Pennsylvania, which had a lower minimum, while employment growth continued. In many cases, higher minimum wages are rolled out over several years to give businesses time to adapt.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/business/economy/minimum-wage-15-dollar-hour.html
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