Logically, it makes sense: If businesses have to pay their employees more, they would resort to raising the prices of their goods or services. And according to Ben Zipperer, an economist with expertise on low-wage labor markets at the Economic Policy Institute — which describes itself as nonpartisan — there’s some truth to it. Research has found that restaurants use small price increases as an adjustment to increased labor costs.
“There are a lot of other expenses when you run a business that have nothing to do with how many minimum wage workers you employ,” he said over Zoom. “For the typical restaurant, labor costs are only 20%-25% — minimum wage labor costs are even less than that. So when the minimum wage goes up, yes, you may need to raise prices a little bit, but you’re going to raise them much less than the actual minimum wage increase.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator supports this conclusion. The tool calculates the income level that types of families in different locations need to have a “modest but adequate standard of living,” Zipperer said. That means being able to afford renting an apartment, transportation, food — and for families with kids, day care.
Today Show
March 4, 2021
Democrats have identified a boost to the federal minimum wage as a cornerstone of their economic recovery plan. The proposed wage increase, however, is seeing growing resistance from all sides, which threatens to hold up the bill in the Senate. The minimum wage rate has stood at $7.25 an hour since 2009. By boosting the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, 32 million US workers, or 21% of the workforce, would see their hourly wage lifted, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
CNET
March 4, 2021
The Wall Street Journal
March 4, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, minimum wage increases in the late 1960s accounted for 20% of the decrease in the Black/white earnings gap in the years that followed. Concomitantly, failures to increase the minimum wage substantially after 1979 account for almost half of the increase in inequality between women at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution.
Philadelphia Gay News
March 4, 2021
Logically, it makes sense: If businesses have to pay their employees more, they would resort to raising the prices of their goods or services. And according to Ben Zipperer, an economist with expertise on low-wage labor markets at the Economic Policy Institute — which describes itself as nonpartisan — there’s some truth to it. Research has found that restaurants use small price increases as an adjustment to increased labor costs.
“There are a lot of other expenses when you run a business that have nothing to do with how many minimum wage workers you employ,” he said over Zoom. “For the typical restaurant, labor costs are only 20%-25% — minimum wage labor costs are even less than that. So when the minimum wage goes up, yes, you may need to raise prices a little bit, but you’re going to raise them much less than the actual minimum wage increase.”
The Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator supports this conclusion. The tool calculates the income level that types of families in different locations need to have a “modest but adequate standard of living,” Zipperer said. That means being able to afford renting an apartment, transportation, food — and for families with kids, day care.
Today Show
March 4, 2021
1A
March 3, 2021
That, said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, is “a big contrast” from the past.
“Pre-Trump, both Democrats and Republicans, for a couple of decades, put in place trade policies that were definitely not worker-centric,” Lee said. Instead, they were, “I would say, corporate-centric.”
She said former President Donald Trump was able to harness latent resentment around jobs and industries that were lost over the years, and that is clearly something the Biden administration has tuned in to.
Marketplace
March 3, 2021
Reverend Barber mentions EPI study.
MSNBC
March 3, 2021
Our data is used in a chart.
Washington Post
March 3, 2021