Seattle's Painful Lesson on the Road to a $15 Minimum Wage

In the summer of 2014, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a bill increasing the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. “No city or state has gone this far. We go into uncharted territory,” said council member Sally Clark. The City of Seattle, to its credit, actually made some effort to chart the waters as they went, funding an ideologically diverse research team at the University of Washington whose members range from Jacob Vigdor, who is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, to Hillary Wething, a graduate student who used to be a fellow at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.

Since the law raised the wage in stages, they studied it in stages. The results of the first jump, from $9.47 to $11 an hour, were released last year, and seemed to show that the effects on earnings were pretty small -- an increase of about $72 every three months -- and that low-wage employment declined slightly. In the long-running battle over the effects of the minimum wage, this paper didn’t offer much ammunition for either side, and thus occasioned relatively little excitement in the wonkosphere.