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"Minimum wage law"
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Living wage : regulatory solutions to informal and precarious work in global supply chains
This book is driven by a quest to re-regulate work to reduce informality and inequality, and promote a living wage for more people across the world. It presents the findings of a multidisciplinary study in four countries of varying wealth and development, exploring why people become trapped in precarious work. The accounts describe the impact of supply chain governance, trade agreements, internal and between-country migration, legal factors, as well as the socio-economic characteristics and outlooks of the workers. 0In a unique approach, the chapters describe existing labour regulation measures that have succeeded, but which have to date attracted little scholarly attention. Building on these existing innovations, the book proposes a new international labour law which would incrementally increase the wages of the poor and regulate precarious work in global supply chains.
Book
Minimum Wage Policy in Great Britain and the United States
In a thorough and well-documented study of the American and British experience with minimum wage legislation, Prof. Jerold Waltman describes and analyzes the operation of current minimum wage policies and politics in both countries. Where are we and how did we get here? For Britain, he chronicles the events leading up to the enactment of the National Minimum Wage, and then discusses its subsequent evolution. Turning to the United States, he covers the almost moribund but still important federal minimum wage, and then traces developments on the state and local front. After that, he takes up the accomplishments of the living wage movement in each nation. He then assesses whether or not contemporary advocates for heightened minimum wages are laying the groundwork for a rejuvenated welfare state. Are they fashioning a public philosophy that will make the minimum wage once again a central feature of the welfare state, or are they heading down other paths? Providing a context within which to evaluate opposing policy proposals, he also discusses the general aspects of minimum wage policy and examines in detail the history of minimum wages in the two countries.
eBook
Bound by Our Constitution
What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British.
Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state--and a momentum for public policy--unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.
eBook
CREDIBLE RESEARCH DESIGNS FOR MINIMUM WAGE STUDIES
The authors assess the critique by Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2014) of minimum wage studies that found small effects on teen employment. Data from 1979 to 2014 contradict NSW; the authors show that the disemployment suggested by a model assuming parallel trends across U.S. states mostly reflects differential pre-existing trends. A data-driven LASSO procedure that optimally corrects for state trends produces a small employment elasticity (–0.01). Even a highly sparse model rules out substantial disemployment effects, contrary to NSW’s claim that the authors discard too much information. Synthetic controls do place more weight on nearby states—confirming the value of regional controls—and generate an elasticity of 20.04. A similar elasticity (–0.06) obtains from a design comparing contiguous border counties, which the authors show to be good controls. NSW’s preferred matching estimates mix treatment and control units, obtain poor matches, and find the highest employment declines where the relative minimum wage falls. These findings refute NSW’s key claims.
Journal Article
Turning a Blind Eye: Costly Enforcement, Credible Commitment and Minimum Wage Laws
In many countries, non-compliance with minimum wage legislation is widespread and authorities may be seen as having turned a blind eye to legislation they have themselves passed. We show that turning a blind eye can indeed be an equilibrium phenomenon with ex post credibility, in a model of minimum wage policy with imperfect competition, imperfect enforcement and imperfect commitment. Since credible enforcement requires costly ex post transfer of income from employers to workers, a government concerned only with efficiency but not with distribution is shown, paradoxically, to be unable to credibly elicit efficiency improvements via a minimum wage reform.
Journal Article
Bound by our Constitution
What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British.
eBook
Fairness Perceptions and Reservation Wages—the Behavioral Effects of Minimum Wage Laws
In a laboratory experiment we show that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects' reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum wage leads to a rise in subjects' reservation wages which persists even after the minimum wage has been removed. Firms are therefore forced to pay higher wages after the removal of the minimum wage than before its introduction. As a consequence, the employment effects of removing the minimum wage are significantly smaller than are the effects of its introduction. The impact of minimum wages on reservation wages may also explain the anomalously low utilization of subminimum wages if employers are given the opportunity to pay less than a minimum wage previously introduced. It may further explain why employers often increase workers' wages after an increase in the minimum wage by an amount exceeding that necessary for compliance with the higher minimum. At a more general level, our results suggest that economic policy may affect people's behavior by shaping the perception of what is a fair transaction and by creating entitlement effects.
Journal Article
Waitresses in Action
In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a “differential” or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women’s exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women’s unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government’s decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women’s gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women’s equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period.
Journal Article
Minimum Wages, Labor Market Institutions, and Youth Employment: A Cross-National Analysis
The authors estimate the employment effects of changes in national minimum wages using a pooled cross-section time-series data set comprising 17 OECD countries for the period 1975-2000. The average effects they find are consistent with the view that minimum wages cause employment losses among youths. However, the evidence also shows considerable variation across countries. In particular, disemployment effects of minimum wages appear to be smaller in countries that have subminimum wage provisions for youths. Regarding other labor market policies and institutions, the authors find that more restrictive labor standards and higher union coverage strengthen the disemployment effects of minimum wages, while employment protection laws and active labor market policies designed to bring unemployed individuals into the work force help to offset these effects. Overall, the disemployment effects of minimum wages are strongest in the countries with the least regulated labor markets.
Journal Article
The Highs and Lows of the Minimum Wage Effect: A Time‐Series Cross‐Section Study of the Canadian Law
We examine the effects of minimum wage legislation in Canada over the period 1975–93. For teenagers we find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with roughly a 2.5% decrease in employment. We also find that this result is driven by low frequency variation in the data. At high frequencies the elasticity is positive and insignificant. The difference in the elasticity across the bandwidth has implications for the interpretation of employment dynamics as a result of minimum wage policy and experimental design in minimum wage studies. It also provides a simple reconciliation of the “new minimum wage research,” which reports very small negative, or positive, elasticities.
Journal Article