“Killing Germs, Not Jobs”: A New Report Confirms That Business Fears About Paid Sick Day Laws Are Unfounded
Every time the idea of implementing a paid sick days law – which requires that workers earn paid time off to use when they fall ill – gets floated somewhere, the same thing occurs: Businesses and conservative lawmakers cry bloody murder about the effect the law will supposedly have on small businesses and job creators. Every mom and pop store will have to close, they say! Job creators will flee elsewhere to escape the job-killing mandate! Oh, the humanity! (Check out the Cry Wolf Project for some choice quotes.)
Reality, though, stubbornly refuses to conform to the script. For instance, when San Francisco adopted a paid sick days law in 2007, its job growth actually outperformed surrounding counties that did not have a similar law. (This isn’t to imply that having paid sick leave caused any job growth, just that it didn’t hurt either.) And a new report from the Center on Economic and Policy Research shows that Connecticut experienced much the same thing after becoming the first state to adopt a paid sick days law 18 months ago.
Gathered via both surveys and site visits, the Center’s data show businesses faced extremely modest costs – if any – due to the sick days law. As the Center’s Eileen Appelbaum, Ruth Milkman, Luke Elliott and Teresa Kroeger wrote:
Most employers reported a modest effect or no effect of the law on their costs or business operations; and they typically found that the administrative burden was minimal. … Despite strong business opposition to the law prior to its passage, a year and a half after its implementation, more than three-quarters of surveyed employers expressed support for the earned paid sick leave law.
Not only that, but the data show that “in the period since [Connecticut’s law] took effect, employment levels rose in key sectors covered by the law, such as hospitality and health services, while employment fell in manufacturing, which is exempt from the law.” Some job killer! Business warnings about employees abusing their sick leave also failed to come true.
On an economic level, this actually makes perfect sense. Sick employees coming to work and infecting others reduces productivity, as does the constant turnover if workers have to quit to recover from an illness or are fired for missing time while sick. In addition, most workers already have paid sick leave, so the disruptive power of applying it to the usually low-income, service sector workers who don’t is low. San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Jersey City and Washington, D.C. all have some form of paid sick leave requirement, and all of them continue to have functioning economies. Plus, paid sick day laws have the added benefit of cutting down on the transmission of diseases, including those of the decidedly deadly variety.
This report is actually the second knock this week to the notion that business regulation automatically increases costs and kills jobs. A Bloomberg News report yesterday noted that in the 15 years since Washington state voted to gradually increase its minimum wage, its job growth has outpaced the national average, with jobs even growing in the sectors thought particularly susceptible to a minimum wage hike, such as food services. Even the recent Congressional Budget Office report showing that a national minimum wage increase would cause some workers to drop out of the labor force or reduce their hours showed benefits that vastly outweigh any cost.
The moral of the story is this: The Econ 101 notion of more regulations or higher mandatory wages automatically translating into fewer jobs and higher business costs doesn’t actually hold true out in the real world. Paid sick days laws actually kill germs, not jobs.
By: Pat Garofalo, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2014
“The Real Job Killers”: Forget What Republicans Say, The Real Job Killers Are Lousy Jobs At Lousy Wages
House Speaker John Boehner says raising the minimum wage is “bad policy” because it will cause job losses.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says a minimum wage increase would be a job killer. Republicans and the Chamber also say unions are job killers, workplace safety regulations are job killers, environmental regulations are job killers, and the Affordable Care Act is a job killer. The California Chamber of Commerce even publishes an annual list of “job killers,” including almost any measures that lift wages or protect workers and the environment.
Most of this is bunk.
When in 1996 I recommended the minimum wage be raised, Republicans and the Chamber screamed it would “kill jobs.” In fact, in the four years after it was raised, the U.S. economy created more jobs than were ever created in any four-year period.
For one thing, a higher minimum wage doesn’t necessarily increase business costs. It draws more job applicants into the labor market, giving employers more choice of whom to hire. As a result, employers often get more reliable workers who remain longer – thereby saving employers at least as much money as they spend on higher wages.
A higher wage can also help build employee morale, resulting in better performance. Gap, America’s largest clothing retailer, recently announced it would boost its hourly wage to $10. Wall Street approved. “You treat people well, they’ll treat your customers well,” said Dorothy Lakner, a Wall Street analyst. “Gap had a strong year last year compared to a lot of their peers. That sends a pretty strong message to employees that, ‘we had a good year, but you’re going to be rewarded too.’”
Even when raising the minimum wage — or bargaining for higher wages and better working conditions, or requiring businesses to provide safer workplaces or a cleaner environment — increases the cost of business, this doesn’t necessarily kill jobs.
Most companies today can easily absorb such costs without reducing payrolls. Corporate profits now account for the largest percentage of the economy on record. Large companies are sitting on more than $1.5 trillion in cash they don’t even know what to do with. Many are using their cash to buy back their own shares of stock – artificially increasing share value by reducing the number of shares traded on the market.
Walmart spent $7.6 billion last year buying back shares of its own stock — a move that papered over its falling profits. Had it used that money on wages instead, it could have given its workers a raise from around $9 an hour to almost $15. Arguably, that would have been a better use of the money over the long-term – not only improving worker loyalty and morale but also giving workers enough to buy more goods from Walmart (reminiscent of Henry Ford’s pay strategy a century ago).
There’s also a deeper issue here. Even assuming some of these measures might cause some job losses, does that mean we shouldn’t proceed with them?
Americans need jobs, but we also need minimally decent jobs. The nation could create millions of jobs tomorrow if we eliminated the minimum wage altogether and allowed employers to pay workers $1 an hour or less. But do we really want to do that?
Likewise, America could create lots of jobs if all health and safety regulations were repealed, but that would subject millions of workers to severe illness and injury.
Lots of jobs could be added if all environmental rules were eliminated, but that would result in the kind of air and water pollution that many people in poor nations have to contend with daily.
If the Affordable Care Act were repealed, hundreds of thousands of Americans would have to go back to working at jobs they don’t want but feel compelled to do in order to get health insurance.
We’d create jobs, but not progress. Progress requires creating more jobs that pay well, are safe, sustain the environment, and provide a modicum of security. If seeking to achieve a minimum level of decency ends up “killing” some jobs, then maybe those aren’t the kind of jobs we ought to try to preserve in the first place.
Finally, it’s important to remember the real source of job creation. Businesses hire more workers only when they have more customers. When they have fewer customers, they lay off workers. So the real job creators are consumers with enough money to buy.
Even Walmart may be starting to understand this. The company is “looking at” whether to support a minimum wage increase. David Tovar, a Walmart spokesman, noted that such a move would increase the company’s payroll costs but would also put more money in the pockets of some of Walmart’s customers.
In other words, forget what you’re hearing from the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce. The real job killers in America are lousy jobs at lousy wages.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, February 28, 2014
“Contrary To Popular Belief”: In Real Life, Higher Minimum Wage Doesn’t Kill Jobs
Economists and government officials endlessly speculate on the impact of raising the $7.25 federal minimum wage.
Most recently, a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour might cut employment by 500,000 workers. That is balanced by the projection that higher pay could also boost about 900,000 people out of poverty.
But some places in the U.S. already have real-life experience with raising their minimum wage.
Washington state, for example, has the nation’s highest rate, $9.32 an hour. Despite dire predictions that increases would cripple job growth and boost unemployment, this isn’t what happened.
At 6.6 percent, the unemployment rate in December was a click below the U.S. average, 6.7 percent, and the state’s job creation is sturdy, 16th in the nation, according to a report by Stateline, the news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
In Seattle, where metropolitan-area unemployment is 5.3 percent, that $9.32 sounds so yesterday. The mayor and city council are practically in a race to see who can move faster and with more gusto to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Safe bet: They will make a move by summer. Seattle could then surpass San Francisco, another city that fancies its role as a laboratory. The City by the Bay’s minimum wage is the highest (not counting airport workers), at $10.74 an hour, and officials are discussing a new rate of about $15.
While Seattle and San Francisco are unrepresentative of the nation, they have helped pressure their states to raise their minimum wages. Fifteen years ago, Washington voters approved an initiative giving the lowest-paid workers a raise almost every year, with increases now tied to inflation. Those increases produced the highest U.S. rate, although California could lap that in 2016 when it hits $10 an hour. Washington governor Jay Inslee and Democratic legislators have been pushing to raise the statewide amount to almost $11 or $12 an hour, but that now seems unlikely this year.
Critics of the voter-approved increase in Washington said it would harm the economy and cause businesses to flee to lower-wage states, such as neighboring Idaho, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. That didn’t happen, as the experience of Washington counties bordering Idaho show.
At the Olive Garden in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, the spaghetti and meatballs are about $1.70 cheaper than at the Olive Garden about a half-hour away in Spokane, Washington. That may be explained by Idaho’s lower minimum wage, taxes, land costs or something else. A restaurant spokeswoman would only cite vague costs of products and of doing business in various locations. Whatever it is hasn’t stopped Olive Garden from operating two restaurants in the Spokane area.
Bruce Beckett, government affairs director of the Washington Restaurant Association, said he wasn’t aware of any restaurants bailing out of Spokane for Idaho. He said he had heard anecdotes about local restaurateurs buying cheaper supplies in Idaho — fairly small potatoes.
Two bakeries moved across the border a few years ago, said Robin Toth of Greater Spokane Incorporated, a Chamber of Commerce and economic-development organization, but she said those businesses cited Washington’s taxes, not its higher minimum wage, as the reason for doing so.
Yes, but what about businesses that can be based anywhere?
The Spokane chamber group had heard of one telemarketing company that had considered an operation in Spokane, then chose El Paso, Texas, instead. The company mentioned the higher minimum wage.
To be fair, it is difficult to measure what didn’t happen: the businesses that didn’t locate in the state, the job growth that vanished, the young people who missed opportunities. There is fear that adults are taking some jobs from teenagers. The state teenage unemployment rate is about 30.6 percent, compared with a national figure of 22.9 percent.
But over the years, states have raised the minimum wage above the federal level without major harm.
A study at the University of California at Berkeley compared hundreds of pairs of adjacent counties in states with differing minimum-wage rates and concluded that a higher minimum wage didn’t significantly affect employment.
“We found in these cross-border comparisons that employment did not decline on the higher wage side of the border,’’ said Michael Reich, one of three authors.
The research found that employers in places in the U.S. where the minimum wage was higher, as in eastern Washington, had an easier time recruiting and retaining workers, said Reich, who directs Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
“As a result, they saved on hiring and turnover costs, as well as the costs of not being able to fill all their vacancies,” he said. “Increased labor supply, together with small price increases in restaurants, could explain why we did not find employment moving to lower wage areas, such as in western Idaho.’’
Minimum-wage workers are younger, often single, perhaps working two jobs in leisure, hospitality, food preparation and serving. A single individual working full time and being paid Washington’s minimum wage earns more than the federal poverty level.
That changes if the earner is supporting a family. Maybe Seattle’s ascent into $15 territory — along with a few other cities — will eventually give Washington and other states the political will to follow this path. There is little real-life evidence to discourage them.
By: Joni Balter, The National Memo, February 24, 2014
“Health, Work, Lies”: Losing Your Job And Choosing To Work Less Aren’t The Same Thing
On Wednesday, Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said the obvious: losing your job and choosing to work less aren’t the same thing. If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, “we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
And now you know everything you need to know about the latest falsehood in the ever-mendacious campaign against health reform.
Let’s back up. On Tuesday, the budget office released a report on the fiscal and economic outlook that included two appendices devoted to effects of the Affordable Care Act.
The first appendix attracted almost no attention from the news media, yet it was actually a bombshell. Much public discussion of health reform is still colored by Obamacare’s terrible start, and presumes that the program remains a disaster. Some of us have pointed out that things have been going much better lately — but now it’s more or less official. The budget office predicts that first-year sign-ups in the health exchanges will fall only modestly short of expectations, and that nearly as many uninsured Americans will gain insurance as it predicted last spring.
This good news got drowned out, however, by false claims about the meaning of the second health care appendix, on labor supply.
It has always been clear that health reform will induce some Americans to work less. Some people will, for example, retire earlier because they no longer need to keep working to keep their health insurance. Others will reduce their hours to spend more time with their children because insurance is no longer contingent on holding a full-time job. More subtly, the incentive to work will be somewhat reduced by health insurance subsidies that fall as your income rises.
The budget office has now increased its estimate of the size of these effects. It believes that health reform will reduce the number of hours worked in the economy by between 1.5 percent and 2 percent, which it unhelpfully noted “represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million.”
Why was this unhelpful? Because politicians and, I’m sorry to say, all too many news organizations immediately seized on the 2 million number and utterly misrepresented its meaning. For example, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, quickly posted this on his Twitter account: “Under Obamacare, millions of hardworking Americans will lose their jobs and those who keep them will see their hours and wages reduced.”
Not a word of this claim was true. The budget office report didn’t say that people will lose their jobs. It declared explicitly that the predicted fall in hours worked will come “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor” (emphasis added). And as we’ve already seen, Mr. Elmendorf did his best the next day to explain that voluntary reductions in work hours are nothing like involuntary job loss. Oh, and because labor supply will be reduced, wages will go up, not down.
We should add that the budget office believes that health reform will actually reduce unemployment over the next few years.
Just to be clear, the predicted long-run fall in working hours isn’t entirely a good thing. Workers who choose to spend more time with their families will gain, but they’ll also impose some burden on the rest of society, for example, by paying less in payroll and income taxes. So there is some cost to Obamacare over and above the insurance subsidies. Any attempt to do the math, however, suggests that we’re talking about fairly minor costs, not the “devastating effects” Mr. Cantor asserted in his next post on Twitter.
So was Mr. Cantor being dishonest? Or was he just ignorant of the policy basics and unwilling to actually read the report before trumpeting his misrepresentation of what it said? It doesn’t matter — because even if it was ignorance, it was willful ignorance. Remember, the campaign against health reform has, at every stage, grabbed hold of any and every argument it could find against insuring the uninsured, with truth and logic never entering into the matter.
Think about it. We had the nonexistent death panels. We had false claims that the Affordable Care Act will cause the deficit to balloon. We had supposed horror stories about ordinary Americans facing huge rate increases, stories that collapsed under scrutiny. And now we have a fairly innocuous technical estimate misrepresented as a tale of massive economic damage.
Meanwhile, the reality is that American health reform — flawed and incomplete though it is — is making steady progress. No, millions of Americans won’t lose their jobs, but tens of millions will gain the security of knowing that they can get and afford the health care they need.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 6, 2014
“Obamacare Is Not A Job Killer”: How Critics Are Misreading A New Government Report
The Congressional Budget Office today released the latest update of its projections for the economy and the budget, including Obamacare. And a fair reading would be that not a ton has changed since last time. CBO now expects the law will lead to 25 million people getting health insurance, while some 31 million people will remain uninsured. It will require a lot of new government spending but, because of offsetting revenue and cuts to other programs, it will actually reduce the deficit.
But CBO revised one finding and, all day long, critics have been seizing on the revision as proof that the law is a boondoggle.
The real story, as usual, is a lot more complicated.
The projection is about how the Affordable Care Act will affect labor output—that is, the number of hours Americans work every year. From the get-go, CBO assumed that Obamacare would slightly reduce labor output, relative to what it might have been without the law in place. Why? The CBO gave a bunch of different reasons.
For one thing, CBO reasoned, the financial assistance Obamacare provides depends on income. The more money you make, the less assistance you get. CBO argued that this would discourage some workers from putting in more hours, since the reward for working harder would be more income but less assistance on health insurance. In addition, CBO noted, historically some people have taken or held on to jobs exclusively to get health insurance. Obamacare makes it possible to get coverage without a job. As a result, CBO predicted, some of these people would stop working—or, at least, work fewer hours.
These weren’t the only ways that Obamacare will affect jobs, according to the CBO. And sometimes Obamacare will lead to people working more hours—for example, by giving people with chronic medical problems more freedom to switch jobs or start their own firms.
Overall, the CBO had said previously, Obamacare’s net effect would be a reduction in total labor compensation of about 0.5 percent. Now, citing new research on the effects of taxes, CBO is predicting that the net effect will eventually be twice as large—a full 1 percent reduction in compensation, or the rough equivalent of what we’d expect if two million fewer people were in full-time jobs.
That sounds like a big deal—and Obamacare critics certainly treated it like one. Here’s the conservative publication Newsmax: “Simply put, the new analysis from the nonpartisan agency suggests the 2010 Affordable Care Act is driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits rather than work.” Here’s Republican Congressman Tom Price: “This independent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office confirms that Obamacare will destroy economic opportunity and with it financial security for many American families.” And here’s a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee: “There is no way to spin this. Because of #ObamaCare, there will be 2.5 million less jobs in our economy.” (If you want more quotes, Glenn Kessler and Greg Sargent of the Washington Post have nice roundups—and some good analysis of their own.)
But CBO didn’t actually say Obamacare would lead to 2 million fewer jobs. It said that Obamacare would lead to the “equivalent” of 2 million fewer jobs. In reality, CBO expects a much larger group of people to reduce their hours by a much smaller amount. Only a relative few will stop working altogether.
More important, CBO says, most of the people working fewer hours will be choosing to do so. And that’s a very different story from the one Obamacare critics are telling. Some of the people cutting back hours will be working parents who decide they can afford to put in a little less time with their co-workers and a little more time with their kids. Some will be early sixty-somethings who will retire before they reach 65, rather than clinging to low-paying jobs just to get health benefits. “This is what we want in a fair society,” says Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist and Obamacare architect. “We don’t want to enslave the old and sick to their jobs out of some sense of meanness. If they are dying to quit/retire, then let them. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Of course, some able-bodied Americans will cut back on hours for reasons that conservatives, in particular, might not like. To put it crudely, they’ll work fewer hours simply simply because they don’t feel like working so hard. But whether or not that’s so problematic, it’s also the inevitable by-product of any program that makes assistance conditional on income. The Earned Income Tax Credit works that way. So do food stamps and Medicaid.
And so, by the way, would the new health care proposal from three Republican senators, which makes subsidies available to people with incomes at 299 percent of the poverty line but not those with incomes at 300 percent. The only question with programs like these is how big the disincentive to work is—and whom, exactly, it affects. The only alternatives are to give help to everybody (which requires much more government spending) or to give help to nobody (which leaves many more people struggling).
Ironically, the CBO report included two other findings that should, if anything, make most people more optimistic about Obamacare’s future. First, the CBO found that the law will reduce the deficit by a little more than initial projections suggested. Second, it found that the now-infamous “risk corridor” program, in which government and insurers share gains and losses, will result in net payments from insurers to the government, rather than the other way. (Jonathan Chait has the details on that drama.)
The change in projected deficits isn’t very large and the risk corridor prediction comes with more uncertainty than usual, so you wouldn’t want to bet a lot of money on either prediction coming true. But both findings call into more serious doubt two of the Republicans’ favorite talking points—that Obamacare will drive up the deficit and that, because of the risk corridor program, it’s a “taxpayer bailout” of insurers. As of today, those claims look even weaker than they did before.
Will Republicans stop making these arguments? Or will they at least acknowledge some uncertainty about them? Nope. And that’s a prediction in which you can feel very confident.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, February 4, 2014
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