"Over the last year, three West Coast cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle – have passed $15 an hour minimum wage laws that will be in full effect by 2018 in San Francisco and Seattle and by 2020 in Los Angeles.
On the way to the full $15 an hour, Seattle increased its minimum wage to $11 on April 1 and San Francisco increased its minimum wage to $12.25 on May 1.
What effects are these minimum wage increases having?
As I (and other economists) have reported here, here and here there is already preliminary evidence that the minimum wage hikes in all three cities have had negative employment effects: a loss of 1,300 restaurant jobs in the Seattle area between January and June, a loss of 2,500 restaurant jobs in the San Francisco metro area over the last year, and a loss of 2,200 hotel jobs in the Los Angeles area over the last year.
...Bottom Line:
Economic logic and common sense suggest that employment patterns in the outlying suburban areas of Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco, where there was no change in the minimum wage, would more likely track the pattern of jobs in the rest of the states of California (where hotel and restaurant jobs increased) and Washington (where restaurant jobs increased), that those areas would follow the pattern of job losses within the nearby city limits where the minimum wage increased significantly. In that case, the reported hotel jobs lost in LA, and the reported restaurant jobs lost in San Francisco and Seattle, would actually underestimate the true number of jobs lost within the cities of LA, Seattle and San Francisco due to the minimum wage hikes this year.
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