Seattle Got Their Precious $15 Minimum Wage. But Look At What Happened To The Job Market…

I know my fellow Millennials don’t like to hear this, but minimum wage is NOT supposed to be where you live your life. Minimum wage jobs are not long-term career choices. They’re where you start out and work your way up. High school kids work minimum wage jobs to earn money to go to college. College kids work minimum wage jobs to put themselves through school where (hopefully) they’re getting actual useful college degrees that they can create big-time careers for themselves (at least, those that didn’t get into obscene piles of debt to drink the Social Justice Kool-Aid, anyway). Minimum wage is where you start – NOT where you live.

So, we’ve got all these kids with worthless college degrees that can’t get jobs because they don’t know how to do anything useful, but they have to pay back loans that they had no business getting in the first place. And then they start whining about “living wages” (as opposed to “zombie wages” or something) and that’s where we get these liberals promising crap like $15/hour minimum wage (dude, in my life before Chicks, I was working in a professional career with an advanced degree and I didn’t even make $15/hour!)

But then reality starts setting in. Take Seattle, for example. They have the all-knowing, all-powerful $15 wage. So you’d think they’d be happy about it. Except – this is what happened to restaurant jobs (the stereotypical minimum wage work) in Seattle after the $15 minimum wage became law –

More details from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) –

The lighter blue line in the top chart above shows that restaurant jobs in the Emerald City started to stagnate and then decline around the first of this year (when the state minimum wage increased to $9.47 per hour, the highest state minimum wage in the country), following steady growth in Seattle MSA food services employment during the previous five-year period between January 2010 and January 2015 (data here). On April 1 of this year, the city’s minimum wage increased to $11 an hour which may have contributed to the loss of 700 Seattle area restaurant jobs between January and September (new BLS employment data for last month were released yesterday), the largest decline over that period since a loss of 3,000 restaurant jobs in 2009 during the Great Recession (see bottom chart above). What makes the restaurant job losses this year especially noteworthy are that the average job gain during the January-September period over the previous five years from 2010 to 2014 was almost 3,000, and over the previous three years nearly 4,000.

And then there’s this bit about how the rest of Washington state compares to Hipster’s Paradise –

What is also noteworthy about the loss of Seattle restaurant jobs this year is the fact that restaurant employment in the rest of Washington state is booming this year, as the top chart shows (see dark blue line). At the same time that Seattle area food services employment has declined this year by 700 (and by -0.52%), restaurant jobs in the rest of the state have increased by a whopping 5,800 new positions (and by 6.6%).

Looks like Seattle employers couldn’t afford to pay their waiters and cashiers $15/hour, so they had to let some of them go. And now they REALLY aren’t getting that mystical “living wage” (I still don’t know what that’s supposed to be, but these losers certainly aren’t getting one.) Compared to other places in Washington, where restaurant workers are getting paid less, but employers can hire more people and give more hours and benefits, if they so choose. And – SHOCKER – they actually get to keep their jobs!

Yup. $15 minimum wage sucks big time.

(h/t Daily Signal)