Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages
59 comments
·January 30, 2025Noumenon72
The compensation package for a job includes a certain mix of "how hard do we make you work, how nice are the conditions, how much do we pay". Minimum wage keeps you from trading those off. Now you get paid more but you have to hustle to earn it, no perks, and less budget for the safety committee.
grayhatter
so, p-hacking, or following a meaningful wage increase, employees are more likely, or more able to report an injury, and the actual rate of injury didn't change?
Or am I missing another more obvious conclusion here?
jmward01
That was my thought too. I just scanned the paper but I didn't see them discussing controlling for changes in reporting based on pay increases. If you beat someone constantly they just whimper. If you hit them only once they will scream loudly. I think there is a chance that is happening here.
crooked-v
I immediately think of line cooks, who are perennially underpaid and extremely replaceable and are expected to tough out any injury short of a hospital visit.
soupfordummies
Really almost anyone paid hourly. Time spent dealing with injury is time spent not working which is time spent NOT getting paid.
_aleph2c_
Having started at the bottom, I think the most important thing for people in this situation is to be able to get the next higher paying job, then the next higher paying job. Minimum wage should be temporary - so this study is kind of stupid.
In my experience, my worst enemies were exhaustion, the crab-in-the-bucket attitude of my peers, and an inability to build a resume and to network out to the people who wanted what I could do. Ultimately I couldn't escape poverty until I could buy enough gear to work up north. That money made it possible to pay for an education.
To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder. If safety makes this harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
wredcoll
> Minimum wage should be temporary - so this study is kind of stupid.
I see this type of attitude/comment frequently whenever the minimum wage comes up, but I've never seen any kind of justification for it.
If these aren't "real jobs" that deserve "real pay" then why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?
_aleph2c_
If you have a minimum wage job, your priority should be to find a better paying job. There is no fairness here and nobody cares about your problems like you do. Don't let the political attitudes or fashionable views of your friends effect your own agency, you need to look out for your own economic interests right now.
I think the study is kind of stupid, since the minimum wage category is a temporary category with extremely high variability, it's not a fixed target. So the base assumption that it stays put long enough to study doesn't hold water for me.
ndileas
I think a lot of the confusion here comes from a conflict between people talking in personal mode and societal modes. As an individual, you absolutely want minimum wage to be temporary, and if you are smart and lucky you can usually make this happen.
You're taking more a societal point of view. At this level, I think you're missing the point of minimum wage. It doesn't provide a family with a living wage; it's just a limit on the monetary abuse that an above board company can dish out, just like we have labor laws that limit other types of abuse (like excessive hours for example). Whether and how our society should be ensuring living wages is kind of another discussion, much more complex. As they currently stand, minimum wages are probably a net good.
rjp0008
>>It's not intended to provide a family with a living wage;
Maybe not family but definitely the individual, FDR on minimum wage:
Ultimately, he hoped to mandate that all workers would be paid "living wages" as described in his 1933 speech on the National Industrial Recovery Act, "It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By 'business' I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white-collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
From: https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-...
nemomarx
not intended by who? when the minimum wage was introduced it was talked about as a living wage intended to be enough to raise a family on.
rufus_foreman
>> why are there billion(trillion?) dollar corporations built entirely on top of employing millions of people at minimum wage?
There aren't any such corporations. There are under a million people earning the federal minimum wage in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T16OC2.
ceejayoz
That's $7.25, to be clear. In 30 states, that's illegally low.
olddustytrail
Isn't that entirely because several states have a higher minimum wage than the federal one?
I ask as an outsider and have to wonder why this didn't occur to an American.
c-linkage
"In my [Franklin D Roosevelt] Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living."
Emphasis mine.
usrusr
Increased job-mobility won't increase the number of higher paying openings though. Even if everybody at the bottom of the pyramid is laser-focused on making it up, the number actually succeeding won't really change, except perhaps through indirect effects. If anything, making people more content at the bottom would make it easier to raise for those who do want.
nickff
The number of people actually employed at minimum wage is quite small (usually low single digit percentage of total employment), though it does vary by location. If you add in some amount over minimum wage the number goes up (significantly), but if you add in tips and the like it goes down a lot. From what I've seen, the median amount of time people spend in that salary range is less than six months (of continuous employment).
epicureanideal
> To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder.
This. The same or more attention should be paid to ensuring there are plentiful, affordable homes, and a ladder of jobs from one level to another, as is paid to social safety nets.
lenerdenator
> I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
This is great, until they receive a debilitating injury that puts them on disability for the rest of their lives, get a mountain of medical debt, or lose the breadwinner.
jampekka
> To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder.
Someone still has to be at the bottom of the ladder.
grayhatter
> If safety makes [job mobility] harder, I would prioritize job-mobility over safety.
I'm sorry, what?! Given the options between, opportunity for a promotion at some point, and not being injured by your job. You would prioritize maybe promoting people over preventing people from getting injured?
First, when given two options, and asked to decide, the first thing every engineer should do is ask, "why not both?". But also, Perhaps you should consider listening to fewer podcasts from Lord Farquaad?
Joel_Mckay
"To help the poor, make it easy for them to climb the economic ladder"
There is no "the poor"... rather its just people that do not have any other options. Primarily, higher education or certified skilled trades are the only effective way out of minimal income survivor economics.
In my opinion, people working at fast food chains making the minimum legally allowable wage work harder than any CEO or academic I've met over the years.
I would recommend this book as it quantifies how income disparity impacts young Americans development:
"Outliers: The Story of Success Paperback" (Malcolm Gladwell, 2011)
https://www.amazon.ca/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...
Notably, naively explaining passive income from assets to minimum wage workers is not usually a productive conversation. Rather, folks are just projecting their own perspective on people in a different situation. =3
dsm4ck
The U.S. could of course just have automatic cost of living adjustment s to minimum wage, like it does for social security payments.
nine_k
[flagged]
mclion
You should really look at what happens in countries with miniman wage. It's not really like you fear.
nine_k
I did look, of course. High minimum wages, serious social support for unemployed or unemployable, high taxes, generally a more collectivist mindset among citizens than what we have in the US.
Additionally, the US has a very backwards system of social support, which cuts off benefits abruptly, so earning slightly more makes you suddenly quite worse off, instead of weaning you off the support smoothly as your income grows. It's literally a trap. Raising the minimum wage may trigger this for some, too, so staying at the same job at a higher hourly rate results in a lower total income than being unemployed and living entirely off benefits.
This system should be fixed first.
triceratops
Why? If customers still need those services, bigger businesses will provide them and hire the newly-unemployed.
nine_k
Big businesses are usually more efficient, even simply due to scale. They need fewer employees for the same amount of sales. Raising the minimum wage squeezes away the least-qualified employees, who are constrained in various ways (language, education, health, etc). The more qualified employees may and do of course benefit.
High minimum wages work well with a strong social security network, and higher taxes to support it. It's not what we have in the US though.
jmward01
Really? Please back that up with actual data or studies. If labor costs go up equally then a business isn't at a competitive disadvantage. Small businesses also often get tax breaks and the like as part of minimum wage increases. In the end they often get helped by a minimum wage increase. At a minimum it isn't a slam dunk in any way that 'they make small businesses unviable' while it is very clear that it makes lives better for employees [1].
Finally, if a business isn't creating jobs that provide a living wage then it shouldn't be allowed to exist since those employees are likely being subsidized by taxpayers for the gap between what the business is paying and what they need to live on. Put simply, I don't want to subsidize a business so that it can avoid paying its employees.
[1] https://irle.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Small-B...
jldugger
> If labor costs go up equally then a business isn't at a competitive disadvantage
The classic low wage job is flipping burgers. Everyone with a kitchen is a competitor to this business, and if restaurants all raise prices in lock step, it stands to reason at least some people will cook at home instead.
> if a business isn't creating jobs that provide a living wage then it shouldn't be allowed to exist ... I don't want to subsidize a business so that it can avoid paying its employees.
I doubt you meant it this way, but that's a fascinating argument against progressive taxation.
nine_k
Instead of subsidizing a business that provides some value and pays some wages, we then end up without the business, and with unemployed folks. These folks don't cease to exist, we don't want to tell them "go away and die", do we? So now the taxpayer pays the whole cost of keeping these folks alive, instead of a part of it, and the folks are possibly worse off, unless they find something to do with their time to earn an extra buck. And that something is usually not a legal employment.
Does it look like a win?
GabeIsko
Sounds like we need more safety regulations.
null
3D30497420
Or better enforcement. To widely speculate, I doubt the US will be getting either of those. /s
Simon_O_Rourke
I'd be interested in some of the speculated causation here, do folks think that because they're getting paid more then they are expected to work 4.6% harder therefore get injured at that higher rate?
yojo
A few possibilities:
1) Companies barely scraping by start cutting corners when labor gets more expensive. The work environment becomes more dangerous.
2) Companies paying more for labor set higher output demands for that labor. The job gets harder.
3) Companies paying more for labor are hesitant to hire more, given the increased costs/risks of adding FTEs. They instead ask existing workers to work more. The hours get longer.
4) Employees getting paid more feel empowered to report accidents that previously would have been hidden. The workers become more outspoken.
Animats
Do they have a breakdown by industry? That would give some insight into what's happening. Did a wage increase cause management to try a speedup?
exabrial
> minimum wage increases adversely impact workplace safety
Ironic, since the intent of minimum wage was make human capital expensive enough to promote automation and prevent human slaughter in the factories of the early 1900s
djoldman
> Our findings indicate that, on average, a large minimum wage increase results in a 4.6 percent increase in the total case rate.
...
> We provide suggestive evidence that small minimum wage increases might reduce injury rates, highlighting the potential heterogeneity in the impact of minimum wage changes.
pydry
I guess since dube, lester, reich the think tank crowd has given up on trying to demonstrate that it destroys jobs and are trying a different tack.
It's worth noting that mininum wage hikes are a very profit hostile policy. This is why they tend to receive such huge pushback.
ceejayoz
> Prior studies document that financial constraints reduce safety investment and thus increase injuries...
I mean, maybe, but that goes both ways.
Someone with a bit more financial security might be more able to seek treatment, too. $500 in savings makes it easier to miss a shift to go to urgent care.
LordDragonfang
Yet another reason why the minimum/living wage treadmill isn't the right solution, and labor activist should push more seriously for UBI. The fact of the matter is that many people's labor isn't worth a living wage, and especially not for ethical working conditions.
The goal of every job paying enough to be comfortable is missing the forest for the trees, because it will always fail to account for the cost of the stress of working, and always be at odds with safety. The actual goal should be that people should be able to survive comfortably no matter their ability to get a "good" job, because as we automate more, it's just a simple fact that "good" jobs will continue to get harder to come by.
mitthrowaway2
Absolutely this. Rather than having minimum wage be $15, UBI should be $15/hour, and then there need be no floor for the amount on top of that that employers are allowed to pay for labor. (Probably there will be a floor to what laborers will accept, because of how much less desperate they will be, resulting in a higher wage share of income overall, and generally reduced wealth inequality across society).
They keep saying that a "large" increase in minimum wage results in a 4.6% increase in case rate. But they don't [d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶"̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶"̶ ̶(̶e̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶v̶s̶.̶ ̶"̶s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶"̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶o̶i̶n̶t̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶d̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶w̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶r̶a̶t̶e̶)̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶] point out a margin of error or a noise floor early enough in the paper for a non-paying reader to see.
They also say that they "do not find evidence that capital-labor substitution could be behind the findings", but its again not within the scope of the free article to show how they were looking for such evidence, and what defined "capitol-labor substitution". Were they looking purely for "it costs $5k a year to provide everyone with safety glasses, but operating costs just increased by $50k on what used to net $60k of profit, so I guess we're not doing safety glasses anymore" or if the same reasoning was used on $600k of profit. The former is clearly capitol-labor substitution, the latter is being cheap out of spite.
Maybe these questions are being answered in a satisfactory manner, but the fact that they use a blend of wiggle words and hard numbers, with no clarifying context even in the abstract, suggests to me that this does not actually support the strawman everybody seems to be getting from it, which is "see, paying the person at McDonalds enough to actually make rent this month might get them killed! You don't want to pay them so much they might die, right?"