From Jeffrey Dorfman at Forbes, Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False:

I want to bust one more myth about the minimum wage: the relationship over time between the minimum wage and labor productivity. This one is particularly obnoxious because those selling this myth almost surely know that they are advocating for their preferred policy on the basis of a lie.

Liberals have been trumpeting a study claiming that if the minimum wage had risen in tandem with worker productivity, the minimum wage would be nearly $22 per hour. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has gone to great lengths to push this statistic into the policy debate. Liberals want you to believe that the minimum wage should have risen at the same rate as worker productivity to ensure that workers continue to take home the same share of the value of the output they produce. However, the statistic they quote is meaningless because it is not measuring the relevant concept.

Labor productivity may have risen faster than the minimum wage over the last twenty or thirty years, but the study getting all the press uses the productivity gains of allworkers to calculate a hypothetical increase in the minimum wage. What is needed is a measure of the productivity gains of minimum wage workers.

Unfortunately, the government does not produce such a number. Luckily for the discussion at hand, the BLS does track labor productivity of food service workers. Because food service workers represent 44 percent of all minimum wage earners, this series is a pretty fair proxy for the productivity gains of minimum wage workers.

The BLS data show that in 2011 labor productivity gains in the food service industry were nonexistent (that is, equal to 0 percent). In 2012, it was slightly worse; labor productivity in the food service sector dropped by 0.1 percent. In limited service restaurants, where minimum wage workers are likely to be concentrated, labor productivity fell by 2 percent in 2012 while business owners saw their unit labor costs rise by 2.8 percent. Over the past few years, these workers, as a group, not only have not earned a raise, but they are getting paid more for doing less.

Taking a longer view, from 1987 to 2012 the same BLS data show that worker productivity in the food service sector rose by an average of 0.6 percent per year. In limited service restaurants, the gains were slightly lower, only averaging 0.5 percent per year. Meanwhile, unit labor costs have risen by an average of 3.6 percent. Over this period the minimum wage has risen from $3.35 to $7.25 per hour which is an average annual increase of 3.1 percent. In other words, at least in food service, the minimum wage has risen at a rate five or six times as fast as justified by the gains in worker productivity.

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