Kansas doesn't have, and did not in 2009 or 2010 have, an exemption to the minimum wage law. Its employers have to pay the national minimum now, and they did before.
You haven't pointed to a single category of employee, or to a single person, who would have gotten a raise because of the relatively meaningless Kansas increase in the state minimum wages. Until you do you have no ammunition against the point that state minimums that are below the federal minimum are between entirely meaningless, and mostly meaningless (the later only if the state minimum is below the normal federal minimum but doesn't have the same exemptions as the federal rate does, and then its only meaningful for those employees, of which tip credit is the only one covering large amounts of people).
Like Kansas had.
No they didn't. Are you just making stuff up now?
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On July 24, 2009, the federal minimum wage will increase to $7.25 per hour. This is the final step of a three-step increase passed in 2007 when the minimum wage was only $5.15. In this last step, about 4.5 million workers will receive a raise, providing an additional $1.6 billion annually in increased wages. However, when adjusted for inflation, the new federal minimum is still less than the minimum wage through most of the period from 1961 to 1981.
What states will be affected:
• There are 31 states that will be affected by the minimum wage increase to $7.25 on July 24, 2009:
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming
epi.org
Kansas and those other states, were affected because they had state minimum wages below the federal minimum wages, and because there is and was no exemption for any state.
There used to be an exemption for a number of US territories and protectorates, but they have mostly or totally, been canceled. The removal of that exemption amounted to a large increase in the minimum wage that had noticeable negative effects on the economies of American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Marianas.
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The GAO found that increase caused the last garment factory in the CNMI to close in early 2009, formerly one of two major employers in the territory. In American Samoa, one of the two tuna canneries – an industry that employed almost a third of the territory’s workers — closed in September 2009.
Polls show that workers in American Samoa, who were initially enthusiastic about the wage increase, now express serious concerns about it. No wonder. One of the biggest single sources of hiring has closed, and private and public officials express concern that the other tuna factory will follow when the minimum wage rises again. Largely as a consequence of these changes, the number of people with jobs at large companies in American Samoa decreased by 12 percent between 2008 and 2009, the overwhelming majority of whom are still unemployed. The total number of people employed in the CNMI decreased by 27 percent between 2006 and 2008. What happened to that shared prosperity again?
Employers in American Samoa have also responded to the minimum wage with other cost-cutting measures, such as freezing hiring and cutting job benefits. In the CNMI, the report found that hotels have had to raise room rates to compensate for the rise in wages that they must pay workers, and these raises may have caused a significant decline in visits to the island of anywhere from 3 to 14 percent. Adding insult to injury, the CNMI government has taken in 6 percent less in taxes from 2006 to 2008, despite the higher wages. The government cannot artificially raise wages without serious harmful consequences to workers.
dailysignal.com
A study by Alida Castillo-Freeman (NBER) and Richard Freeman (Harvard) concluded that subjecting Puerto Rico to the federal minimum wage reduced employment in the territory by 8 to 10 percent. More recently, the inability to find jobs has driven Puerto Ricans to emigrate in search of employment. According to the Pew Research Center, Puerto Rico has experienced net emigration of 144,000 people, equivalent to 13 percent of the labor force, since 2010, with 42 percent of emigrants saying their reason for leaving was "job-related."
Data shows that the employment situation in Puerto Rico is dire. The unemployment rate is 12.4 percent, over twice the mainland rate of 5.5 percent. In 2014, the employment-population ratio, a broad metric that accounts for people who have given up looking for work, was 35 percent on the island, compared to 59 percent for the mainland United States. It is so difficult to find a job in Puerto Rico that many people are not even looking.
So what does this have to do with Puerto Rico’s debt crisis? Fewer jobs means fewer people paying taxes, and more reliance on welfare and public services. The minimum wage is not responsible for all of this—blame also lies with the island’s high energy prices and bloated public sector, which deter investment. But it does not help that the U.S. government neglects the interests of its Caribbean territory when setting federal labor policy.
economics21.org
According to researchers Paul Kupiec and Ryan Nabil, “The impact on the economies of American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands was devastating. In American Samoa, by 2009, after only three of the ten scheduled minimum-wage increases, overall employment dropped 30 percent — 58 percent in the critically important tuna-canning industry. Real per capita GDP in American Samoa fell nearly 10 percent from 2006 levels. In the Northern Mariana Islands, by the end of 2009, employment was down by 35 percent, and real per capita GDP off by 23 percent.”
As the situation grew desperate, the governor of American Samoa testified before the U.S. Congress explaining that the new minimum wage policy created, “the real possibility that American Samoa could be left substantially without a private-sector economic base except for some limited visitor industry and fisheries activities.” He continued, “American Samoa’s economic base would then essentially be based solely on federal-government expenditures in the territory.”
Puerto Rico met a similar fate after the new minimum wage rate went into effect. The increase resulted in a minimum wage that was 75 percent of the Puerto Rican median wage. In fact, the situation grew so dire, unemployment in Puerto Rico surged and its GDP per capita declined by almost 7 percent between 2007 and 2013. As a result, many young and able-bodied Puerto Ricans left for the U.S. mainland, creating an imbalance as the old and less motivated were forced to stay behind.
Additionally, foreign investors were turned off by hiring Puerto Ricans, since residents of Jamaica and the Bahamas would only cost half as much to employ.
zerohedge.com |
