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Is That Minimum-Wage Study Real, or Is It Bogus?
A 10-point checklist to help you determine when conservative groups are trying to feed you disinformation on minimum-wage increases
I’ve been writing about the Fight for $15 campaign for over five years, covering the push both here in Seattle, the first major U.S. city to approve a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and nationwide. If you do anything for five years, you start to recognize familiar patterns of behavior that repeat again and again — and the minimum wage conversation is no different.
Conservative politicians and the business lobby promote several arguments every time a minimum-wage increase happens anywhere in the United States. First, news outlets profile a few small business owners who warn, with no proof, that businesses will close; then the media huddles around failed businesses and pin their closure on the wage, despite all the signs to the contrary; and then finally, once the sky doesn’t fall, local pundits argue that while a higher minimum wage might be right for big cities like Seattle, it would surely decimate the job market for workers elsewhere.
These arguments against minimum-wage increases are incredibly predictable — in fact, they’re so obvious that they’re starting to lose their effectiveness. For four decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have presented trickle-down economics — the theory that giving money to the wealthiest 1% in the hopes that that money will “trickle down” to the rest of us in the form of high paying jobs — as indisputable scientific fact. Those arguments have grown stale and easy to debunk.
But there’s one anti-minimum-wage tactic that’s still pretty effective, because it preys upon our trust of academia and research.
Most of us are primed to trust studies, and for good reason: Recognition of expertise is a central pillar of a complex society like ours. We can’t possibly test every thesis in the world all by ourselves, so we have to rely on smart people who have devoted their lives to building a solid and growing base of knowledge in a specific subject. But in truth there are a lot of bad actors out there who try to exploit our trust in research by creating and promoting bunk studies on a multitude of subjects…
