Do fast-food workers warrant being paid $15/hour?

Sorry man, it's true that significant minimum wage increases will have a negative effect on employment. (Why do you care anyway?) But that's a biased blog with an opinion column for its main citation with a hyperbolic headline based on numbers that could mean anything based on a sample size that's too small to say anything.

Restaurant jobs are way down for the whole country and state as well as San Diego, look at the charts in the opinion column that the blog cites. Down the most in San Diego? We don't even know. Is there another city in California that did not increase the minimum wage that performed even worse against that greater-California benchmark? If Bakersfield had even worse restaurant job growth in that time period then would that mean that not increasing the minimum wage causes a negative employment effect? Restaurant job growth is down nationally, so if it's down the most in Des Moines and they didn't increase their minimum wage then would you consider that statistically significant?

Maybe San Diego restaurant jobs were impacted by other factors? Some San Diego restaurants were corporatized in that time period (ahem) and some people lost their restaurant jobs in the process. I know a few of them. Why would anybody assume that the minimum wage increase is the only possible causal factor in San Diego's restaurant job growth rate slightly underperforming the state average?

It weakens our case when we cite biased sources. If your case is strong then you don't need to back it up with fake news and propaganda. Regurgitating thin evidence makes your case look weak. Citing real, defensible research is a lot better and there is plenty of that on this topic.

Harvard Business School...

Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit

We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the minimum wage at the city level. The evidence suggests that higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants. However, lower quality restaurants, which are already closer to the margin of exit, are disproportionately impacted by increases to the minimum wage. Our point estimates suggest that a one dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating), but has no discernible impact for a 5-star restaurant (on a 1 to 5 star scale).

San Diego's Experiment With Higher Minimum Wage: 4,000 Fewer Restaurant Jobs

So did the restaurants go out of business, or are they just offering worse service?

Yeah, I agree with Tech, that article is nonsense. First of all this is a bald faced lie

dropped sharply, with perhaps as many as 4,000 jobs lost,

when you look at this line

"If job growth in the restaurant sector had just kept pace with the state's performance … the industry could have created 5,200 jobs instead of the 1,300 that took place,"

So there was no LOSS of jobs, just slower growth compared against some made up, imaginary target.Any number of factors could have caused that, assuming it is even a real thing. Maybe the market was oversaturated. Maybe some big employers went belly-up for unrelated reasons. Maybe they had heavier than average rains that kept people away from restaurants.

They didn't even bother to get a quote from some poor waitress saying, "Oh it's so horrible, I'm getting paid more, but they won't hire more waitstaff so I'm sooooooo overworked."

This right here has always been bullshit

Economists say the restaurant industry is a good barometer for the consequences of minimum wage increases because those businesses rely heavily on low wage workers, operate on small margins, and have high rates of turnover (that is, restaurants tend to pop-up quickly in some areas and go bust just as quickly in others).

Restaurants are TERRIBLE barometers because they are almost also run by idiots who can barely do basic math, they are nearly always underfunded, behind schedule and barely scraping by their health permits. There really isn't a worse industry that you could use as a barometer and that is one of the big problems with this whole experiment.

The real problem is, all you mouthbreathers want a quick fix and that is not how this works. Americans are underpaid, period. Fixing that requires a whole economic and social shift. The way to start that is to lean on the offenders, that is the employers who pay pathetic wages. Yeah, there may be some losses in the short-term, but in the long-term, the chaff will sort out and the business world will figure it out. They always do.

EVERY SINGLE TIME the death of an industry has been predicted by the industry lobbyists, they have been wrong. I remember when the car industry was SURE as fuck that Catalytic Converters would destroy the American economy and we would all sink into abject poverty. Didn't happen. Smart people at those companies figured out how to adapt.

The same thing will happen here. It will take 3-5 years, maybe more, but you have to hitch up your big boy pants, quit being a whiner, and get on with finding solutions.

From the You Can't Make This Shit Up files...

DNC Workers Sue Party for Receiving Sub-Minimum Wages, No Overtime

Congressional Democrats Want a $15 Minimum Wage—but Pay Their Interns Nothing

Seattle’s Minimum Wage Hike May Have Gone Too Far

Using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly rate, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent. Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees’ earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.