To review, the timeline seems to have gone like this: The UW shares with City Hall an early draft of its study showing the minimum wage law is hurting the workers it was meant to help; the mayor’s office shares the study with researchers known to be sympathetic toward minimum wage laws, asking for feedback; those researchers release a report that’s high on Seattle’s minimum wage law just a week before the negative report comes out.
Strong is correct in saying that the UW study was not funded by the city. It should be noted, though, that the researchers involved in the study are the same researchers who are in charge of the city-funded reports.
Those reports have previously grated advocates of the $15 minimum wage. In September, Coucilmember Kshama Sawant took the research group to task for various aspects of a report from last July, which Sawant argued cast the wage law in a poor light due to bad methodology and accused the director of the study, Jacob Vigdor, of â€idelogical editorializing.â€
When it comes to reading all these studies, do you have any tips on analysing them? ---