Low-Income Parents’ Perspectives on a Local Minimum Wage Law

• In Event: 1-161 - Public policy as macro-level context: The effects of local labor policies on family and child well-being

Integrative Statement

Most research on minimum wage laws and other labor regulations focuses on estimating the impacts on employment and earnings using quantitative data. Less studied is how these impacts might “trickle down” to affect family income, parent stress, and parenting practices. Any effects of minimum wage laws on family processes and child well-being are likely to depend on how working parents experience and understand changes to the policy context and to their own financial well-being. Qualitative data are particularly well suited to examining these subjective aspects of policy effects on families and to developing hypotheses that could be tested in future quantitative studies.

This study used longitudinal qualitative data from 55 workers who had low-wage jobs and were raising children during the initial implementation of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance. Over a two-year period, we conducted three in-depth interviews, and four short phone surveys, with each person in the study. The interviews focused on the workers’ experiences with work, balancing work and family, budgeting with low wages, and the minimum wage law. The sample was majority female and immigrant, with a nearly even split of married or cohabiting versus single respondents. All were in low-income families, but they were racially diverse. Nearly half the sample had a child under six years of age at the start of the study.

The workers generally supported the idea of the minimum wage law, but were pessimistic that it would improve their lives. Their lived experience suggested that financial circumstances were a zero-sum game, in which each success (e.g. a wage increase) was accompanied by a commensurate loss (e.g. reduced food stamp benefits). This reality affected their subjective well-being, making it difficult for them to feel agentic and to be optimistic about the future. Another difficult reality for these workers was that many were “choosing” part-time hours to care for children or other family members, but they are doing so at the cost of having insufficient income. As one worker says: “There’s nothing bad about the job for my family life other than the pay is low…” Among the workers in this study that experienced increases in hourly wage rate over the three-year study period, many saw that change as a direct result of the minimum wage law, but just as many say that the cost of living is rising much faster than wages. They view the minimum wage increase as a partial but inadequate bulwark against rapidly increasing housing costs, the dramatic influx of higher earners, and a general perception of rising regional inequality. These findings suggest that minimum wage increases alone are unlikely to reduce the stress of making ends meet even if they produce objective improvements in financial well-being.

Author

• Heather Hill, University of Washington
  Presenting Author