Santa Fe “Living wage” law reduces employment

Santa Fe has made news recently with plans to increase the City’s minimum wage to as much as $10.32. This is certainly not a cause for celebration. Rather, as the Hoover Institute points out in a new brief, “As the wage demanded increases, the jobs offered in the labor market will decline.”

The paper goes on to note that, “after the wage level was increased, unemployment rates did move sharply upward. Some of today’s workers will be lucky enough to ride the living-wage tide upward, but others are likely to be cast aside.” These and other regulations have not made the City a high-unemployment city, but Santa Fe continues to grow less-quickly than other cities in the state.

Of course, it is only intuitive that forcing businesses to pay more for employees will reduce employment, but it bears repeating.