South Sound minimum wage workers got a raise last week. If you ask restaurant owners how they feel about paying the highest minimum wage in the country, some will grumble a bit and others will tell you that they’re used to it. If that seems like a mild response, it may have to do with hysteria whipped up by business and industry advocates, who seem to have a slightly different agenda than the average, independent restaurateur.



State minimum wage earners got an extra 48 cents per hour starting last week, bringing the state’s minimum wage to a record $8.55 per hour — that’s higher than any state in the nation. And unlike most other states, Washington doesn’t allow restaurant owners to pay tipped employees a reduced wage. Add significant increases in the price of food, an economic disaster or two, and rising rents, and it’s no wonder restaurant owners are wincing over this latest increase.



“I wish things were different in our state,” says Pat Nagle, owner of the Hub and Harmon restaurants, which have about 80 employees between them. “But, compared to other states, we’ve been paying more all along. We’ve had to budget for those kinds of labor costs from the get go. Any increase is significant for restaurants. But really, we feel that our employees are our greatest asset. Investing in our people is what’s going to help us survive during this economy. So we’re just going to move forward. This is the business we’re in.”



Now wait a minute. I’ve been reading media reports for the past year that make minimum wage hikes sound like a death sentence for restaurants and other businesses that employ a majority of minimum wage earners.



“In bad economic times, these added costs often mean the difference between an employment opportunity or a job and an employer either cutting back work hours, forgoing hiring people, or simply doing the work himself or herself,” says Association of Washington Business President Don Brunell, for example, in an recent op-ed piece. “They have no choice, because pennies can mean the difference between keeping the doors open or folding.”



This is a typical cry anytime anyone tries to raise business taxes, wages or fees — that any additional expense for business owners becomes a de facto job killer. But if you ask most restaurant owners in Washington, where the minimum wage has been increasing steadily and significantly for years, they’ll gripe a bit, and then get back to making money. Because our state minimum wage is indexed to cost of living in Washington, it goes up every year, like clockwork. Most restaurant owners know it’s coming. And like Nagle, they budget for it.



The closer you look, all the doom surrounding minimum wage increases begins to look like a mirage.



Let’s start with a few interesting facts: A 1998 Economic Policy Institute study failed to find any systematic, significant job loss associated with wage increases in 1996-97. A more recent Fiscal Policy Institute study found no evidence of negative employment effects on small businesses related to minimum wage increases. Also recently, 562 economists signed a letter agreeing that “as with a federal increase, modest increases in state minimum wages … can significantly improve the lives of low-income workers and their families, without the adverse effects that critics have claimed.” Among signers were four Nobel Laureates, three of whom have served as presidents of the American Economic Association.



So where do we get all these figures about all the horrible impacts of minimum wage increases?



Well, much of the hype can be traced to the Employment Policy Institute (EPI), which is widely and indiscriminately cited by media organizations across the country.

The EPI is one of several organizations affiliated with public affairs magnates Berman & Co. The Washington, D.C.-based firm is led by Rick Berman, a policy analyst and lobbyist. EPI is employed and funded primarily by the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries — where a disproportionate number of minimum wage earners are employed.



The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said that EPI has been “sponsoring cooked studies and issuing tendentious sound bytes whenever attempts are made to establish healthcare or better wages for workers,” for years.



In the late 1980s, for example, Berman spent a lot of time fighting against the Americans with Disabilities Act, claiming it would cripple the hospitality industry. He fought against mandated insurance legislation in 1992 and 1993, and worked hand-in-hand with tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to battle the Clinton healthcare plan, claiming it would kill as many as three million jobs. The Clinton plan was to be funded through an additional federal tax on cigarettes. He has claimed that U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warnings about salmonella-related food poisoning were just “whipping up fear over food.”



In 1995, Berman and Norm Brinker, were tagged as the lobbyists who donated the money that disgraced then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who got dragged before the House Ethics Committee for influence peddling over the money.

Berman and Brinker were lobbying against raising the minimum wage.