The New York Times Claimed D.C.’s Minimum Wage Hike Created Jobs. We Exposed Their Error.
Did the number of restaurant workers in Washington, D.C., go up after the city voted to increase the minimum wage in a citywide referendum? That’s what The New York Times reporter Priya Krishna claimed in an article that appeared in March, citing figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
She reported that the total number of workers in the industry had increased from 13,690 in 2022 to 14,168 by September of 2023.Â
These numbers are false. It turns out that Krishna misunderstood the data she was looking at. The chart she linked to in the article presented numbers “in the thousands,” meaning that the actual data were not 14,168 but 14,168,000, which also makes sense because Krishna didn’t realize she was reading national BLS data —not local figures.
Reason contacted The Times about the mistake, and the paper issued a correction.
This would be just an embarrassing error, except that by the time the paper corrected the figures, the labor group that advocated for the minimum wage increase in D.C., One Fair Wage, had cited the Times’ reporting as evidence that its policy hadn’t negatively impacted employment in the district.Â
It has. When the law first went into effect in May 2023, full-service restaurant employment was at 29,678. Employment peaked in December of that year at 30,111 but since then has fallen by 4.1 percent to 28,875, as of October 2024.
The Times’ correction of Krishna’s initial mistake introduced new problems. The rewritten paragraph now claims that the number of workers in the industry increased to 77,356 in September 2023 from 71,762 a year earlier. And while, in this case, those are real numbers, they refer to employment from all leisure and hospitality establishments, including movie theaters, hotels, spas, golf courses, museums, and more. These job categories weren’t impacted by the policy change that
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