The City of Seattle passed its $15 minimum way ordinance in June of 2014, and that December commissioned the UW team to conduct a five-year study of the law’s impacts. The ongoing research is led by professors Jacob Vigdor, Mark Long along with Jennifer Romich, associate professor in the UW School of Social Work and director of the West Coast Povert Center— and other co-authors from the Evans School, the School of Public Health and the Washington Employment Security Department.
The lot of Seattle’s lowest-paid workers improved following the city’s minimum wage increase to $11 in 2015, but that was more due to the robust regional economy than the wage hike itself, according to a research team at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy & Governance.