What’s Up With Food Service Employment in San Diego?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Mike Boswell tweets this morning that this is “good data for a @kdrum post”:

That is peculiar, isn’t it? Why did food service employment in San Diego plummet starting in October? I poked around a bit, and didn’t come up with anything. However, the answer is supposed to be “because they raised their minimum wage,” so I took a look at that. But it doesn’t really fit. In July 2016 San Diego raised its minimum wage to 50 cents more than the state minimum. That’s a pretty small increase to have such a significant effect, and for three months it didn’t have any effect. Food service employment didn’t turn around until October. So then I took a look at Seattle and San Francisco, two other West Coast cities that have raised their minimum wages recently. Here’s what food service employment looks like in all three places:

I dunno. San Francisco and Seattle raised their minimum wages considerably more than San Diego, and their food service employment has been fine. Combine that with the tiny size of the San Diego increase and the 3-month lag before anything happened, and the minimum wage theory seems a little iffy.

But nothing else comes to mind either. Could it be due to an outflow of undocumented workers following Donald Trump’s election? Something else unique to San Diego?

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate