Regarding the courts, a coalition of Missouri business groups, including the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, has filed a lawsuit challenging Proposition A.

The plaintiffs argue that combining wage increases with sick leave provisions violates the state constitution’s single-subject rule for ballot initiatives. Proposition A, which passed with 58% of the vote, would incrementally increase the minimum wage from $12.30 to $15 by 2026 and provide workers up to seven paid sick days annually starting in May 2025. Supporters contend that wages and benefits are integral to overall compensation and thus constitute a single subject. The Missouri Supreme Court has yet to schedule hearings for the case.

As for the legislature, because the proposition was a statute, the legislature may act to overturn it. One Missouri legislator introduced the Entrepreneur Rights Act, which would exempt some small and seasonal businesses from minimum wage increases.

Supporters may point to California’s recent mandate elevating the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour as a triumph for labor rights. However, a closer examination reveals that the anticipated benefits, particularly in job creation, have not materialized. A study from the University of California, Berkeley, initially suggested that the wage hike did not adversely affect employment levels. Yet, upon scrutinizing the data, it becomes evident that fast-food employment in California has grown at a slower pace compared to the national average. In fact, since the law’s implementation, California’s fast-food employment increased by only 1.85%, while the national rate rose by 3.22%. This discrepancy indicates that the wage increase may have hindered job growth within the state. Such outcomes underscore the complexities of implementing blanket wage policies without fully accounting for market dynamics and the potential unintended consequences on employment opportunities.

Show-Me analysts have consistently been critical of the arguments for, and the claimed benefits of, increases in the minimum wage. Minimum wage hikes just don’t deliver on their promises—even if academic studies twist themselves into knots trying to demonstrate otherwise.

The post No, California’s Minimum Wage Hike Did Not Create Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post If You Tax Something, You Get Less of It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Using household employment data, Wall, a professor of economics at Lindenwood University, tests whether employment growth in the two major cities appears to cause employment growth throughout the rest of the state.

Interestingly, the data show a statistically significant relationship between growth in Saint Louis and outstate Missouri. For example, a one percentage point gain in employment in Saint Louis would lead to a half percentage point gain in outstate Missouri the following year and then smaller gains in the years after that. Wall did not find as strong of a relationship in Kansas City, though the results were not far from being statistically significant.

Why these findings occur is a matter that can be explored further, but the point is clear. Saint Louis and, to a lesser extent, Kansas City are economic drivers for the state. Missourians have a vested interest in seeing sound policies put in place to help these cities flourish.

Click here to read the full report.

The post Is Growth in Outstate Missouri Tied to Growth in the St. Louis and Kansas City Areas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Megan Rose is the CEO of Better Together, an organization that strengthens families and communities by promoting work, protecting children, and supporting families in crisis. With the help of hundreds of compassionate volunteers and church communities, Better Together builds lasting support systems that help families cope with hardships—job loss, substance abuse, homelessness, and even jail time—and ensure that children are cared for in a safe home until the family can be reunited.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Stitcher 

The post Podcast: More Than Just A Paycheck – Megan Rose appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Titled “Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say about Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States?” it surveys the existing research on the effects of the minimum wage.

What does it find? According to the authors:

Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

Labor economics isn’t my field of expertise, but from an outsider’s perspective, raising the minimum wage doesn’t look good!

The post New Summary of Minimum Wage Research Shows Negative Effects appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Find more details and apply here: https://talentmarket.org/events-show-me/

The post The Show-Me Institute Is Hiring appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

https://soundcloud.com/show-me-institute/smi-podcast-shoshana-weissmann-license-to-regulate

The post SMI Podcast with Shoshana Weissmann: License to Regulate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fortunately, the findings from a recent nationwide survey conducted by Gallup, the Strada Education Network, and the Lumina Foundation, suggest that a college degree isn’t necessarily the only thing that employers are interested in. Researchers looked at two types of credentials that can be earned without a college degree and measured their impact on the employability and the earning power of the people who earned them. The credentials studied were the following:

• Certificates “awarded by educational institutions for completion of professionally oriented courses that typically represent a year or less of work.”
• Certifications “awarded by independent bodies that verify specific skills and competencies through testing”

The survey looked at adults 18 to 65 years old who had no postsecondary degree and compared those who had earned a certificate/certification with those who had not. The results suggest that earning a credential offers some real benefits in terms of employment rate and income.

It’s important to note that the study involved subjects of widely varying educational levels. Some had been to college (but hadn’t earned a 4-year degree), while others hadn’t completed high school. Those who hadn’t finished high school are overrepresented in the non-credentialed group, while those who had gone to vocational/technical school are overrepresented in the credentialed group. This means that we can’t easily separate the effect of the credential from the effect of the amount of education a participant has had.

However, the study also found a benefit to having a credential among low-, middle-, and high-income earners:

There’s strong evidence that educational programs that result in students earning these certifications provide real benefits, but what does that mean for Missouri?

It could mean a lot, especially with respect to prioritizing needs when allocating the money Missouri spends on education. Credentialing programs appear to offer a positive return to students on the money invested in them. So why can’t these programs capture the imaginations of the public (and of policymakers) in the way that things like pre-K programs do—even though the case for the long-term benefits of pre-K is anything but ironclad?

Nothing against imagination, but when making spending decisions, policymakers are better off being guided by the facts. Although this survey covered adults aged 18 to 64, investing in high schoolers so they can earn industry-recognized credentials could help students leave high school qualified to enter the Missouri workforce immediately. In this case, the facts are lining up behind credentialing programs as a possible way to help Missouri’s workers and employers alike.

The post What Can Credentials Get You? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In many cases, the “right” credential to have coming out of high school is an industry-recognized credential (IRC). You earn it by passing an exam that is designed not by your school, but by a professional trade organization. There’s nothing wrong with earning a CTE certificate from your school; it can reflect a broad competence in the skills required for a given profession. But an IRC indicates mastery of knowledge specifically chosen by employers who have jobs to fill. It only makes sense that schools should encourage students to earn the credential that their potential employers want them to have.

The graphic at the top of this post shows just a few of the career options that can open up for students who earn an IRC. Others include (but aren’t limited to) education, culinary arts, business, graphic design, and hospitality. Fewer than 3 percent of Missouri high school students earned an IRC in 2017. Moreover, out of 27,437 students who completed three or more CTE classes during the 2016–2017 school year, only 8,565 earned IRCs. Employers are bending over backwards to tell us what students need to learn in order to get hired; shouldn’t we listen to them?

Listen to the podcast.

IRC infographic-1.pdf

The post IRCs Open the Door to Career Opportunities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Currently, Missouri requires licenses for 240 occupations, 37 of which are for low- to moderate-income jobs. Many licensing boards list “good character” or not having committed “any offense involving moral turpitude” as a requirement for applicants or renewal of licenses. While it may make sense to prohibit some ex-offenders from obtaining a license, these vague statements shut out almost anyone with a criminal record regardless of the nature of their offense, the time that has lapsed since they served their time, or if they have successfully completed rehabilitation. It also precludes an employer from exercising its discretion in determining a person’s fitness for a position.

On one hand, it seems wise to refuse licenses in certain cases—say someone with a history of substance abuse or drug dealing applying for a pharmacy technician license. On the other hand, blanket bans of ex-offenders create obstacles to getting jobs that may have no connection with the crime committed and make it more likely that the offender will eventually return to prison. Other states—including Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, and Tennessee—have shown there is a better way forward that strikes the balance between safety and second chances.

Instead of allowing licensing boards to have wholesale bans on those with criminal records, Fresh Start Legislation would require that boards list specific crimes that are directly related to the occupation in question and consider factors such as time passed since the last conviction and the nature of the offense. .

Under Fresh Start laws, boards may only outright deny applicants if they have a conviction within the last five years or if the conviction was for a violent or sexual crime. This means more dangerous criminals and repeat offenders would still be able to be screened out. But if someone has an older conviction for a nonviolent crime and has remained crime free since being released, their application must be considered and they are allowed to appeal the decision if denied.

Missouri’s Governor recently mentioned the need for better prisoner education so prisoners can be released ready to enter the workforce. But how much can educational programs accomplish if ex-offenders are being automatically shut out of hundreds of occupations? By removing unnecessary obstacles to ex-offenders leaving prison, a Fresh Start law would be a good first step to help these people get jobs and fully reintegrate into their communities. 

The post Giving Ex-Offenders a Fresh Start When Looking for a Job: Part Two appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Whether it is for a technical violation of the terms of their parole or because they committed a new offense, having so many people return to prison is expensive. The average cost to incarcerate just one person for one year is $21,000. Multiply that by thousands of people serving years-long sentences and the cost of recidivism for Missouri taxpayers is in the millions.

While there are several important factors that may contribute to recidivism rates, research has found that finding employment upon release strongly affects whether someone will end up back in prison. This study from the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments explains why employment for ex-offenders is important:

Employment can make a strong contribution to recidivism-reduction efforts because it refocuses individuals’ time and efforts on prosocial activities, making them less likely to engage in riskier behaviors and to associate with people who do…Employment also has important societal benefits, including reduced strain on social service resources, contributions to the tax base, and safer, more stable communities.

Last year, Show-Me Institute’s Patrick Tuohey testified on a bill that would have removed the restriction on anyone convicted of a felony from obtaining a license to sell lottery tickets—a law which essentially prohibited them from working at convenience stores or gas stations. While this bill wasn’t adopted, other states have taken an approach that Missouri should consider.

Instead of considering different licensed occupations piecemeal, Fresh Start Legislation adopted in other states requires a comprehensive review of licensing boards’ restrictions on ex-offenders. Such a review can help ex-offenders by removing unnecessary barriers to employment. Part two of this blog post will dig more into what a Fresh Start law would look like and how it could help Missouri reduce its recidivism rates.

The post Giving Ex-Offenders a Fresh Start When Looking For a Job: Part One appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We already have a RTW law – passed by the Missouri Legislature and signed by the governor in early 2017. It was supposed to take effect on Aug. 28, 2017. However, on Aug. 18, organized labor groups collected enough signatures to give voters the choice of implementing the law (with a “yes” vote on Prop A) or rejecting it (with a “no” vote). A simple majority wins.

At a labor rally in St. Louis on June 23, AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka joined with other labor leaders in proclaiming that RTW would set off a “race to the bottom” for all workers, not just union members. He said: “Proposition A will lower wages, destroy jobs, (and) increase poverty.”

Naturally, no union boss who can limit the supply of labor to members of his own union wants to give up that ability. Who wants competition – when you are in the cushy position of not having to compete? But the idea that competition is bad for growth and job creation is complete nonsense.

In fact, RTW states have consistently outperformed forced-union states in job growth, personal income growth, and economic growth. That’s not a matter of opinion; it comes from hard data provided by three federal bureaus (Census, Labor Statistics, and Economic Analysis) over the ten-year period from 2004 to 2014.

During this period, average job growth in the 22 states with RTW laws in place for most or all of that time was more than twice as fast (at 9.1 percent) as in the 28 forced-union states. The RTW states also had considerably faster growth in personal income (at 54.7 percent compared to 43.5 percent), and a much stronger economic growth (50.7 percent compared to 38.0 percent).

And there were other ancillary benefits, including faster population growth (more than double that of forced-union states). From 2004 to 2014, many Americans voted with their feet in moving into RTW states and out of forced-union states.

The devastation that befell the U.S. auto industry during and after the 1980s exemplifies what happens when companies are kept from responding to market forces as a result of compulsory unionization, forced to pay an artificially high price for labor, and forced to absorb “legacy” costs (health care and pensions) they cannot possibly afford over the long run.

During the Great Recession of 2008–2009, two of the three big automakers – GM and Chrysler – would have collapsed but for government bailouts totaling billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Meanwhile, Toyota and other foreign manufacturers that had opened plants in RTW states continued to perform well without bailouts.

In 2012, Michigan – the state that gave birth to the United Auto Workers union – became the 24th state to adopt RTW. Gov. Rick Snyder said that he believed that the legislation would lead to “more and better jobs for Michiganders.”

It is not just employers who benefit from right to work. It is anyone and everyone who seeks employment. Compulsory unionization represents an unfair and counterproductive abridgement of the freedom of people to offer their services to the highest bidder; they should not be locked out of an opportunity because a union with political clout has been granted a broad monopoly over the supply of labor.

The post How and Why Prop A Will Boost Jobs and Growth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Hard-luck stories are a common feature in election-year advertisements, and I hope the gentleman from Oklahoma has found his way out of his job loss—which, based on Oklahoma’s right-to-work timeline, may have happened nearly twenty years ago. But that doesn’t alter the underlying facts about Oklahoma’s economy and the effects of right-to-work laws generally—facts which the ad either ignored or mischaracterized.

First, let’s look at the employment facts for Oklahoma. Oklahoma voters passed a right-to-work law in 2001. In March 2001 (before the recession that year and before the passage of right-to-work) there were 1.53 million people employed there. As of May 2018, there were 1.68 million Oklahomans employed. Simple arithmetic reveals that 150,000 more people are on Oklahoma’s payrolls now compared with payrolls before right-to-work passed, so since 2001, tens of thousands of jobs have actually been added in Oklahoma, not lost.

Could the gentleman be referring to what happened to employment between December 2001 and July 2002, when Oklahoma payrolls declined by 40,000 workers? Maybe, but that decline was unlikely to have been related to right-to-work legislation. The recession of 2001 is a much better explanation for why employment fell in Oklahoma during that period, as payrolls were declining in many places at the time.

But the issues with the ad don’t stop with the numbers themselves. The ad essentially claims that right-to-work laws lower employment and lower wages, but economically speaking (and, as seen in practice,) that claim is highly suspect. Here’s how it works in terms of old-fashioned demand-and-supply: When the cost of labor is no longer driven up by the bargaining power funded by compulsory union dues, it becomes less expensive for employers to hire new workers. The less expensive labor is, the more of it employers can buy.

Claiming broadly that “wages will fall” as a result of right-to-work is grossly misleading. Employers are not going to slash the pay of the current workforce. Without union interference, newly hired workers will be paid what they are worth, and there will be more of them.

Somehow, our ad-man argues that both wages and employment will decline. He doesn’t explain why making it less expensive to hire workers will lead businesses to hire fewer of them.

Unfortunately, the ad conceals a great deal in its depiction of Oklahoma and of facts in general, cocooning a host of dubious conclusions inside a hard-luck personal story. That might be politics, but it ain’t economics.

Luckily, people throwing numbers at Missourians also need to show us why their explanation is better than the one suggested by basic economics. I look forward to an exchange of ideas rather than thirty-second sound bites.

The post Prop A Facts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Employment in small firms—those with fewer than 20 employees—declined in Missouri following the recession. The U.S. overall eked out a only small increase in this category. For all other firm sizes, employment in Missouri establishments increased at a pace slower than the national average.

Payrolls in Missouri generally rose at a significantly slower rate than in the nation overall. This holds true across all sizes of firms. Only for large firms—those with more than 500 employees—was the increase in payrolls similar in Missouri and the nation.

The post Employment and Payrolls in Missouri Lag Nation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly release of employment data revealed that there has been meager growth in Missouri jobs over the past year. Between May 2015 and May 2016 there was an increase of about 24,000 jobs, or less than a one-percent increase. Is this slow increase a recent phenomenon or something more persistent?

The chart above plots total non-farm employment since 1990 for both Missouri and the United States. To make the two series comparable, each is indexed to their January 1990 values. The two lines show that jobs in Missouri and the nation both react to changes in economic activity. They both expanded during the economic boom of 1992. Conversely, employment fell during the recession that occurred in 1991, and during the so-called Great Recession, which lasted from 2007 through 2009, employment dropped significantly.

What makes the chart interesting is the fact that while Missouri’s job growth kept pace with the nation for most of the 1990s, it has lagged far behind since then. From the beginning of 2000 to the beginning of 2016, employment at the national level increased by about 9 percent. Missouri, in contrast, has seen employment increase by less than 2 percent. And while the nation has rebounded from the Great Recession with employment higher now than what it was in 2007, total employment in Missouri has changed very little.

To answer the question posed above, Missouri’s lack of job growth is a persistent phenomenon, one lasting well over the past decade. 

The post Missouri’s Weak Employment Mirrors Weak Economic Growth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The U.S. Labor Department has extended mandatory overtime pay to more than four million white-collar workers, including some 100,000 workers in Missouri. A new ruling from the department more than doubles the weekly threshold for salaried workers exempt from overtime pay to $913 a week (or $47,476 a year), and it requires employers to pay time and a half to employees at or below the threshold for any week in which they work more than 40 hours.

With five hours of overtime pay, a salaried worker at the threshold level will go from making $913 in a week to $1,172.

That may sound good, but it reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of what leads to wage and job growth and upward mobility for workers. It sets a new high-water mark in government meddling in other people’s business—or businesses.

As the CEO of one restaurant chain points out, the new ruling will demote thousands of mid-level managers into “glorified crew members” whose overriding incentive is to log more time rather than get results and be rewarded with bonuses and promotions.

In calling for cumbersome timekeeping systems that will rein in those who see showing initiative and always doing more than the required minimum as a ticket to success, the new ruling restricts the freedom and flexibility of employers and a large portion of their front-line managers to come to mutually beneficial agreements on compensation and working hours.

Other unfortunate side-effects will also follow. According to a National Retail Federation study, the rule will cause employers to move about a third of salaried retail and restaurant workers to hourly status. Further, it will lead to reduced hours for many of those workers and a shift to hiring more temps.

The idea that government can force businesses to take money out of profits in order to pay more to different classes of workers is itself delusional. To force any business to pay more to a worker than his or her value to the enterprise is to ensure that the business will do its best to keep employment of such workers at an absolute minimum. Unlike governments, companies that can’t make money are unable to expand, and are subject to extinction. That is especially true for low-margin, hypercompetitive businesses such as hotels, restaurants, and retailing that have been especially critical of the ruling.

The White House is saying that millions of salaried workers will get a raise under the new overtime rule. However, according to the Federation of Independent Businesses, that is contradicted by the Labor Department’s forecasts of a decline in average pay rates of newly covered salaried workers of about 5.3% in 2017.

To paraphrase Churchill, the Obama administration’s plan to order up a raise for middle-class Americans through an administrative edict is as foolish as the man who stands in a bucket and expects to lift himself up by pulling on the handle.

In fact, the administration’s plan is worse than that. At least the man who pulls on the bucket handle does not descend to a lower level. But that is exactly what will happen through the ministrations of our know-it-all government.

The post Know-it-all Government Undermines Growth and Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recent data release (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/metro.pdf) allows us to compare job creation in Missouri to that in other states over the past year. Between January 2015 and January 2016 the number of employees on nonfarm payrolls in Missouri increased by only 0.7 percent. (The figures used in this report are based on non–seasonally adjusted data.) Though better than in the six states where employment numbers actually declined, Missouri’s job growth is much slower than that of most other states: Missouri ranks 38th in new nonfarm employment growth over the past year. And when compared with its neighbors, Missouri’s record of job growth is below average (1%), and notably worse than Tennessee (3.2%) and Arkansas (2.3%).

Missouri’s job growth was weak, but is this reflective of the metropolitan areas? The table below shows that, on average, jobs increased at a 1.6 percent rate across the eight metropolitan areas. The percent change in nonfarm employment ranges from a high of 4.6 percent in Columbia to a low of 0.5 percent in Cape Girardeau. In Kansas City and St. Louis, the two metropolitan areas that together account for about 85 percent of nonfarm employment in Missouri, job growth outpaced the rest of the state: In Kansas City nonfarm employment increased by 2 percent while in St. Louis it rose by 1.2 percent.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The post Job Growth in Missouri: Depends on Where You Live appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To see this, we can look at ridership changes on the MetroBus and MetroLink systems since the end of the recession. That recession technically ended in mid-2009, according to the Saint Louis Federal Reserve. And while 2010–2013 cannot be described as great years, total employment in the Saint Louis Metropolitan area has steadily risen since around October of 2009.

Metro ridership was anything but recession-proof. During the economic downturn, MetroLink ridership fell 37% and MetroBus ridership fell 28%. But while the employment in the Saint Louis area has slowly but steadily recovered, the same cannot be said of Metro ridership. In 2010 and 2011, MetroBus gained back much of the ridership it had lost in the recession, but in 2012 and 2013 growth stagnated. MetroLink ridership recovery was less robust. By mid-2014, five years after the recession’s end, MetroLink ridership was still 30% below its pre-recession peak.

But as the chart below also shows, 2015 saw ridership levels reverse their post-recession trend of steady (if modest) growth. From July 2014 to October 2015, MetroLink ridership fell 8% and MetroBus ridership fell 5%. Taking all this together, it means that MetroLink ridership in late 2015 is only 2% higher than the post-recession ridership lows.

There are many factors that may explain weak post-recession ridership growth for Metro. Saint Louis has had a weak jobs recovery, with total employment still below pre-recession highs; employment has only increased 4% since 2009. However, economic growth has accelerated in the last year, the same time ridership began to decline on Metro.

Whatever the underlying reasons, this much is clear: there is no evidence that Saint Louis residents are flocking to public transportation or the MetroLink, despite significant investments made in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The post Metro Ridership Trending Down in 2015 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This February, Doug McMillon – the current CEO – agreed to raise the hourly wage at Wal-Mart to no less than $9 an hour in April and to $10 an hour (or 33 percent above the current federal minimum wage) in early 2016.

How is the sharply elevated internal “minimum wage” working out for the world’s largest retailer and (by a wide margin) the nation’s largest private employer?

So far, not at all well.

In announcing the company’s third-quarter results this Tuesday, McMillon acknowledged that the wage hike had been “by far the biggest driver” in causing a 13.3 percent reduction in corporate earnings over the first nine months of its current fiscal year (ending on Jan. 31, 2016). Higher wages have added $1.2 billion in annual costs in this fiscal year and will add another $1.5 billion in costs next year.

Net income at Wal-Mart hit an all-time high of $17.0 billion in calendar 2012 (fiscal 2013, ending in January 31, 2013). According to Value Line estimates, it will drop to $14.8 billion at the end of this year and to $12.6 billion next year, which would be the lowest annual earnings for Wal-Mart in a decade.

That is no big deal to critics like Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor under President Clinton. Reich pointed to Walmart and McDonald’s in a petition that he launched on MoveOn.org in 2013 urging the biggest employers to increase wages so workers can finally “get a fair share in this economy.” “Your typical employee is now earning $8.25 to $8.80 an hour,” Reich wrote. “They [Walmart and McDonald’s] can easily afford to pay [workers] $15 an hour without causing layoffs or requiring price increases.”

In regarding any profit as proof that a company can afford to pay more to its workers – without doing harm to its customers – that viewpoint disregards the realities of a competitive marketplace.

For one thing, Wal-Mart competes with other public companies in striving to maximize returns to shareholders. To say that Wal-Mart has been getting hammered in this regard is something of an understatement.

Wal-Mart’s shares have lost a third of their value since the beginning of this year – falling from a high of $90 a share in January to $60 at the close of business on Nov. 17. Meanwhile, its biggest rivals have done substantially better. Costco has climbed from $140 a share to $159, and Amazon.com has more than doubled in price.

In July, Amazon passed Wal-Mart to become the most highly valued company in the retail sector and it has shot further and further ahead since then. It now has a total market capitalization of $308 billion, compared with $195 billion for Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart lags far behind both Amazon and Costco in productivity – measured in sales per employee, with Wal-Mart at $219,000, Costco at $565,000, and Amazon at $578,000. It is clear that Wal-Mart is intent on closing the gap by slowing the growth of bricks-and-mortar stores while putting much greater emphasis on e-commerce. As McMillon put it in his presentation on Tuesday:

We will be the first to deliver a seamless shopping experience at scale. No matter how you choose to shop with us – through your mobile device, in a store or a combination – it will be fast and easy. Online retailers are testing physical store experience because they recognize the same customer desire that we do. There’s a race to do this right.

But consider the impact on total employment at Wal-Mart if the company were to close the productivity gap between itself and Amazon by 25 percent over the next three years while also achieving its stated objective of growing annual sales from about $485 billion to $530 billion or more.

In this situation, Wal-Mart would need a global workforce of 1.7 million associates, compared to the 2.2 million it has now – a loss of approximately 500,000 jobs. That would entail a loss of about 320,000 associates out of the U.S. workforce of 1.4 million associates.

While those numbers are speculative, they clearly point to the conclusion that Wal-Mart will no longer be the great job-creation machine that it was years past, which is something that self-declared champions of working class should be thinking about in agitating for higher wages. Paying higher wages has made the company more focused on achieving higher levels of productivity.

At the same time the company may water down if not abandon its historic commitment to serving less affluent shoppers with rock-bottom prices across a vast array of merchandise. The late founder Sam Walton said his dream was “to serve the under-served.” That is less of a priority today. “Globally, we know growth will come from middle- and upper-income households in years ahead,” McMillon stated at an analysts’ meeting in October.

The post Killing the Golden Goose: How Walmart’s Left-Wing Critics Destroy Job Creation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We have made a conscious decision as a community to build the infrastructure to retain, attract and grow tech companies here and support entrepreneurship. It’s one of our strongest economic drivers.

While few would dispute that many great tech companies are starting in, and coming to, Saint Louis, the data show that in terms of companies and jobs, Saint Louis is losing as many as it is gaining.

To see this, we can look at Census Data that tracks Saint Louis City business establishments from 2008 to 2013 (which excludes government employees and self-employed persons). The period starts just before the recession and ends three years into the “recovery.” Over that time, Saint Louis City’s total business establishments rose by 866, or about 10%. That may sound good, but the problem is that over the same period the city’s total paid employees decreased by more than 25,000 (as shown in the chart above). 

The increase in business establishments and decrease in employment seem counterintuitive until one notes that all the city’s net establishment gain came from the smallest businesses (from one to four employees). Total businesses with more than four employees decreased in the city over the period examined.

Contrary to the popular narrative, growth in small companies did not come primarily from tech fields. Instead, the main growth sectors were health services and education (meds and eds):

The Saint Louis economy has performed better in 2015 than in previous years, so it is possible that future data will show greater business and employment growth. However, the latest census data strongly suggest that:

1.       In recent years city has failed to retain or increase medium- and large-sized businesses of nearly every type.

2.       The business and job growth there has been is mostly attributable to health services and education, not tech startups. 

The post Census Data Does Not Reflect Saint Louis City Claims of Business, Tech Company Growth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.