Counterpoint:<p><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/06/26/25238844/the-morning-news-ignore-the-report-about-how-15-an-hour-is-hurting-seattles-poor-weekend-heat-breaks-records" rel="nofollow">http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/06/26/25238844/the-morn...</a><p>Michael Reich, a UC Berkeley economics professor who was lead author on the Berkeley report, said he found the UW team’s report not credible for a number of reasons.<p>He said the UW researchers’ “synthetic” Seattle model draws only from areas in Washington that are nothing like Seattle, and the report excludes multisite businesses, which employ a large percentage of Seattle’s low-paid workforce. The latter fact was also problematic, he said, because that meant workers who left single-site businesses to work at multisite businesses were counted as job losses, not job gains in the UW study.<p>Reich also thought the $19 threshold was too low, and he said the UW researchers’ report “finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times more than in hundreds of minimum wage and non-minimum wage studies. … “There is no reason,” he said, that Seattle’s employers of low-paid workers “should be so much more sensitive to wage increases.”