This week marks the fifth anniversary of the passage of Seattle’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law, the first such law in the country. At the time it passed in 2014, strikes were rare and victories for working-class people were few and far between, so it was a startling development. Since then, Seattle has inspired many similar campaigns and victories nationwide. The result of long, hard organizing and lobbying work by SEIU and other groups, Seattle’s law came just after the 2013 election of councilwoman Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, who’d made the $15 minimum wage a cornerstone of her campaign — another startling election victory back in those benighted pre-Rosanna Rodriguez days. There’s now been plenty of time to study its results, and while the policy has been a success by nearly any measure, Seattle’s experience also shows the limitations of single-issue reform.

The question of how to measure the impact of Seattle’s $15 wage is a complicated one. Some important facts are that Seattle’s wage hike, which was phased in gradually, raised hourly wages for workers and has not, contrary to right-wing predictions and liberal fears, cost jobs. According to Stephanie Luce, professor of labor and sociology and the CUNY School of Urban Studies and author of Fighting for a Living Wage, this is consistent with research on wage increases around the world. Businesses didn’t leave Seattle, nor have entrepreneurs been deterred from starting new ones there. The concern trolls have mostly been wrong and the always-touted “unintended consequences” have not come to pass.

However, one study, conducted by the University of Washington’s Jacob Vigdor and co-authors, using extensive state employment data, did find that employers cut back on entry-level workers’ hours as a result of the policy, undercutting overall earnings gains. That study had its critics, who noted that Vigdor and his colleagues excluded some large chain stores, for example. I’d also add that one of Vigdor’s co-authors was on Amazon’s payroll! A 2017 study by the Institute of Self-Reliance found that while warehouse workers are generally badly paid, Amazon is a standout in this space: in the eleven metro areas studied, the company paid its warehouse workers, on average, 15 percent below the prevailing wage. So, the company just might have an interest in this topic.