Worker Privacy and Ohio's Issue 2:

One of the many voter initiatives on the ballot in Ohio is Issue 2, the "Ohio Fair Wage Amendment," a proposal to enshrine an ever-increasing minimum wage in the Ohio state constitution. If it passes (and polls suggest it will by a large margin) the Ohio minimum wage will rise to $6.85 an hour in 2007, and increase with inflation thereafter.

There's no need to rehash the economic arguments about the minimum wage here. (For those interested, see my NRO commentary on Issue 2 here). There are several other aspects of Issue 2 that are worth comment. First, for a constitutional amendment, Issue 2 is quite unweildy. Only a small portion of the thousand-plus-word amendment concerns wage rates. The rest details employer record-keeping, reporting, and disclosure requirements, and provides for a private cause of action against employers who fail to comply with the new law.

Issue 2 opponents have focused their efforts on portions of the amendment that they claim threaten workers' privacy. A group called Ohioans to Protect Personal Privacy, for instance, argues that the amendment's "fine print can also make your payroll records public: how much you make, when you worked, where you live."

This charge is overstated. According to Ohio State's Peter Swire OTPPP's claims are "wrong" and display an "an ignorance of actual privacy law." That said, I believe Issue 2's non-wage provisions are still cause for concern.

Issue 2 requires employers to maintain payroll records for all employers for three years after their employment. Under the Amendment, "Such information shall be provided without charge to an employee or person acting on behalf of an employee upon request." An individual "acting on behalf of an employee" is presumably someone like an attorney or authorized union representative, and herein lies the potential problem.

Another provision of Issue 2 provides that:

An action for equitable and monetary relief may be brought against an employer by . . .an employee or person acting on behalf of an employee or all similarly situated employees . . . for any violation of this section or any law or regulation implementing its provisions.

This provision, read in conjunction with the rest of Issue 2, seems to create the possibility that an attorney retained by a current or former employee could bring a class-action suit on behalf of all "similarly situated employees," and then seek the relevant employment records by claiming that they are acting on their behalf. Why would they do this? Perhaps to facilitate a litigation strategy or union organizing campaign.

This is not the only potential interpretation of Issue 2, but it is hardly an unreasonable one either. So, while some privacy-based complaints are overstated, there is a reasonable basis for concern -- and reason enough, in my mind, why someone who would like to increase the minimum wage might still have misgivings about a constitutional amendment like Issue 2.

When "The Weight of Empirical Evidence" Is Only "Anecdotal or Theoretical":

In a post on proposals to raise the minimum wage, Kevin Drum comments:

"it's worth noting that virtually all the evidence on the anti-minimum wage side is either anecdotal or theoretical. The evidence on the pro-minimum wage side is concrete and statistical."

Yet the very story he cites as the basis for this proposition reports otherwise.

In a new report, economists David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board say a review of more than 90 studies in more than 15 countries since the early 1990s shows nearly two-thirds of the studies find a "consistent" though not always statistically significant negative impact on employment. Fewer than 10 found a consistently positive impact. While there's "no consensus," they say, "the weight of empirical evidence" supports the traditional view.

UPDATE: I am not sure, but this appears to be the Neumark-Wascher study referred to in the WSJ story. From the conclusion:

In general, our results provide evidence that minimum wages tend to reduce employment rates among the youth population. A clear negative correlation between the level of the minimum wage and youth employment-to-population ratios appears both in the raw data, and in time-series cross-section regressions relating employment rates to minimum wages, with controls for overall economic conditions and cross-country variation in labor market policies and institutions. The disemployment effects also appear in models that control for country-specific factors (including country-specific time trends), indicating that the results are not solely driven by cross-country differences in minimum wage levels and youth employment rates.