The headlines were ebullient: "Minimum Wage Increase Hasn't Killed Jobs in Seattle." So said a report from a team of researchers affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, timed for the three-year anniversary of the law.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray conveniently had an infographic designed and ready to go for the study's release. His office excitedly tweeted that the policy had "raised food workers' pay, without negative impact on employment," linking to an uploaded study version on the Mayor's personal .gov website rather than a University domain.

The UW reports on Seattle's $15 experiment had something for everyone. Unfortunately for the Mayor's office, their conclusions on the early stages of Seattle's $15 wage experiment were not uniformly positive. The Washington Post reports:

The average hourly wage for workers affected by the increase jumped from $9.96 to $11.14, but wages likely would have increased some anyway due to Seattle's overall economy. Meanwhile, although workers were earning more, fewer of them had a job than would have without an increase. Those who did work had fewer hours than they would have without the wage hike.

Nuanced conclusions like this one don't lend themselves to celebratory press releases like the one the Mayor's office put out yesterday. Enter the Berkeley team, which always arrives at the same positive conclusion on minimum wage no matter the number: In their view, a higher minimum wage is always a good thing.

In an expose published last year, the Albany Times-Union used emails obtained via public records request to explore the motivations of the Berkeley team:

The Times Union was recently provided hundreds of pages of emails among minimum wage advocates, Jacobs and other Berkeley academics, demonstrating a deep level of coordination between academics and advocates....

The Berkeley Labor Center has done at least six other studies on the minimum wage in California municipalities, all showing that a wage increase would be beneficial. In fact, Jacobs could not name a study conducted by Berkeley that said raising wages would have an overall negative impact. ...

Given this history of identical results, it's not surprising that the Murray administration in Seattle was anxious to have a copy of the predictably-positive Berkeley report to tout on the third anniversary of its minimum wage law.