If you want to better understand the attacks that restaurants will be facing in the near future, I urge you to read “Smoke and Mirrors,” a new report from the Employment Policies Institute, for which I serve as executive director. Our organization seeks to debunk the phony statistical arguments used by activists who want to increase the minimum wage.


Those kind of faulty facts appear in a recent study by The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, or IRLE — a far-left-leaning outfit based at the University of California – Berkeley — that argues that minimum-wage increases between 1990 and 2009 had no impact on teen employment.


The claim and study have been passed around by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, a California representative pushing a bill that would raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour. That’s up from $8 an hour, a rate that’s already one of the highest in the country. San Francisco’s minimum wage is an astonishing $9.92 per hour. Pushing the minimum wage higher will only increase the state’s unemployment rate, which already clocks in at 12.3 percent.


This is basic economics: Higher labor costs reduce demand for employee labor. 


So how did the IRLE come to its counterintuitive conclusion? Most researchers look for the impact of minimum-wage rates by examining how employment growth in a state compares to its minimum-wage policies. They include controls for certain economic factors that might be related to both the state’s employment growth and its minimum-wage policy. But there’s a catch: If you add too many of these controls, job loss that’s directly related to the minimum wage is masked and instead looks like the regular ebb and flow of the labor market. 


The IRLE study includes more than 800 controls. The typical minimum-wage study, by comparison, has about 80 controls.


With this statistical sleight of hand, researchers virtually guaranteed that any reduction in teen employment between 1990 and 2009 was blamed on regional economic variation instead of increases in the minimum wage.


As our report points out, the states of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania could all raise their minimum wage to $50 an hour, and this study would still find that the changes in unemployment rates were due to shifts in the regional economy instead of the minimum wage.


The average assemblyman isn’t terribly good at math, however — and certainly not at the kind of math required to fully spot these types of falsehoods. Those who are already predisposed to agitate for a minimum-wage hike are generally happy to pass on such pseudo-stats without giving them a second thought. 


Arming yourself with knowledge is the best way to fight off these attacks. Let local and federal elected officials know that studies such as IRLE’s are rare: 85 percent of the best studies on the subject show that minimum-wage increases lead to lost jobs. Tell them that less than 11 percent of the benefits of a proposed federal wage hike to $9.50 an hour would accrue to the working poor. Why? The average income for households with a minimum-wage earner is over $47,000. Inform them that government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit are superior vehicles for addressing poverty, with the added bonus that they also spur employment for vulnerable populations, including single mothers.


You need to make your employees and your customers understand the consequences that increased minimum wages have for their career prospects. Service with a smile might one day be seen as a luxury afforded to only the wealthiest among us, as cost-efficient automation and self-service replace friendly employees. It’s not an absurd future to imagine, even at casual-dining restaurants: Self-service touch screens instead of team members taking orders, self-bussing of tables and self-service soda fountains. Many of these advances have already come to quick-service restaurants. Why should we expect that “progress” would stop there?

Richard Berman is president of Berman & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm.