[Clodfobble]

The less-experienced half of the group, which logged less than a third as many hours on the job each week at the beginning of the study period, averaged little or no change in income...

The "good" employees still got fewer hours (if you the math), but they were paid more via the law, and so did better per quarter.

So, I interpret these two things a little differently. First, someone working 10-15 hours a week ("less than a third" of the close-to-full-time workers) is not someone who is supporting a family. In my recent experience (via my stepdaughter's ongoing part-time efforts,) employers prefer the magic number of 30-34 hours per week--few enough that they don't have to provide health benefits, but just barely, because coordinating the schedules and paychecks of three people at 10 hours each instead of one at 30 is just more headache for the manager and requires more time wasted on training, etc. I posit that anyone working just 10 hours a week wants to be working that little, i.e. the job is intentionally supplemental. So relatively speaking, I'm the least concerned about their wages stagnating compared to others'.

Second, you could look at it as the good employees "got" fewer hours, but you could also say they "had to work less" while taking home a bigger paycheck. They may be using that time to go to school to get a better job--the effects of which won't be seen for several more years--or voluntarily spending more time with their kids because now they can afford to, or (not great, but still) able to apply the extra hours toward a second part-time job since their first employer won't give them the full 40 hours with benefits. Ideally everyone wants to work 40 hours, but if your employer is keeping you at a max of 35.5 anyway, then it seems better to work less for more money.

For low-wage workers with less experience — a high-school student looking for a summer job, say — the wage increases have led to fewer job opportunities, the researchers found.

This, I'll grant you, isn't good. But it is a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a long time now. To me, it goes hand-in-hand with the fact that older workers in manufacturing are also having a hard time finding jobs--we have to figure out what the shit jobs of the New Economy are going to be, for all ages, and that takes some time. Possibly in a few more decades it will be a given that all teens work for, say, Instacart, but that will require them and/or their parents to familiarize them with the life skill of shopping on their own, and consider it as a logical option instead of mentally defaulting to, say, food service, which is where all the teens of my generation worked but isn't a viable option for most teens now.