Update on Project Activities
This week we extended the deadline for survey responses to November 10 in an effort to solicit more feedback from business representatives and employees. We touched base with Alex and Julie, who will distribute the links again via Facebook, Twitter, and email lists. At Alex’s suggestion, our surveys will also be forwarded to members of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. Including the Chamber of Commerce members does alter our initial goal of surveying only downtown-based businesses but will hopefully offer a more holistic snapshot of the economic situation in Mountain View in addition to increasing the rate of response. We further revised the survey by making it accessible to users without Google accounts; hopefully no further changes will be required on this front. As of November 3, we have received 16 responses from business representatives and 14 from employees, which unfortunately is only four more responses than last week. We will be looking for more responses in the next week before we close the link to begin conducting analysis. What We Observed and Learned Since the survey link remains open, we have not begun analyzing the data. The response rate has been rather underwhelming; hopefully we have not lost valuable time and responses by continually having to check the link accessibility. We will be intrigued to learn how the inclusion of Chamber of Commerce businesses will affect our results, as Alex informed us that one-third of those businesses are registered non-profits, which tend to pay lower wages. We are also exploring the possibility of taking another trip to Mountain View to gather more responses from business representatives, as it is simple to overlook emails or not have time to respond to a survey. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The team will meet Alex for brunch this Sunday at noon to discuss next steps, hopefully including more visits to Mountain View, and to refresh our project objectives. We hope that expanding to include more businesses in the Mountain View area will enable us to provide a more inclusive and accurate depiction of the current state of economic development. After November 10, we plan to close the survey and begin analyzing that data while including interview feedback to inform our conclusions. In terms of class work, we found Tuesday’s readings especially relevant to the project. It was interesting to note that of the Bay Area’s “low- to low-middle-wage” workers, which comprise over one-third of the Area’s labor force, a majority earn less than $12 an hour (SPUR Economic Prosperity Strategy, page 8). As the Mountain View ordinance shifts the city’s wage from $11 to $15, thereby raising workers above that $12 per hour standard used in this publication, the city could be a trendsetter for other local governments, which places even greater emphasis on the outcome of our analysis. Furthermore, we appreciated the class simulation and found the experience of learning how to enhance economic development from a policymaker’s perspective to be valuable moving forward. Update on Project Activities
This week we made minor adjustments to our ongoing surveys as results started to roll in. First of all, we removed the requirement for surveyees to sign in with a gmail account in order to allow for increased access and thus a larger sample size of both business owners and employees. Since Julie could not officially release the surveys for business owners and employees until Tuesday via email, we do not yet possess a large enough amount of data to make conclusions. As of now, a total of 26 individuals (11 employees and 15 business representatives) filled out the surveys. We will make plans to convene with our community sponsor in the coming week in order to assess additional approaches to promoting the surveys and increasing turnout. What We Observed and Learned So far we cannot make conclusions about the impact of the minimum wage ordinance on Mountain View businesses and employees, but we do know that our current approach to surveys may prove inadequate. We did not account for the lost time making edits when we planned the surveys’ due date, so we will likely need to extend the survey period for one more week in order to amass enough data to begin our report. We may also need to explore the possibility of two more site visits in order to force the issue of surveying with more business owners. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We made many necessary adjustments and updates to our surveys this week in order to work out the logistics of meeting Mountain View’s needs, but the lost time means we likely need to extend our surveying period for at least one more week (the original deadline ends today). We will also look to meet Mr. Andrade again very soon, either in Mountain View or on campus. Update on Project Activities
This past Sunday, our team had brunch with Alex Andrade in order to create an objective and logistical timeline for the next few weeks. During our discussion, we decided to dedicate the next two weeks to conduct site visits to Mountain View’s Castro Street (downtown) to interview local business owners and their employees about the pending preparations for the enactment of the $15.00 minimum wage ordinance. To do so, we are dividing our outreach to a physical and a digital medium. Physically, we are splitting up into two teams (Gabi and Sean; Holden and Denzel) to visit Alex this Thursday (10/12) and Friday (10/13) in Mountain View where he works at City Hall to discover the scene on Castro Street. We have created two separate lists of questions for employers and employees to discover more of the economic (employers) and social (employees) impacts and influences of the ordinance onto the more than 260 local businesses in Mountain View. Digitally, we will be outreaching to the same businesses (with the help and relations Alex already has) with an anonymous Google Form that has the same questions, as we assume that individuals will be more hesitant in-person and could contribute more freely online behind a screen. What We Observed and Learned During the first site visit on Thursday, we visited the Executive Directors of the Central Business Association (CBA). During our initial meeting before outreaching to businesses, we discussed the questions we prepared. We decided to modify the wordings of our questions to more base-level, “easy to comprehend with little time” questions because of our limited time to conduct field research. After visiting 5-6 different businesses and their owners, we discovered a multitude of opinions that confirmed Alex’s assumptions about their reactions to the minimum wage ordinance. For one, many businesses have a negative opinion of the timeline of the wage increases because they cannot compensate for rising commercial rental prices, sustaining the same number of work-hours for their employees while balancing their (the owner’s) hours at the same level, and finally, they do not have enough time to prepare financially for the wage increases. Most businesses highlighted that although Mountain View will be economically growing at an unprecedented rate, the minimum wage is not at the same level as the “living wage,” which many owners stated is around $30-35 per hour. Furthermore, although we attempted to allocate ten or so minutes to each business, the owners were more than willing to chat about the ordinance, with some interviews lasting more than 25 minutes. In the future, we will be more conscious about allocating our time more efficiently. We will comment further on our Friday visit on the reflection due for next week. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward After interviewing businesses in downtown Mountain View, a few key themes and actions were prevalent throughout their opinions:
Update on Project Activities
We met with Alex Andrade Monday in order to plan our report on a minimum wage ordinance’s impacts on economic development (specifically in relation to low-wage workers in small businesses) in Mountain View. After giving a presentation to the entire class, Mr. Andrade sat down with our group to discuss the logistics for this quarter regarding our roles in researching the effects of the minimum wage increase. What We Observed and Learned To offer us some context as we begin our task, Mr. Andrade explained to us the prevalence of minimum wage workers in California. According to his data, approximately five service sector jobs exist for every tech job. Mr. Andrade also opened our eyes to the fact that about 20% of Google employees work for minimum wage. A survey conducted in Mountain View around 2015 found small business owners largely supported an increase in minimum wage, but recent reports worry Mr. Andrade about the potentially negative impacts of such a minimum wage increase on small businesses. He described one individual as tearful when she realized she might need to spend thousands of dollars more on labor each year. In addition to the above concerns, Mr. Andrade informed us about his expectations for an economic downturn in Mountain View within the next five years. He would like us to conduct updated surveys on the residents of Mountain View in order to determine what the city can do to retain residents as the projected downturn approaches. Regardless of our findings, we know the City of Mountain View’s minimum wage will reach $15.00 January 1, 2018. Mr. Andrade said he expects a 2% increase in each year afterward to account for rising costs of living. Our mission revolves around the discovery of future shortcomings that may require further changes to the minimum wage or other actions entirely. Some direct quotes (in bulleted form) from Mountain View’s website: Regarding employees:
Site Context Mountain View is an affluent city with a village feel. Local businesses fill in its downtown area. The city has a tech driven economy with Google being one of its major contributors. Its unemployment rate is 3%. Because of its attractive job opportunities Mountain View housing prices are inflated which makes it hard for those who work in Mountain View to live in or close to Mountain View. To combat this, Mountain View’s council decided to increase its minimum wage ordinance with the intent to give individuals more economic mobility. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Mr. Andrade elaborated on what he expects from us in our final project deliverables. First, he advised we draft two surveys (one with questions for business owners and one with questions for their employees) and communicate the results in the form of a bullet pointed document outlining the goals of the research. He also said we can use the council reports seen online as templates for our final paper deliverable: a research paper describing the impact of the minimum wage ordinance. Mr. Andrade described this paper as a “stakeholder outreach engagement plan.” He then told us that, while unnecessary for our project, we can freely attend Mountain View’s city hall meetings every first Tuesday of month at 8:00 a.m. In terms of action items for the next week, we will be meeting Mr. Andrade for brunch this upcoming Sunday at 12:00pm to discuss our thoughts and to schedule our first field meeting. Since Mr. Andrade is a Resident Fellow at Trancos, his accessibility for meetings is even easier because he is living on Stanford’s campus. |
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