Automation would come along regardless, but higher labor costs obviously means more incentives to automate.
As the labor union-backed Fight for $15 begins yet another nationwide strike on November 29, I have a simple message for the protest organizers and the reporters covering them: I told you so.
It brings me no joy to write these words. The push for a $15 starter wage has negatively impacted the career prospects of employees who were just getting started in the workforce while extinguishing the businesses that employed them. I wish it were not so. But it’s important to document these consequences, lest policymakers elsewhere decide that the $15 movement is worth embracing.
Thanks To 'Fight For $15' Minimum Wage, McDonald's Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide
Bangladeshi wages for American workers, that’s how we will get jobs back, get this economy moving again, and get back to being great.
They're flipping burgers, not performing rocket surgery.
As usual, depends, but we don’t have any time for anything but fantasy slogans in this society so all conversations come down to wackass dueling duality outlier points of view.
The struggle for a wage full time workers can exist on in our predatory economic system encompasses far more than your maligned “burger flippers”, but yeah, if the only way you can stay in business is to pay full time employees too little to live in their own society on, as far as I’m concerned you can go out of business, you’re not contributing to society, you’re a parasite. McDonald’s is not struggling to stay afloat at all.
If the minimum wage was jacked up to $15/hour, that would raise the wages of 25% of the workers in america; that’s a pretty sad commentary on American society. Because it doesn’t stop at “burger flippers”. This also includes a lot of child care workers, nursing/psychiatric/home healthcare workers, nursing home staff, material/freight/stock movers, stock clerks/orders fillers, receptionists/information clerks, bakers, textile/garment pressers, bank tellers, driver/sales workers, agricultural equipment operators, farm workers/laborers, assemblers/fabricators, laundry and dry cleaning workers, taxi drivers/chauffeurs, etc.
All of these folks contribute to what would be a functional society had we not rerigged the economy over the past half century or so, now they’re essentially sharecroppers, like most who work in America now.
We live in a society that has lost all cohesion, all sense of community, and respect for the human being. We reward those who care for our children and our elders in the same manner you speak of as, and with the same disdain as, your “burger flippers”, while we fawn over wealth and celebrity, and mall brawl at holiday shopping orgies.