California's $15-an-Hour Minimum Wage May Spur Automation (computerworld.com) 940
An anonymous readers links to an article on ComputerWorld: For many California business groups, the state's decision to gradually raise its minimum wage to $15 by 2022 is a terrible thing. But for its technology industry, it may be a plus. Higher wages, says the California Restaurant Association, will force businesses to face "undesirable" options, including cutting staff, raising prices and adopting automation. But a higher minimum wage will "signal to tech companies and entrepreneurs" to look at the restaurant industry, said Darren Tristano, president of Technomic, a research group focused on the restaurant industry. The state's governor and legislators reached an agreement Monday to raise the wages. "I think there are a lot of tech companies that are looking at the restaurant industry to accelerate their growth," said Tristano. The restaurant industry is primed for change, said Tristano, "Many of the routines that take place in restaurants are not very different from 30 to 40 years ago," he said.
May spur automation (Score:2)
Re:May spur automation (Score:5, Insightful)
But then again, it may not...
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00, and unemployment went down in the following months and year, from around 7.5 %to 6.75% (source [thestar.com]). While that doesn't prove that minimum wage increases never result in unemployment rises, it does disprove that they always result in unemployment rises.
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well, and besides, the naysayers repeat this line almost Every. Single. Time. - even for overdue inflation-indexed increases, which generally casts doubt on their positions. In reality, it's a lot more complicated than that.
I will never understand why minimum wage is not tied to inflation rates - this is a ridiculous argument to have Every Five Years.
http://www.thenation.com/artic... [thenation.com]
http://www.thestar.com/busines... [thestar.com]
https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org]
Re:May spur automation (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, a wage hike of $0.75 (Canadian) is not really comparable to a $5.00 (US dollars) wage hike.
One constitutes less than an 8% raise, while the other is a 50% raise.
Re:May spur automation (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, the california hike is actually five one-dollar/hour hike a year apart.
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It is a 50% raise over the 6 next years! That would mean about a 8.2% increase per year. That is faster than inflation but considering the minimum wage has gone from,
California has been fairly good in increase the minimum wage but it most yea
Re:May spur automation (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the old US car makers who refused to let the government force them to provide cars that were safer and got better gas mileage.
They fought the regulations, refused to comply, sued and delayed, and eventually got their market taken away by car makers who provided all of those benefits in less expensive vehicles
At which point, the manufacturers tried to blame it all on the unions without considering their own recalcitrant behavior
Yeah, they can all suck it, we see through their bs for the lies that it is
Re:May spur automation (Score:5, Insightful)
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well
Not true. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices when there are substitute goods available. Fast food is labor intensive. If the price goes up, more people will cook at home or purchase low-labor pre-packaged food at grocery stores (using the self-checkout line).
California already has a much higher minimum wage than the rest of the nation. If you go in a McDonalds in California, you don't see teenagers working there. You see adults, since the pay is enough to attract them. Adults are more productive than teenagers, so you need fewer of them. So California has removed an important rung on the economic ladder, by turning entry level jobs into permanent no-skill "careers" flipping burgers. This effect is worst in minority neighborhoods which already have extremely high teenage unemployment.
Re:May spur automation (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree that this is an undesirable side effect of raising the minimum wage in some (or many?) circumstances, I also at the same time disagree with the idea that wages should be kept low (and in some cases well below the poverty line) simply to provide employment. By your argument, the result of this minimum wage hike is that McDonald's now has more productive workers at the expense of lesser skilled workers being more often unemployed. I see that as a zero-gain, but also zero-loss, proposition.
Now while your point that it removes an important rung on the economic ladder is at least in some (or again, many?) cases true, I tend towards my more capitalistic opinions - that wages should not be kept low simply to provide employment to the unskilled. There should be a wage floor that allows unskilled workers to consume baskets of goods, not merely subsist on them. For the record, I am currently unemployed, have been for a year, and live on a shoestring budget. 90% of my expenses are tax-free, give or take. Things like groceries, diapers, medications, rent, all of it is tax-free in most modern societies. Raise the minimum wage for my wife, and we'll have more money for luxuries, or at least, for taxable consumer goods, returning nearly all of that to the economy rather than a savings account or investment fund, and also returning more of it to government coffers.
Without minimum wage legislation, the market will tend towards indentured servitude (I know, that's a rather poignant term to use). I would rather see poverty level wages eliminated entirely, and a corresponding rise in unemployment, than see subsistence level wages proliferated. If that means I pay more for my Big Macs, I'm all for it. There is a reason I don't shop at WalMart, and don't buy clothing made in Bangladesh. I want the people who manufacture and sell my consumer goods to be capable of supporting a family. It's why I buy my coffee from Starbucks - they pay well (decently, at least, at least in Canada). I for one am happy to see more productive, and hopefully better paid, workers at McDonalds, knowing that the people working there can afford to feed a family. If that means higher unemployment, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I suppose it all boils down to this - I'd rather see fewer better paying jobs than more lesser paying jobs (grammar, ugh...).
Re: (Score:3)
The statement was that it impacted minorities more, not that it did not impact white teenagers at all.
And the answer is that more affluent neighborhoods will better adsorb the cost of doing business because they can raise prices more than less affluent neighborhoods.
Re:May spur automation (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, so why does it remove entry-level jobs for minorities but apparently not for white teenagers?
Because white kids have a lot more opportunities. Many of them don't want a job, because they are too busy studying for college. Or they work part-time at their daddy's business. Black and Hispanic kids are at the bottom, so when that last rung is taken away, they get hurt the most.
For a clear illustration of what happens when you push "white" solutions onto communities where they don't apply, look what happened in Puerto Rico [washingtonpost.com]. The economy was doing well, and it was a hub for low end manufacturing, mostly paying about $3 an hour. Then the courts ruled that federal minimum wage laws had to apply to PR. So overnight the wages went up to $7.25, and the jobs disappeared. So instead of making $3 an hour, the workers were making $0 an hour, debts piled up as people stopped paying taxes, and now PR is bankrupt, and seeking a federal bailout.
What happened to PR will likely not happen in California, because the change will happen more slowly, and California has a far more diverse economy. But the same principles apply, and the worst effects will be on the people that can least afford it.
Re:May spur automation (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00
That's about a 7% increase. We're talking a 50% increase here. The company I work for relies heavily on minimum wage-ish laborers for the manufacturing jobs, which are basically screwing caps on bottles, putting them in boxes. Real unskilled stuff, diploma and English not required. We're in Los Angeles, and when they announced the minimum wage hike, eyes immediately pointed just over the border to Ventura County, where no such increase was proposed. Now that this is looking to be a state-wide thing, a 50% increase in labor costs for the bulk of our production workers is going to make the automated fillers and cappers pretty much sell themselves. Either way it goes, it's going to drive the price per unit up. Labor isn't the main cost for producing products here, but when we price out to the tenth of a cent per unit, and we roll off hundreds of thousands of units per run, it begins to add up. This cost will either be passed on to the customer, or more likely, will lose us business as clients take their filling operations to states with lower labor costs and less distance to their distribution houses. Most of our min-wage laborers are day workers, so if there's no work, they don't show up or get paid. If work starts disappearing, the $15/hr doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and ultimately the whole scheme will hurt the very people it's supposedly helping.
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I will never understand why minimum wage is not tied to inflation rates - this is a ridiculous argument to have Every Five Years.
Because it gives politicians something they can brag about to their constituents.
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And if your employer lays you off, sends your job overseas, automates your job, or closes their doors, how much are you spending locally?
Why stop at 15? why not 30? or 300?
Re:May spur automation (Score:4, Insightful)
Dunno why you were modded as "Troll", because your post makes perfect sense, especially when asking at what point do we set this wage? What calculus is being used to set it?
"Living Wage" is not only vague, but it becomes a moving goalpost... so that can't be it. Setting it against a cost-of-living index might work, but that becomes a moving goalpost as well (and barring massive deflation, it always moves upwards).
So at what objective point does one set this wage without creating a self-feeding loop that pushes it upwards?
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While I do agree that everyone's wages drive the cost of doing business, there's a problem: Wage discrepancy itself has frig-all to do with determining a workable minimum wage, and for one reason: that metric is honestly based in class envy, and nothing more.
Why? Because there is no sane and objective way to prove the argument that said discrepancy is the cause of poverty. There are a few reasons why, but they're all based on bad assumptions:
First, aggregate monetary wealth is not a static quantity, but gro
Re:May spur automation (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose the local businesses have a 10% profit margin, and that a large fraction of that is fixed costs (rent, power, loans, taxes, etc). Now, suppose that 10% of their customers just lost their job to automation and no longer patronize them. Now their profit goes to zero, and their employees also get canned. This causes cascading business failures are fewer and fewer people in the town can afford to pay for things like going out to eat and movies and new cars. Now your local businesses get trashed, and the pool of unemployed go up, pushing down the value of labor. This, in turn, causes over a longer term, wage depression as there is now much more competition for jobs, and people are now willing to work at the mill for minimum wage instead of being able to demand a higher salary. Now the millworkers have less disposable income, which feeds into this depressionary cycle.
But someone will take advantage of the depressed wages, you say. Sure, why? Are you going to move your Googleplex to Modesto? Your expensive white collar people are unwilling to move there; there aren't any restaurants and such; it's now a poor people town. If low wages are important, move the plant overseas, otherwise, put the new plant where the people you're moving want to live. But, you say, they can get lower cost white collar employees there. Maybe, but those individuals left to get higher paying jobs, and when the real estate value plummeted, so did school funding and the quality of teachers, as the better ones didn't want to live there.
This is the death spiral that bay area taxes and minimum wages have pushed on the central valley. $15/hr in SFO is a reasonable minimum wage. It's going to kill the last 5 full time jobs in Modesto where $15/hr is well over a living wage and, frankly, more than unskilled labor is worth there.
There's no "may" about it (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the actual sitiuation.
On the one hand, cost of employing people in jobs that can be automated is rising. Picture this as a graphed ramp up on a plot.
On the other hand, cost of ever-higher quality automation is dropping rapidly. Picture this as a graphed ramp down on the same plot.
When those two lines cross each other, businesses will automate as soon as possible. Not may; will. Any of them that might be inclined not to, for whatever reason, will be out-competed in very short order and subsequently fail.
This can't be fixed by raising the minimum wage; it can only be accelerated, because it doesn't change the rate of the dropping automation line, but it only steepens the rate of the rising employment costs line.
So the solution cannot lie in "just raise minimum wages" approach. There has to be some way to either add costs to automation (most typically taxation is the cost suggested... which businesses generally arrange to be taken from the income of the remaining workers) or change the entire economic model to something along the lines of Basic Income [basicincome.org]. Something along the lines of that is inevitable due to inevitable technological change, but there's a lot of pain and screaming that will be done between where we are and that point. The former is right where we are already:
Walmart, for instance, is one example of severely low wage workers that are subsidized by the social safety net, which in turn is paid for by the middle class. This is what enables Walmart to keep prices low; they only pay part of the worker's survival needs. Same thing for waitresses, burger flippers and so on. Your hamburger isn't cheap if you're middle class; it's just that you pay for part of it at McDonald's, and then you pay for the rest when you pay your taxes. Very handy for McDonalds. They get to maintain the illusion that they sell cheap(er) food. Most taxpayers fail to make the connection, and continue to support McDonalds' business model by buying those burgers.
The question is how long that will be sustainable in the face of a mandated wage increase -- will people still buy a burger if, instead of $1.00 at the window and $x at tax time, it's $1.++ at the window? And what, do you imagine, will McDonald's do about it if they see this as less likely?
Pretty obviously, they will automate. People will lose their jobs. But now instead of paying for part of the burger flipper's wages at tax time, the ex-flippers are unemployed, so the social safety net must cover their entire cost of living using the income of those who remain employed. Business will continue to see to it via legislative control that they are not the ones who do the paying.
Isn't it clear that severe pain is on the way no matter what under the current economic model? I can't see a way out of it. At all.
This is why I support a change to a formal basic income. Looking at the stats and polls, though, I don't think it's likely in the near term.
Re:There's no "may" about it (Score:5, Insightful)
That's precisely correct. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm just inclined to do it honestly, openly, and at the expense of military adventurism and foreign aid as well as as a tax burden on productivity above the zero level. If everyone has an adequate basic income, no tax on income above that is such a serious burden that they can't live as well as the basic income allows. It doesn't bother me in the least if my taxes support others as they do now; I'm extremely productive, and I enjoy that for its own sake, as do many others. There's nothing about that enjoyment that says to me that only I should benefit from my productivity (and that's why I write software and don't charge for that.) It's also why I, and my SO, are charitable givers. Nothing about basic income will slow my productivity even a little bit, nor retard my inclination towards charitable action.
I see no significant value in forcing unproductive people to take unwilling part in the economy; when someone sees the task as too hard or too unrewarding, let them go, and give the task to someone who wants to do it well for the sake of doing it well and the personal rewards that brings. I no more insist on people who don't like being productive attempt productive tasks than I would insist that a fingerless person make finger paintings.
The thing is, we're a very rich country in terms of both consumable / renewable resources and physical space. The idea that we can't support a large segment of our population based on the idea that sharing is somehow antithetical is not something I can get behind. And the fact is, many already don't participate. We've not been ruined by it. It's a known functional operating model. The fact that some people whine about it notwithstanding.
As for eliminating government, there are some tasks that are just too big for the states, never mind private enterprise. Roads, national defense, (not implying any support for international offense, mind you), distributing the cost of dealing events of injury and disease evenly enough that US residents never go without adequate high quality care, ensuring that the states conform to some sort of explicit formal mechanism supporting individual liberty, those sorts of things. Consequently I am highly confident that we need an entity at that level. I agree in principle that today it is too big and has its hand into far too many pies, and that it is presently in a highly anti-liberty mode of operation in its current form of an oligarchy driven by 545 opinions ungoverned by any higher authority.
But I see no change coming in that model. Not even a hint of it. Whatever chance we ever had at reaching the goal of becoming a constitutional republic, I see no sign of such a thing any longer. That ship has sailed.
Back to basic income; the ideal, as I see it, is that it is instantiated at a low but reasonable level; then as technology increases our leverage, and as the idea becomes embedded in the national mindset, the basic income is increased, raising everyone's standard of living, while the available ceiling for what is presently unlimited acquisition of wealth drops. For example, the ceiling might be that you can have up to 500 times the basic income yourself, but above that, everything goes in the pot. A little further along, that ceiling drops to 400, then 300, and so on, all the time the basic income is rising.
In the end, everyone could live very well. The idea that no productivity will exist under that scenario is not something I can take seriously. Nor are the ideas that there might no longer be any billionaires, or that no one might own a yacht, anything that upset me at all.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the absolute capping of income is probably something we should avoid. However an infinitely scaling income tax curve is something I could support. Perhaps every time you double your income earned above the basic income you get to keep 10% less of it, in increments of the basic income.
So if Basic income started at $10K it would look like this:
Basic Income:
$10,000 No Tax
Income over basic:
$0.00 - $10,000 10% Tax
$10,000.01 - $30,000 19% Tax
$30,000.01 - $70,000 27.1% Tax
$70,000.01 - $150,000 34.39% Tax
$1
Businesses will automate anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the performance / cost of automated technology is steadily increasing.
This wage change only has the potential to bring very slightly sooner what seems an inevitable trend toward significant job losses to automation.
Minimum wage rise or no, society is going to have to deal with one of:
A) Guaranteed annual income (for existing as a human in the country).
B) Building really tall barbed wire walls (with automated machine guns/frickin' lasers?) to divide the still-employed and automation owners/shareholders from the increasing hordes.
Re:Businesses will automate anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
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Funny... but that does bring up the subject of how quickly such automation would go into effect.
Call day 0 the day the law goes into effect.
By day 1, all businesses that have not started up yet, or who have grown enough to start hiring employees, will probably start looking very hard at adding automation to their list of things to implement, even on a small scale. Consider that some of this is in place now; at the Apple Store, there is no checkout counter, because nearly every employee on the floor is not o
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Way too many people nowadays believe that jobs come from letting (financial) business have a lots of money, while in the real world the jobs come from tasks that need to be done -- a.k.a. demand.
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The other thing I'm concerned about is what happens to everyone else's pay. Will they guy that's now making $15/hour (like the EMTS, construction workers, etc.) now get $20? Wouldn't they expect that? What about the guy/gal that's now making $25? And so on. In the end you get nothing bu
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On the other hand, some (a lot?) of people now have 50% more purchasing power, and money is moving around way more than before. Which, if I'm not mistaken, will generate demand, which will generate jobs...
Way too many people nowadays believe that jobs come from letting (financial) business have a lots of money, while in the real world the jobs come from tasks that need to be done -- a.k.a. demand.
Exactly this. Where do businesses expect to sell their products if too few people make enough money to buy them?
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Just a few minutes on YouTube browsing videos showing various manufacturing machines and the processes they do suggests that making a machine to cook and build Hamburgers and other fast food orders would be child's play.
The only question is where the point between the capital costs of such a device and the higher wages cross.
Exactly, and a higher employee wage pushes the balance more towards the automation angle.
For instance, let's do a stupid exercise at a fast-food joint. $7.50/hr costs an employer (at full time) roughly $15600/yr *before* counting SS/Unemployment Ins./Healthcare/etc contributions. Call it maybe $19k/yr (we slapped on 20% and rounded up). I suspect that you're going to have a damned hard time finding a burger-flipping machine that will amortize to less than $20k/yr (incl. maintenance contracts).
Now bump the e
Sounds good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Sounds good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, they don't. Why would the others want to allow the machine owners to continue owning those machines?
The greatest labor saving device in history is the washer/dryer. Would you allow your neighbor to own one?
Why do you think that only "the rich" will own labor saving machines? Most middle class people own some sort of computer, a washer/dryer, a microwave, etc. 3D printers are already under $500, and multiple families could share one. A food growing robot for you backyard shouldn't cost more than $1000 in parts (the rest is software and other NRE).
An automated fast food restaurant will not need workers, but it will also mean much lower costs, which in a competitive market will mean much lower prices for consumers.
Throughout history, rapid technological change has caused temporary disruption, but in the end, has resulted in broadly higher standards of living for nearly everyone.
Re: (Score:3)
Wealth, as we have seen so thoroughly demonstrated over the past 30 years, does not trickle down.
Take off your blinders. During the last 30 years TWO BILLION PEOPLE have been lifted out of extreme poverty. For the very poor, the last 30 years have been the best 30 years in all of human history.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Informative)
That's technology trickling down again, which side are you arguing for? The modern computer-owning worker makes less than a less technologically-endowed worker would have 30-40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. At the same time, the number of people who collectively own half the world's wealth could now travel together in a double-decker bus, and nobody would have to stand.
Wealth sure as hell doesn't trickle down, it rushes up.
Re: Sounds good. (Score:4, Interesting)
If the current problem of terrorism shows one thing, then that this is patently false.
If I have nothing and you have everything, I can not only win, I can actually not lose. You, on the other hand, can only lose. Because you have nothing to gain from fighting me. Fighting me accomplishes nothing for you. I have nothing you could want or use. You, on the other hand, do have a lot that I could want or use.
What have we gained in this war on terror so far? Well? Name it. I could not really think of a single thing that we won. But boy, did we lose. Liberty. Safety. Not to mention the waste of money and human lives. We have to fear the next attack.
Are we winning yet?
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Self interest.
Those that have always have more to lose and less to gain than those that don't have. History has shown what happens when the latter get pushed past the breaking point. It's usually messy and ends the lives of some of those that really had a lot to lose.
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You're absolutely wrong. But not for the reasons you think.
People need a purpose in life, and that is "Work". Without purpose, you'll see the same things as what is happening in Ghettos today, people with no purpose, no meaning in life, trying to build meaning in harmful ways (gangs, drugs ...)
The amount of self worth is directly attributed to the work we do. Which is why, I tell people to find jobs they actually enjoy doing.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Informative)
People would spend time doing what they wanted to do which could include art, literature, sport, playing video games, learning a language, studying science, travelling and many other things. Things that people can't do now due to financial restrictions. I'd love to spend my days playing soccer, lifting weights, learning Spanish, playing guitar, yoga and many other things. At the moment I have a full-time job so I can only devote a small amount of time relatively speaking to some of those things above. If I live long enough to retire I'm going to be doing at least the less strenuous of the abovementioned.
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But the real world shows that a large majority of people wouldn't do that. Let's just look at education. Education is free through high school. Yet many people (in some places the majority) waste this opportunity to spend every day 9 months a year learning for free. They would rather engage in non-productive activities. At the Community College level the prices are very low and in some states also free. Yet still there are many people who would rather sit at home drawing free money rather than take advantag
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds good in theory, but look around any retirement home for a strong counterexample. You'll see a lot more people watching TV than painting, writing books, studying, etc. Yes, they're old, but that's not why they're vegging out. It's because they're people. It's often been said that most people start dying the minute they retire.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would people who have no need to work and have everything provided for them act like your stereotypical ghetto inhabitants, when that doesn't match their situation at all? In the ghetto people have nothing provided for them and a desperate need to work (to meet basic necessities) but no opportunity to do so.
Instead maybe you should look at trust fund babies. They have everything provided for them and no need to work. They pursue creative and philanthropic pursuits and enjoy themselves with leisure activity, and mostly don't get into trouble.
Also I pity you, that you have no meaning in life other than to work. For most people (including myself) work reduces meaning in their life, which they derive from non-work interests. Very few are paid to do what they enjoy, and most do what they enjoy without being paid. But you wouldn't. That sounds like severe depression in fact.
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The goal of any advanced civilization should be 100% unemployment and automation.
Sounds like an idealistic notion from a brilliant individual who never looked up from a fucking book long enough to actually notice anything useful about the civilization around them...
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It's not the point of a business to "care for" those who cannot contribute.
Businesses are (theoretically) about efficiency; they will seek the most efficient solution to the problem.
If some socialists are successfully able to sell the bread & circuses idea that the government should mandate they be paid more (despite their complete replaceability) don't expect business to put on their sympathy hat and decide "oh well".
If a person costs $15/hour ($30k/year, plus unpredictable sick days, plus harassment l
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taxes? funding? no I think you are confused on how such a society would be built
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This is exactly the point that I think a lot of people miss about automation. There's a lot of menial jobs that suck, and a perfect example of such a job is flipping burgers. Wouldn't it be better if nobody had to do it at all, and you could spend your time doing better things? Yet it needs to get done somehow.
Also, it's a lofty goal and all to say that we should pay all of the burger flippers six figures, however, that's just not realistic because you're effectively asking somebody else to pay them a salar
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Things you probably can't, and won't fully automate:
doctors
nurses
policemen
firemen
clergy
Not exhaustive of course, but just going through the list it was easiest to find government controlled jobs (at least in most countries) as the ones you can't automate.
I find that very disturbing.
Besides, what are we going to do? Sit around and play D&D all day eating machine made pizzas?
Two Words (Score:3)
Butlerian Jihad.
Oh, so the REAL minimum wage is always ZERO? (Score:3, Interesting)
No matter what "minimum" is dictated by statists? I'm shocked, shocked!
Restaurants (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's all fine and well. I don't think waiters are getting replaced by robots in the near future, too much dexterity and flexibility required. Although, be prepared to pay though the nose for the food you used to think was affordable due to the wage hike.
Re:Restaurants (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, each meal might have to cost an extra $0.30 to pay the waitstaff properly. Boo Hoo Hoo.
Re:Restaurants (Score:5, Insightful)
I have had to pay workers and I support sjames's comment... Your appeal to authority argument is a fallacy.
Re:Restaurants (Score:4, Informative)
I have. Labor Costs, on waited tables generally runs between 30/33% of sales (as a cost). Jacking the Min wage 50 % is going to raise the cost of that food by 16.5%. On a burger, fries, coke at a Sitdown burgerjoint ($10 meal for example) will mean the cost of increased from 3.33 to 3.89, an increase of $.55 per meal. Restaurants will pass that change in cost to the customer by raising the price of the burger.
$.30 number is a crock, and not based on any real data, by people who don't know shit. It is $.55, on a $10 meal (how Restaurants calculate food costs). And at $10, that is a CHEAP burger, fries and drink. Most fine dinning (real sitdown dining) is closer to $25 meal (or more), making that $.55 closer to $1.25 a meal.
And anyone who has been in the Business knows, it is a struggle to keep labor costs at 30-35 % How do I know? I've run businesses, including restaurants. Raising prices on meals by $1 is often deadly to traffic.
Re:Restaurants (Score:4, Informative)
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What if fast and cheap was better than slow and expensive, because you can upgrade all the "food" by replacing the "people" (soylent Green comment here) that serves it? And you don't risk getting "Mel's" armpit hair in your burger as a bonus!
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You cannot upgrade the food though. The reason the food, atleast at this time, can be automate is because it is cheap prepackaged food.
Re:Restaurants (Score:5, Insightful)
Robots aren't needed.
Menus will be replaced with touchscreens. All orders will be automated. Replace a waitstaff of 15 will a serving staff of 3.
yeah! cooties! (Score:3)
I imagine those touchscreens are an absolute horrorshow during cold & flu season.
Chili's / Ziosk, I'm looking at you.
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This happened decades ago in Japan. Many restaurants have a vending machine by the door. The select your food, pay the machine and it dispenses a ticket. You sit at a counter that is right in front of the kitchen, and the cook prepares and serves your food directly to you.
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What "through the nose" might look like at a US restaurant that pays their people $15 an hour right now:
https://www.ivars.com/locations/acres-of-clams
Funny, that's not crazy at all. And tipping is optional there.
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and I sure as heck don't want a robot or some automation preparing my food, either.
Will you be inspecting the kitchen area, then ?
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Robots could do that too. duh
Re:Restaurants (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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Spaghetti and all types of pasta - manufactured by machines, pasta gets squeezed through various shaped nozzles and turned into shapes. Bolognaise - made from mince which in turn is made from meat that has been automatically sliced up. Other items are canned automatically. Ordering of cooking ingredients used by the kitchen is done through electronic systems. The payment of meals is done automatically through the banking system. Some restaurants have the wireless credit card readers. Ordering of meals can
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But for those of us who like our food to not be some mass-prepared crap, that's far from the case.
If your food is to easy to automate, it's probably not really worth eating.
Oh, good grief. Do you do any cooking of your own? Most tasks associated with cooking -- whether it's at home or in the kitchen of an expensive restaurant -- are relatively simple mechanical skills, and there's zero reason why machinery could not be designed to duplicate the majority of dishes served at your favorite restaurant with very little human intervention. If labor costs get high enough, it will become profitable to develop that machinery.
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Right. A robot can't do it because of ... nuance. In other words, you believe in magic. Oh, and the supercilious attitude of "well, your food is crap, but everything I eat is absolutely amazing." Apparently you not only believe in magic, you only eat at restaurants staffed by wizards.
A food processor isn't designed to cut things up the same way you do with your knife. Duh. But the notion that we can't make a machine to cut up vegetables however you need is beyond ridiculous.
Pay a premium for human service (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Restaurants (Score:5, Insightful)
"I don't know about anyone else, but if I go to a real sit-down restaurant, I want an actual human server, not a robot or some other form of 'automation', and I sure as heck don't want a robot or some automation preparing my food, either."
Exactly! We want our undocumented aliens who never read anything about hygiene prepare our food, fresh from the bathroom and not some sterile machine.
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At "real sit down restaurants" they usually work for tips which are quite a bit better than $15 an hour.
The type of restaurants that would be effected are fast food places, the type of places that automation would help.
Also though I don't know about you but a mobile robotic drink refill-er would be pretty useful when you have to wait 20 minutes for a server to bring you a refill on your lemonade or coffee.
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I don't know about anyone else, but if I go to a real sit-down restaurant, I want an actual human server, not a robot or some other form of 'automation', and I sure as heck don't want a robot or some automation preparing my food, either. If that was my only other choice then I'd just as soon stay home and cook my own food.
I used to be a fan of Red Robbin. One day a manager told me how excited he was he was moving to a new location where he could cut staff by 50%. The burgers were dry I noticed.
It turns out they bought a toaster oven and just throw the patties in where they are under a heat lamp. No fry cook needed. Can I custom order a burger with medium or medium rare? Nope. Only 1 guy in the kitchen. Everything is now frozen or pre-made and the patties get thrown into a toaster every 5 minutes and are grabbed. Instant savi
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One of the chain "sit down" restaurants around here has started putting tablet-like things on the tables. A waiter/waitress still comes around (and balloon artists circulate and make animals for the kids on weekends), but this tablet allows you to do things like enter orders for dessert, additional food, check your bill, and swipe and pay without waiting for the waitress to "come and serve you." All in all, I think it's an improvement - now, service times are maddeningly slow in most restaurants like this
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Yes, if a robot serves your food, you have way too few incorrect orders, jackass attitudes, substandard sanitization. And not to mention you lose all chance that your server will spit in your food.
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It has already caused problems (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The National Review is not exactly an unbiased or labor-friendly publication.
Re:It has already caused problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Most businesses aren't operating at the kind of obscene profit margins that would allow them to do that kind of thing. If they were, someone else would have opened shop and started undercutting prices to take the business. Not everyone who owns a business is some kind of millionaire that could give their employees more money, but chooses not to because they are so miserly.
Never mind that it's a comic shop, which now has to contend with online merchants, digital distribution, etc. The local shop here is probably only open because the owner is big into Warhammer and has a lot of people come in when he has tournaments who buy more miniatures from the store.
Ya, Sure, So What's Slowing Owners Up? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ya, Sure, So What's Slowing Owners Up? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the machines existed today, they'd be purchased; regardless of the minimum wage.
Not if the machines cost more than minimum wage.
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If the machines existed today, they'd be purchased; regardless of the minimum wage.
Not if the machines cost more than minimum wage.
Exactly. There's a breaking point. And California just passed it, apparently.
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Those machines do exist, and they are being phased into production for the sole purpose of keeping labor costs in-line with product prices. The issue is that with the forced increase in minimum wage, the adoption rate will be higher.
Regarding Papa John getting his panties in a twist, his company is actually good to work for. I spent a few years in college delivering pizza for them, and they were good to the people. I can't speak personally for him, but I believe he does see the value of having employees, bu
Re:Ya, Sure, So What's Slowing Owners Up? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am always bemused that after call centers being moved to India, manufacturing jobs ending up in China, and even Fords being built in Mexico that people can't fathom that increasing labor costs at home might have an affect on the job market. Like the US labor market is somehow a product of American exceptionalism, free from other cost concerns.
While trying to increase the ranks of the middle class is laudable, it seems to be more ending jobs for entry-level workers.
The difference in yearly income between a burrito engineer and a degreed and licensed professional is about $10k under the new scheme. Why bother with the school debit, the professional associations, and yearly certifications when you could just work fast-food?
Except once that pandora's box of automation is opened, even those professional careers are fair game.
The submitter (Score:2)
Is the submitter paid by the hour, or by the number of times he can fit "restaurant industry" into TFS?
Robobuns (Score:2)
Robots make better BURGERS!!!!!!!
I'm quitting (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
With unpaid overtime, your IT job may not end up paying you much more than $15/hour.
Labor going up while illegal immigration... (Score:2)
... clamping down... in a state that is the tech capital of the most advanced civilization in human history?
Yeah... automation might happen, champ.
Or maybe nothing will happen at all (Score:5, Insightful)
If people who normally live paycheck to paycheck now have some disposable income, maybe they will spend some of it at restaurants. Maybe they will even spend enough to more than make up for the increase in employee wages.
At worst it speeds things up (Score:3)
Burger flipping is ripe for automation anyway. The rest of making an automated McDees is already done. Royal Farms uses touch screens for the customers to order, and the automated checkouts are in all the grocery stores now.
I worked in industrial automation 20 years ago, and I knew then that the day when people who were intellectually on the left side of the bell curve were unemployable was coming. No here quite yet, but in the next 10 years it will become a major political and social issue.
we are not helpless, just unwilling (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is not that people aren't getting paid enough. That is what is called a symptom (for the layman). The problem is that too many people want to live and work in California, for fucks sake! This is the root of housing issues, unaffordability, income disparity, etc. in California. When will people realize that?
Increasing minimum wage just adds to the fundamental pressures here. People are being paid below this new minimum wage because.... There are people willing to work for less than the minimum wage! Do you really think increasing the wage will make the housing crunch better? Make it overall more affordable and possible to live here?
We need policies that make it less expensive to live here, not more. But of course those are the policies that are hard to come up with, and inconvenient -- so yeah, let's just ignore those.
This isn't a bad thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been saying for years that an increase in the minimum wage can partly pay for itself by spurring automation. And that's a very good thing, for everyone.
Some business owners might prefer to pay a bunch of people $1/hour to dig a ditch using a shovel, but at $15/hour, you gotta use a backhoe.
I always find it funny when rightwingers complain that a minimum wage increase is simultaneously entirely inflationary AND that it will cause you to lose your job to automation.
I've often thought that we are using far too LITTLE automation, not too much. If burger flipping can be automated, why the heck aren't we automating it? Oh, right, because it's cheaper up-front (but not long-term) to just pay someone a poverty wage.
And it's also always funny to see rightwingers pull out the Luddite critique, i.e. that automation will put us out of jobs, when in fact we've had increasing automation for centuries, now, but not any lower voluntary unemployment. So the Luddite critique is ridiculous when OTHER people use it, but totally fine otherwise...
And then, realize that we had a real minimum wage of about $11/hour in the 1960s, when productivity was FAR lower, when we had far less economic productivity per person. If you adjusted the minimum wage for productivity growth, it'd be over $20/hour right now.
I actually think that by NOT raising the minimum wage, we've stymied technological progress. Yes, there's definitely a limit to how fast you can increase the minimum wage without hitting inflation (or possibly some unemployment), but we're not near that limit with $15/hour.
competitive equality (Score:3)
The minimum wage causes no competitive disadvantage to local businesses.
If a single restaurant had to pay minimum wage and not its competitors, it could be hurt by the additional cost. If all restaurants have the same cost, then all are as competitive as they were be before. There is the slight problem that a dinner that used to cost $10 will now cost $11 - I doubt that will deter many customers. On the plus side, customers may feel less obliged to pay a large tip to the waiter.
Other industries will have the same competitive equality as long as their competitors are in California. If they compete with Mexican or Chinese businesses, they may have problems. That issue brings us to the TPP which may expedite solutions for those businesses (at the cost of California jobs).
It's going to happen anyway (Score:3)
Tie it to inflation (Score:3)
Why on earth isn't minimum wage tied to CPI (inflation) like it is in most other countries? Set it to some agreed amount, then index it each year based on official inflation figures. The way it is now, the minimum wage even AFTER being increased to $15 still won't be as high as it was in the 1960s, in terms of actual buying power.
This whole "setting it to a fixed, static amount" is a weird, high-maintenance way to legislate. It just means you have to go through the same process another decade down the track.
100 thousand years ago,... (Score:3)
people had four specific jobs.
1) Protect the tribe.
2) Physically gather plants.
3) Hunt animals.
4) Make essential clothing the few minor tools for use in jobs 1-4.
EVERYONE did those things. Today, each of those jobs is done by less than 1% of our population. Each of those jobs, is for all effective purposes, made obsolete by automation and efficiency gains.
Are we all unemployed? No. Work is dependent not on things that need to be done, but instead on things we want to be done..
As long as mankind has dreams and desires, there will be work. And Humans are greedy S.O.B.s Give each of us a sex-bot and we will demand a second so we can have a three-way.
Mankind won't run out of dreams and desires until we flood the universe - which I don't see as being a problem for the forseeable future. We haven't even left Earth yet.
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Either pay up or shut up, business owners.
This is exactly wrong. It's either pay up or shut up, customers. If you artificially increase the cost of doing business, business owners will have to increase their revenues to cover that cost. That means that you, the customer, will be charged more to cover it.
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This is not about "unskilled labor" This is about the minimum cost to do business. Business owners like to talk about the "market" but the market does not, and cannot fix this issue, because the government subsidizes "the market", which is really what this is about. We need to get this subsidy out of the market and put the proper minimum wage in place, such that if an employee is working 40 hours a week he can make a minimum living. If your company cannot pay for someone to live at that then your company is
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This is a commonly misquoted fallacy that is not substantiated by historical evidence.... please note that it is called *MINIMUM* wage... and as a consequence of that, it's overall impact on the economy is quite low, even though the number of workers that are affected by it is quite large. Typically, also, increases in minimum wage a
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