How things happen in the real world. First,
you get this:
In the latest skirmish in a year-and-a-half-long war for higher wages, fast food workers in the United States are staging a 150-city-wide protest — and taking their fight overseas.
Fast food workers in at least 33 countries and 80 cities on six continents will join their U.S.-based counterparts, for an expected 230 strikes and protests worldwide, from Seoul to San Salvador, from Brussels to Bangkok, from Auckland to Casablanca. Early in the day, the campaign’s website, FastFoodGlobal.org, showed photos of protesting workers in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Denmark and Bandung, Indonesia.
U.S. workers are demanding $15 an hour — about double the federal minimum wage — in cities such as Oakland, New York City and Raleigh, with first-time protests in Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia and Sacramento. Targeted establishments include McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and KFC.
Then,
you get this:
McDonalds recently went on a hiring binge in the U.S., adding 62,000 employees to its roster. The hiring picture doesn't look quite so rosy for Europe, where the fast food chain is drafting 7,000 touch-screen kiosks to handle cashiering duties.
The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers.
It's also cheaper than paying cashiers $15/hour. But there's an added benefit:
In an interview with the Financial Times, McDonald's Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald's could potentially track every Big Mac, McNugget, and large shake you order.
All that data is a beautiful thing if you're a marketer. You can send coupons or special offers to customers as an additional incentive to visit your location. There are any number of jobs that once took a human being to do that may no longer exist. And remember, cashiers
aren't the only jobs that could go away:
Hamburgers are a multi-billion dollar business, and while fast food chains have got the process down to an efficient production line process, making them is still labor intensive with armies of burger flippers and sandwich assemblers. In a move that could put millions of teenagers around the world out of their first job, Momentum Machines is creating a hamburger-making machine that churns out made-to-order burgers at industrial speeds and aims to use it in its own chain of restaurants.
And it's not just fast fooders. You see automatic checkout lanes in more and more places. Recently a new Walmart opened in Roseville, a few miles from my house. They have about a half-dozen automatic check-out kiosks, which are able to take cash and dispense change, along with taking plastic. The automatic check-out lanes are already in place at grocery stores as well. You can't get $15/hour for a job that no longer exists.
2 comments:
There's a deeper, more disturbing undercurrent to these protests - that people actually want minimum wage jobs to become minimum wage careers.
Once upon a time (you know, 10 years ago), minimum wage jobs were for the very young, very old, and very unqualified. For all but the last category, they were seen as stepping-stone occupations - either that first "real" job for teenagers or the supplemental job for retirees.
The transition away from that model tells me the system to raise people out of poverty, and/or minimum wage jobs, is broken. We've already seen a college education isn't what it once was (I have a friend with a law degree whose making collections phone calls - yikes!). I'd be curious for your opinion, D, if the rage against the minimum wage is an off-shoot of that or is more of a political ploy that utilizes low-wage employees with vague promises of better pay (without telling them about fewer jobs).
I'd be curious for your opinion, D, if the rage against the minimum wage is an off-shoot of that or is more of a political ploy that utilizes low-wage employees with vague promises of better pay (without telling them about fewer jobs).
FR,
I suppose there could be an element of that, but the Occam's Razor explanation is that (a) the unions are trying to get the minimum wage raised to help out their membership, because many union contract wage scales are tied to the minimum wage. That there's an ancillary benefit — cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder, which is something unions have traditionally sought to prevent worker competition — is just gravy.
"I've got mine" is always a growth industry.
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