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California's $15-an-Hour Minimum Wage May Spur Automation (computerworld.com)
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.
It hit at least one bookseller pretty hard.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant to save money, I do it because I don't feel like cooking, or don't feel like eating something fast and cheap (and lower quality), or just to treat myself to something I normally wouldn't eat. If I want to save money then I stay home and cook for myself.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It almost seems like government is helpless or has thrown up its hands in dealing with the root causes of the problem, which is the responsibility of government.
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.
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.
To be fair, the california hike is actually five one-dollar/hour hike a year apart.
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.
Actually, minimum wage increases have NEVER reduced employment in the mid to long term. It's a conseevative myth that it does, and the only reason you occasionally get short term drops is political--businesses being reactionary in a 'now see what you made me do' kind of sense.
Now if we could only get rid of the sense of entitlement among business owners. If your business model relies on basically not paying people there's something wrong with you.
What is that? Your propaganda has turned Unions and Detroit into such simple pejoratives that they do not even require whole sentences?
Stop eating the propaganda, Detroit and US automakers failed because of poor executive decisions that led to heel-dragging and allowed foreign competitors to take the market away
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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. 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.