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Former McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour (foxbusiness.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Fox Business: As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour (warning: autoplaying video) bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe," said former McDonald's USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.
But when you increase the labour cost by 25-100%, all in one go, you shock the system so bad that they will naturally look to any and all means necessary to rein in their labour expenses.
Not been tracking this issue in the news have you? Nobody is proposing increasing the minimum wage to $12 (much less $15) "all in one go". The "Raise the Wage Act" being submitted to Congress raises it to $12 but does it over four years. The law recently signed in California reaches $15 an hour, but takes 6 years to do it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
This scaremongering makes zero sense, there are plenty of countries with higher income than USA and they don't starve from unemployment, rather the opposite.
Citation needed.
You're correct only if by "plenty" you mean 3-5. There are 5 countries with higher median income than the US: Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Denmark.
There are 3 countries with higher average wage than the US: Luxembourg again, Switzerland, and Ireland (according to the OECD). (Though this depends on who you ask: according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the US is flat-out No. 1 for average income.)
All but 2 of those (Norway and Switzerland) have higher unemployment rates than the US.
The answer is yes. In every single case (22 times) where the federal minimum wage was raised by law, economic growth and standards of living went up faster than inflation. Every single time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ironically, it's not like McDonalds has ever even BEEN a food company. Ray Koch has given multiple talks in which he spelled it out: McDonald's is a property company. The whole restaurant schtick was just a way of acquiring valuable corner properties right outside city CBDs which would be IN those CBDs a few years later.
McDonalds makes far more from renting out the properties where a restaurant stood decades ago than they have ever made from selling food. Hell the main corporation doesn't even sell any food at all. They sell franchises, and they allow you to buy one by signing over the deed for the place where the restaurant will go and paying the bond on the property. That's how they acquired such a massive supply of valuable properties.
To quote Koch himself: "Every person I've ever met can make a better burger than McDonalds, but none of them are as rich as me, because McDonalds is not a company that makes money from selling burgers".
One side effect is that anything the McDonald's corporation says about labor should be treated as bullshit since they are not in a labor intensive industry at all - they are landlords. The franchise owners care about labor costs, but they are not part of the corporation and the corporation decidedly does not speak for them - they are merely tools the corporation uses to acquire more land.
McDonalds corporation has consistently insisted on that seperation when it came to any and all forms of liability. The case a few years ago in New York where thousands of workers were cheated out of their paychecks by outright fraud (altering their timesheets to lie about how much they worked) ended up having to be pursued against individual franchise owners as the corporation denied any involvement in the management of the franchises nor any liability for anything they do.
Different courts have shown different levels of agreement with that argument (the famous coffee case - which everybody knows only the bullshit corporate-spin version off that has no resemblance to reality at all found the corporation liable for the fuckup at a particular franchise, most cases have not).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *