So it begins- Wendy's To Switch To Self Ordering and Automation To Avoid $15/hr Wage hike

[brother walt]

and when that robot fix a half done burger and the customer die that lawsuit going to be enormous

 

[MollyGalaga]

$15 is too much.
$7 is too little
Figure out a number in between damn it

 

[Xerces]

one time a fast food joint didn't even put a burger patty in my burger


15.00 though

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

So would wendy's have just scrapped the idea if there was no minimum wage? or a very low one??




Robots are becoming more and more 'human' everyday, those new jobs could be replaced by new robots. But history has never been wrong so...

Wendys has prob been working on this for years But higher minimum wage will incentivize deploying that technology sooner.

And yea, history is rarely wrong. And history shows new technology = new opportunities and jobs we never thought of before. The real pressure is coming from distortions in the pricing of housing, healthcare, and increased demand for skills w/expensive training as well as increased global competition.

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

Like a welfare check, but bigger and better in order to keep the economy afloat since machines will take over all the jobs.

How can checks from the govt keep the economy afloat? Where will the govt get the money from?

 

[Wild self]

How can checks from the govt keep the economy afloat? Where will the govt get the money from?

Taxing the corporations, if they are brave enough and smart enough to see how that will help.

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

Taxing the corporations, if they are brave enough and smart enough to see how that will help.

How would corporations work, if everyone is home getting their govt checks?

 

[Wild self]

How would corporations work, if everyone is home getting their govt checks?

The execs and the managers would be the only humans. They get taxed to pay for the basic income checks, that the general population uses to pay for the goods.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Well, since our exchange has been about manufacturing, we could start with the fact that manufacturing is leaving Germany and coming into the US. Lot of manufacturers are building plants here and shutting them down in Germany. That is def working out well for German auto workers :yadontsay:

Bullshyt.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) there were 17,619,000 Americans employed in the manufacturing sector in January 1998; by January 2010, this figure had declined to 11,462,000, or 6,157,000 factory jobs lost in 12 years - an average annual decline of 513,000 jobs and a 35 percent overall decline in manufacturing employment over a 12-year period. Focusing on the last decade, the BLS employment data offer a sobering perspective on the manufacturing sector's growth in employment in recent years Between 2010-2014, 762,000 new U.S. manufacturing jobs were created over that five-year period, at an annual average rate of 152,400 new jobs. In contrast, during the preceding five-year period (2005 to 2009), 2.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the U.S. economy, or an average decline of 562,200 jobs per year. Placed in perspective, this means that only 762,000 and about 27 percent of the 2.8 million manufacturing jobs lost during the five years between 2005 and 2009 were actually recovered in the last five years (2010-2014) of economic recovery. And compared to the start of the Great Recession, American manufacturers employ 1.4 million fewer factory workers today than in December 2007.

Germany, on the other hand:

German manufacturing success has been the envy of many OECD economies. Even in the dark years of low growth after unification in 1991, German exports of goods grew significantly, both in absolute terms and expressed as world share of exports. It should therefore not come as a surprise that many economies have attempted to emulate the policies that underpinned this success: France under President Mitterrand did so in the early 1980s (Levy 1999), MIT’s Productivity Commission in the late 1980s invoked German industrial prowess (Dertouzos et al. 1989), and many Central European economies considered the German model as a possible example of sustainable capitalism early in the transition period. Today, with Germany seemingly at its export apex again, interest in the policies and institutions underlying German manufacturing (export) success has been growing everywhere, including the UK. This is not particularly surprising, given Germany’s superior manufacturing export performance over the last 14 years, both as a proportion of trade in (Figure 1) and in money terms (Figure 2)

And that's all despite the fact that US has a far more massive domestic market for manufactured goods (due to its huge population). So the USA still runs a massive trade deficit in manufacturing, while Germany may be the top export economy in the entire developed world.

But yeah, keep talking like the US manufacturing industry in 40-year decline is superior to a manufacturing sector that's the envy of everyone else.

We live in a globalized world. If labor is cheaper in Mexico than it is in Germany, why should a manufacturer build anything in Germany?

Because they have higher-paid, better-trained, more experienced, more skilled workers.

The ONLY way a developed country can compete with a developing country in manufacturing is by making a better product, and that means investing more in its workers. This whole "race to the bottom" shyt of paying workers the least possible and thus getting the most unskilled, useless people possible will ALWAYS fail when up against developing nations, because their bottom is lower than yours.

You can't even follow your own arguments to their obvious conclusions. That's because you're not making the arguments yourself, you're just repeating shyt that corporate heads have put into the airspace for years and now you actually believe you came up with it on your own. That's what corporate control of advertising and politics will do to you.

 

[duncanthetall]

Taxing the corporations, if they are brave enough and smart enough to see how that will help.

And then those companies go to countries that don't do that shyt and pay their workers 50 cents an hour because fukk you. LOL do you seriously think they'd just take that? jeez

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Do u not realize how half of jobs being taken by robots will destroy our current economy and social structure...

How do these companies expect people to buy their products if no one has a job? good luck convincing a robot to buy your overpriced sneakers

This is part of the argument that those "trickle-down economics" fools consistently ignore. People in the lower half of the economic bracket are always SPENDING their money. The more money you give them, the more money that gets fed right back into the economy.

People at the very top don't feed all that shyt back in. A huge amount of their profits are saved in overseas accounts, hoarded with gold/other backup holdings, spent overseas, invested in places like China, etc.

That's why eras where the money has distributed to the lower-half of the economic bracket have always had far better economic growth than eras where the money was hoarded on top. And far better long-term social consequences as well. Again, read Larry Bartel's "Unequal Democracy" for a breakdown of economic position in the USA by income bracket since the late 1940s. You can't argue those facts, no matter how bad some of the fools in this thread want to cape for Reagan.

Some people in here are advocates for slavery. Whole Foods paying prisoners 70 cents a day to contract for private prisons and rake in millions.

Whole Foods, Expensive Cheese, and the Dilemma of Cheap Prison Labor | VICE News

Meanwhile that job would help support an individual on the outside unable to find work (If they paid a living wage)

But would the same people who don't see any value in a living wage advocate people making 70 cents a day? I guess because it's unskilled labor it doesn't matter.....

fukk that.... that's just straight up exploitation

They're brainwashed by the Fox News crew. None of their arguments have been shown viable by actual economic data. They just repeat the same tired "logical" arguments that have been being thrown around by the trickle-down economics fools since the 1980s. And look where it's gotten us.

If corporate lobbying is the problem, why not get rid of that? $15 minimum wage wont do shyt to challenge that, or in general.

Can you even hear yourself talk? Your arguments are wack as fukk. Why don't we just "get rid of corporate lobbying" when every elected official we have is being paid off by corporate lobbyists. Not to mention that an army of useful idiots like yourself are eating up every argument they make through the media.


Meanwhile, you want to argue for giving corporations even more power. "Cut corporate taxes!" "Forget about minimum wage!" "Worker protections are counterproductive!" Like all your shyt won't give them more and more power to lobby.

You want to dismiss actual positive gains that can happen right now by giving pie-in-the-sky impossible alternatives that you don't have the slightest ability to enact, nor are you even going to try.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

For fukks sake.... if the country was the happiest during that time, how do you explain the Civil Rights Movement? How about McCarthyism? Japanese internment camps? You have got to be kidding me. It was bad enough that you are a redistributionist/socialist masquerading as an advocate for the poor, but on top of that you are a revisionist too?

If you want to act like an educated person, don't make yourself look completely ignorant.

Japanese internment camps in the fukking 1960s? You do realize that ended with WW2, right?

"McCarthyism" in the 1960s? Joseph McCarthy who was publicly censured by the Senate in December 1954 and died in 1957? McCarthyism was over as a public concern by the mid-1950s.

As far as Civil Rights goes, the average state of the Black man in America got far, far BETTER during the late 1950s and through the 1960s. That was when the Black community saw by far the GREATEST gains in economic and social position. Compare what's happened from the 1980s through now - even with Obama in power, is the community any better off than it was before Reagan came into power and this trickle-down economics shyt started? How have welfare/unemployment/wages/general social indicators for Black people done since 1980?



Yeah, keep ripping on the 1960s as if that wasn't when good shyt was actually starting to happen.

Right - because our taxes wouldn't go up if minimum wages were raised.

Explain what kind of wack argument you're trying to make here.

It would for the "minimum basic wage" people are proposing.

Speaking of which, for all you minimum basic wage people, where would that money come from?

From upper management salaries that are by far the highest in history (multiple times higher than they were 30 years ago and in some cases an order of magnitude higher than other nations) and stockholder gains that are at their highest point in history, doofus.

The top 1% controls 40% of all wealth in America right now. To put in another way, the top 1% has more money right now than the entire bottom 60% combined. You could cut that in half, and they'd still be rich as fukk and still control just as much of the economy as they did in the 1960s. But with just half of the top 1% wealth, you could improve the state of the bottom 60% by fifty percent.

 

[Yuzo]

How can checks from the govt keep the economy afloat? Where will the govt get the money from?

the government already dedicates a lot of money to many social welfare programs. programs like social security, food stamps, unemployment, disability, etc would all be shut down and replaced with a singular basic income program. to get basic income to become feasible, its total cost must be equal to or less than what the government currently spends on all its current social welfare programs, which it would replace.

therefore, the cost of living is important to consider, since the cost of living determines the amount of money the government would need to give out for a person to survive on a basic income. that is to say, that if the cost of living can be brought down, the cost of a basic income is also brought down with it, making a singular basic income program a cheaper and more efficient way for our society to handle the problem of social welfare in general.

for the cost of living to come down, changes need to be made to the way things like housing, electricity, food, education, transportation are priced. for example, automated uber vehicles may come to replace the need to own a car in most cities as people can just order cheap rides on the fly instead of paying for a car and its related costs including things like gas and insurance. food may become cheaper as automation may remove a lot of costs associated with it from farming to transportation and ultimately even to its preparation, sort of like what this thread is about. this would not be unlike the way a lot of our technology and gadgets have become much cheaper for example. do you think you can think of any more ways the cost of living can come down?

the alternative of course would be to increase taxes, or to say, reduce spending in other areas, such as military, and then divert it to basic income. i think this is impractical in the short term and in the long term this may be unnecessary, because as technology progresses it may start to naturally bring down the cost of living on its own. for example, communities where each home is hooked into its own communal solar grid which collectively produces an excess of electricity without the need for purchasing any electricity from an outside source, or even selling the excess electricity it produces to nearby businesses, such as restaurants etc.

 

[Kill Dat Noize]

regardless of how much you think fast food workers deserve to be paid, the fact of the matter is that a group of people who felt they were being exploited fought for what they felt they deserved... and they won.

so if you're upset that they're making more than you, or you feel like you deserve to be paid more... then maybe you and your people should organize and do what they did.

could this end up being a good thing? i would imagine you're gonna start seeing a lot skilled workers opting for these higher paying fast food jobs. so won't that increase the DEMAND for skilled labor, hence increasing the pay?

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

the government already dedicates a lot of money to many social welfare programs. programs like social security, food stamps, unemployment, disability, etc would all be shut down and replaced with a singular basic income program. to get basic income to become feasible, its total cost must be equal to or less than what the government currently spends on all its current social welfare programs, which it would replace.

Ummmm.... OK, there are ~250M adults over the age of 18 in the US. Of them, 120M are full time employees. So we are talking about a program to provide income to at least 130 million people, but probably way more, because why would anyone work for crumbs if they could have their needs met w/a govt check? So just off the rip your plan is off to a bad start.

therefore, the cost of living is important to consider, since the cost of living determines the amount of money the government would need to give out for a person to survive on a basic income. that is to say, that if the cost of living can be brought down, the cost of a basic income is also brought down with it, making a singular basic income program a cheaper and more efficient way for our society to handle the problem of social welfare in general.

for the cost of living to come down, changes need to be made to the way things like housing, electricity, food, education, transportation are priced. for example, automated uber vehicles may come to replace the need to own a car in most cities as people can just order cheap rides on the fly instead of paying for a car and its related costs including things like gas and insurance. food may become cheaper as automation may remove a lot of costs associated with it from farming to transportation and ultimately even to its preparation, sort of like what this thread is about. this would not be unlike the way a lot of our technology and gadgets have become much cheaper for example. do you think you can think of any more ways the cost of living can come down?

So why couldn't we look to reduce the cost of living to help people get more from the money they earn at jobs?

the alternative of course would be to increase taxes, or to say, reduce spending in other areas, such as military, and then divert it to basic income. i think this is impractical in the short term and in the long term this may be unnecessary, because as technology progresses it may start to naturally bring down the cost of living on its own. for example, communities where each home is hooked into its own communal solar grid which collectively produces an excess of electricity without the need for purchasing any electricity from an outside source, or even selling the excess electricity it produces to nearby businesses, such as restaurants etc.

Increase taxes on who? A minimum basic income would decimate the tax base.... so many people would stop working.

I think we have to do all we can to enable people to get the most for the work they do. Why are people so afraid of work?

regardless of how much you think fast food workers deserve to be paid, the fact of the matter is that a group of people who felt they were being exploited fought for what they felt they deserved... and they won.

so if you're upset that they're making more than you, or you feel like you deserve to be paid more... then maybe you and your people should organize and do what they did.

could this end up being a good thing? i would imagine you're gonna start seeing a lot skilled workers opting for these higher paying fast food jobs. so won't that increase the DEMAND for skilled l
labor, hence increasing the pay?

They didn't win. $15/hr is still well under the poverty line in NYC for anyone with mouths to feed.

And that market distortion you are pointing to is bad. This would artificially drive up the cost of labor for everyone, with no benefit to the consumer or business. If flipping burgers is worth $5/hr let it be worth that, and let people who can command $15/hr go do work that is worth that much. If minimum wage is too low we should be looking at what we can do to help people earning that income get the most of their money. Pay is not too low; shyt is too expensive... and there is an important distinction between those two things.