As predicted, minimum wage workers actually made less money as the minimum wage in Seattle jumped to $13. The obvious reason being that they were given fewer hours to work to offset the increased business expense due to higher wage law. But it will get worse for the "professional minimum wager" when all the orders are taken by kiosks and the burgers are flipped and assembled by drones. Automated floor polishers and toilet scrubbers will replace most of them, and the automation of burger joints will be a metaphor for other industries as well. If cars can drive themselves through complex city traffic and configurations, then automatons can build houses, high rises and burger joint kiosks, just from engineering instructions.
But the minimum wagers will likely continue to protest at burger joints, but no one will be inside except customers and the occasional electronic technician. They will discover that the actual minimum wage is $0. And unemployment payout doesn't last forever.
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Except that this sort of automation is pretty much inevitable, anyway. Demands for higher minimum wage may accelerate its arrival by a second or two, but the economic efficiency of automated kiosks, et al., will eventually drive burger flippers out the door no matter how low minimum wage is kept.
Hell, my brother is a professional truck driver who’s been in denial about the threat to his job for years.
An interesting "wrinkle" on the minimum wage debacle:
Maine restaurant workers successfully lobby to REDUCE their minimum wage
Dr. Thomas Sowell and Dr. Walter Williams (along with others) have repeatedly documented the adverse impact that minimum wage increases have on the lowest paid workers - who are the supposed recipients of those increases. Yet the SJW politicos continue to hammer that particular constituency into oblivion with their "help."
True story: one of my coworkers is a housekeeper at a Mall. He was a big Bernie Bro millennial, and all in for the proposed $15.00 per hour minimum wage - until I explained the facts of life to him. I asked him what he proposed to do with his new "minimum wage" of $0.00 per hour and his "free time" (several shades of nuance in that phrase!) when he became unemployed. He tried to bluff it out, insisting that he would be raking in the dough, and screw the company. It didn't register completely until I informed him that his work was not worth $15.00 per hour; it was only worth his current wage of $8.00 per hour. If the company was forced to pay all housekeepers $15.00 per hour, then the company would have no choice but to reduce its current workforce size so that a profit could still be made under the existing contract. He then went to the SJW "weapon of choice" - forced compliance with no "opting out" by firing employees. I asked him how long he thought a company could run in the red before it went bankrupt. Somehow, he had never connected those dots before, while listening to Bernie's grand schemes. It wasn't long afterward that the company reduced his hours considerably, driving home the point. (No, I had nothing to do with that outcome. He brought that on himself by his lack of a good work ethic.)
Why is it that MORONS cannot grasp that there is a COST to a minimum wage that has to be paid by someone, sometime, and the payee is most likely to be the beneficiaries of that government "largesse" with other peoples money?!?
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