So why doesn’t the burger flipper just go get an engineering job?
How do you do that when they can move their operation elsewhere? Or replace the workers with automation?
I mean $15 an hour for running the register at McDonalds sounds good, oh wait, there’s an app for that now.
Also some places have the Order screens where people can do it themselves.
So that 15 dollar an hour doesn’t make sense. In some of these positions.
But what i see will raise wages is more competition in the Workforce. More companies competing for employee’s will cause benefits or wages to increase to attract the works.
So we are getting to full employment which we hope will cause the companies to be struggling to find workers so they will need to compete.
A crystal ball suggests looking into the future. I am looking into the past. We have seen this before - the repatriation of funds, the tax cuts, the tax breaks for corps…it never has played out the way it is being sold. Never.
I imagine taxes will be the way. Robot taxes.
How about we insist employers pay service sector workers living wages so we don’t have to subsidize the work forces of corps who are setting record profits year after year?
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Which will drive up the price of goods, it’s a wash.
Who didn’t see that coming. I mean, seriously.
Point of trivia, here fast food workers are now being paid more than EMTs. Which job do you think is more valuable?
Right - there is an ap for that now with very low wages. Meaning the fear of automation in response to higher living wages is a red herring.
Speeds up the roll out. If you don’t believe it look at farm work, automatic harvesters have existed for many crops that are currently harvested by hand for decades, but they weren’t adopted because migrant labor was so cheap the up front investment on them didn’t make sense. Raise those wages high enough and it will.
They are already going up with no corresponding increase in wages, in fact as the OP says wages are falling. Only people getting more wealthy are CEOs and shareholders.
Doesn’t do any good to harvest something that no one can afford to buy. Supply and demand, pretty simple. You gotta pay people for them to be able to buy your product. You don’t pay robots and they don’t spend money.
Well that would be true, if the only way to make money was to harvest vegetables.
How does that work in the job market?
True. With more and more automation it seems we are creating more low paying unskilled positions. How do we as a nation create more high skill, high paying jobs?
We just hit full employment, give it some time, the last time that happened wages grew.
The same way it does in every other laissez-faire market, except that is not what we have here in America, never have, never will. Business will do as they are told or they won’t be in business anymore, you’ve already seen it since the very first minimum wage law was passed, only thing you haven’t seen in a steady increase in that rate due to the amount of bought off politicans.
Lack of high skilled and high paying jobs isn’t really the problem, if it was, high unemployment for those kind of jobs would be present. People dropping out of high school and/or not going to college is the problem.
The other thing businesses will do is control costs, or they won’t be in business any more.
