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| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
On May 28th I posted a warning of sorts to students
and others excited about the possibility of a $15 per hour minimum wage. One of
the consequences I warned about was an industry wide replacement of fast-food
workers by robots that could do their job faster, more efficiently, more
accurately, and more cleanly.
A recent story out of San Francisco, a city where the current
minimum wage is $12.25 per hour lends credence to my warning. An article
titled, “This
robot-powered burger joint could put fast food workers out of a job,” dated
the June 30, 2016 on the TECH INSIDER website tells the story of Momentum Machines, a start-up robotics
company that four years ago introduced the world to a burger making machine
capable of slicing toppings, grilling a patty, and assembling and bagging a
burger without any help from humans.[i]
Apparently Momentum Machines is
ready now, four years later, to take its robotic burger maker to the public. In
January of this year, the company applied for a construction permit to build a
restaurant around its burger making machine.[ii]
The restaurant will require a minimum number of human employees to work as
Restaurant Generalists as explained in an ad on Craig’s List.
The human employee will still be the one customers interact with, and will
still be the one responsible for cleanup and taking out the trash. The pay
scale is not given other than to say it is competitive and the work is
full-time.
While this won’t be the first
restaurant to go robotic, KFC, Domino’s Pizza, and other fast-food places have
begun replacing human workers with robots and kiosks over the past several
years, it will be among the first built from the ground up around the robot
rather than designed to accommodate human employees.
As the Craig’s List at for
Momentum Machines’ restaurant shows, however, a certain human element will
always be required. In China, where there has been a more widespread
implementation of the robotic restaurant worker, restaurant owners and managers
have learned that humans still do a better job at some things than do robots.
Tasks such as serving food and filling water glasses are still better
accomplished by humans.[iii]
Will a nationwide increase to a
minimum wage of $15 per hour lead to massive layoffs in the fast-food industry
as these low-skill, repetitive task jobs now done inefficiently by human
employees begin to be taken over by highly efficient robots? Former McDonald’s
CEO Ed Rensi and current Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder seem to think so.[iv]
Puzder is hoping to build a restaurant “that would be completely free of human
employees.”[v]
This onslaught of automation
raises the question of what will then happen to the tens of thousands of
minimum wage fast-food employees whose minimal skills are no longer needed?
Perhaps a robot tax will be introduced by politicians to fund job retraining
for those employees replaced by robots because of the minimum wage hike those politicians
enacted that caused those workers to lose their jobs in the first place.
My advice to my students will
be what is has always been. Stay in school, pay attention to what the teachers
are trying to teach you, and gain the knowledge and skills that will propel you
to a career where you won’t ever have to worry about the minimum wage.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
[i] http://www.techinsider.io/momentum-machines-is-hiring-2016-6
[ii]
Ibid
[iii]
ibid
[iv] http://www.eater.com/2016/5/25/11770576/mcdonalds-ed-rensi-wage-increase-fight-for-fifteen
[v]
ibid
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