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You still have to employ people to build the robot.
You would have to be insane to think that hiking minimum wage to $15 an hour wouldn't have an impact.
I really love this argument about automation etc.
Do you really think the number of jobs to build (and even supervise and maintain) most robotics, automation and AI even comes close to the number of jobs it replaces? By a factor of 100, much less even 10 or so?
Frankly, I am afraid that Walmart will overwork and underpay the robots. Hopefully, they can unionize and negotiate for a living wage, no more than a 40-hour work week, vacation, and healthcare benefits -- as well as a fifteen minute break every four hours of work.
I don’t think most of those will result in losing jobs, just different jobs. Have you been to a Walmart lately? Tons of employees running around, perhaps more than in the past. The only difference is now they are personal shoppers instead of cashiers.
No employees walk around the Walmart stores here. God help you if you need to ask where something is located.
The centuries-long trend of mechanism in all its permutations continues. Yet you attribute this immediate snapshot in history as not part of that overarching of ... well, of the entire Western world from the Industrial Revolution onward, but a sudden reaction to current policies.
I wonder if you were one of those (woefully wrong) individuals who proclaimed that the rise in ATMs would decrease bank employment? That didn't happen. Or perhaps that increased use of surveillance cameras would result in fewer law enforcement jobs? That was completely wrong, too. The examples are endless.
In reality, it doesn't look like Walmart is doing this in reaction to what aggrieves you politically. They're just doing what industry has been doing for hundreds of years.
What is predictable is the silly hand-wringing, from the Luddites to those trying to spin it as a consequence of policies they don't like. I wonder how these people manage to explain - in their own excuse-making minds - how this country once employed 50% of its populace in agriculture and now employs a mere 2%, yet 48% percent of the country isn't standing around without work complaining that the tractor and combine replaced the plow and hoe?
They have their Larry Kudlow sound-bites, but unfortunately for them, they don't have reality on their side: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25434
Exactly.
Scanners and UPC codes eliminated the need to employ people with price sticker guns. Had nothing to do with $15/hour minimum wage.
This continual whining about how raising the minimum wage is a bad deal is nonsense. It means people will be able to support themselves without Food Stamps, etc. It means hamburgers might cost another dime. It means Walmart might have to raise prices or cut into its billions of profits.
Frankly, I am afraid that Walmart will overwork and underpay the robots. Hopefully, they can unionize and negotiate for a living wage, no more than a 40-hour work week, vacation, and healthcare benefits -- as well as a fifteen minute break every four hours of work.
You know they're all just going to end up on welfare and getting e-stamps.
I wonder how these people manage to explain - in their own excuse-making minds - how this country once employed 50% of its populace in agriculture and now employs a mere 2%, yet 48% percent of the country isn't standing around without work complaining that the tractor and combine replaced the plow and hoe?
That's because the remaining 10% of the population that lives in farming regions and don't work in ag management for Con-Agra instead whine that they've somehow been forgotten and want massive investment to "build up rural America" again. And have a disproportionate vote to remind us of their inexplicable decline. Why, some towns don't even have a tractor dealership or co-op grain elevator any more.
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