By Marc Jampole
The dining experience of most Americans is beginning to resemble how the agricultural industry prefers to raise cattle and chickens: an impersonal industrialized process.
The dining experience of most Americans is beginning to resemble how the agricultural industry prefers to raise cattle and chickens: an impersonal industrialized process.
Unbeknownst to many, most of the food eaten in casual dining
restaurants comes to the restaurant already prepared and partially cooked,
often frozen, ready to be popped in the microwave or plunged in the deep fryer
for a little finishing. As it turns out a very small number of companies
manufactures these mostly finished dinners.
While diners might not know that their restaurant night out
is little more than microwaved frozen food, they can’t help but notice
automation beginning to take over the service part of the dining experience.
Some restaurants have now started placing order tablets in their outlets. A few
years back, McDonald’s announced that it was replacing human cashiers with
touch-screens at more than 7,000 European locations.
Right-wing ideologues such as Michael Saltsman, research
director at the Employment Policies Institute, use service industry automation as a stick to beat back the beasts of the minimum
wage, mandatory sick leave and employer-sponsored health care. Saltsman, who
never saw an employee benefit or government program he liked, writes that raising the minimum wage will make employers in the fast food, casual dining and retail industries seek to automate as many parts of the food delivery process as possible as quickly as possible.
Saltsman’s reasoning is specious: The large retail, fast
food and casual dining chains are already galloping towards greater automation
as fast as they can. If we lowered the minimum wage, the manufacturers would
still seek to automate. The top 1% of the country—the people who own and run
the large retail corporations that are automating—has consumed virtually all of
the economic gains we have made in recent decades. And yet this outsized explosion
in their slice of the pie has not prevented major employers from continuing to
look for whatever way possible to cut more of their employees…and automation
does just that!
Standard economic theory states that automation frees labor
to do other things: new needs are created, such as designing and building the
machines and computers that have taken away so many jobs. Educating workers for
the new jobs is the key according to this standard version of the creative
destruction of capitalism.
Unfortunately, it
may not work this time. A recent Economist article reports that a 2013 paper by two
Oxford professors theorizes that jobs are at high risk of being automated in
47% of all occupational categories, including such “brain-work” service
professions as accountancy, the law and technical writing. Employment caused by the coming blitzkrieg
of automation may permanently disrupt the economy. There is no way that
training and retraining will enable us to fit all the workers that future
automation will replace in the next few decades.
Economic right-wingers don’t like to hear it, but for our
economy to perform its basic function of providing goods and services to
people, the distribution of the wealth will have to become far more equitable.
We will need to implement higher minimum wages and cut the number of hours that
constitute full-time work, to spread the work that does exist around to more
people. With so many people out of jobs, the safety net will have to be
expanded—more unemployment and food stamp benefits. It would help if our
population falls, so that our automated economy has fewer people chasing after
jobs.
We will also have to consider how much automation is really
good for society. Having waiters serve meals that are prepared on the premises
by individual chefs expressing their creativity is a pleasure that more people
could enjoy if salaries were high enough to enable people to afford something
other than Mickey D’s. Organic agriculture and animal husbandry are more labor
intensive than the industrialized agriculture that developed in the 20th
century. Requiring greater environmental regulations on coal and natural gas
production and electricity generation creates more jobs as well.
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