Just face it - you're automating a job. If your company succeeds, more people will become unemployed. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but call it what it is and take responsibility.
To be fair, the whole quote (in the article, not the video) is: “We’re playing around with education programs for the staff. Five percent of the time they’re paid just to read. We’re already doing that. There’s a book budget. We’re paying $16 an hour. As opportunities come up to fix the machine, there’s a path we’re going to offer people as repair or maintenance people to get paid even more.”
That is quite different from "when I make these people redundant, they will have time to read".
I agree that the founder should be more straightforward. But take responsibility for what? As a business you don't have any moral or legal requirements to employ x people.
Getting rid of this menial jobs will push people to look to do other stuff. It's good for them and for the society. Flipping burgers like a machine all day long is not healthy.
Everytime there are stories on burgers why do so many feel it is ok to run down people who are working and attempt to debase and dehumanize them. Is it some kind of perverse pleasure in running down others?
Why should a random commentator decide what is worthwhile for other people to do, what people should earn or what is the value of their job. Why is it more worthwhile to write html code, do hft trades in office or peddle surveillance and spyware all your life? How come no one else is running them down.
This is no place for such debased comments on other human beings in civilized discourse and the mods here usually on top of things should consider the impact of perpetuating this kind of gratuitous disparagement on entire groups of people.
But the founder, Vardakostas, is a person- not a business. A person ccan always consider the morality of the likely outcome of their decisions.
Being truthful.
And of course advantages for the restaurant owner, but also a bit for the employees : more space, generally. The whole kitchen seems to be the size of a small car. That's pretty good.
[1] https://bestlifeqatar.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/20171031_1...
"Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact the 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about the labor force activities (jobholding and job seeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the survey reference week (usually the week that includes the 12th of the month). These are live interviews conducted either in person or over the phone. "
It might be a better indicator of "how well is the economy serving the needs of the people", depending on what you value.
Of course much of that drop is also demographics; the baby boomers are starting to retire en masse.
Still, the illusion of job abundance does not hold.
In fact the unemployment rate is low because the economy has produced an extraordinarily vast number of jobs. In May alone the US economy nearly produced a million new full-time jobs (solidly contracting the part-time count). The full-time job count is at an all-time record high. The US economy has produced 14 million full-time jobs in just the last six years. [1] And the median full-time income in the US is about $50,000, among the highest on earth.
> notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets?
The US homeless rate per capita has plunged dramatically and is at an all-time record low. [2] You're entirely fabricating your claims, both about jobs and homelessness.
The total homeless count has declined by roughly 27% in just 13 years. From ~760,000 in 2005, to less than 550,000 for 2018. The US added about 10% to its population over that time simultaneously.
How is that possible? Everyone knows the US sucks and has no safety net or support systems. Except, that's a lie. The US welfare state is now more generous than either the Canadian or Australian welfare states. [3]
[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000
[2] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-s...
About the last part of your statement though: society has already implicitly accepted the crappy minimum living standards (at least in the US) that it's willing to accept. That doesn't make it right for the people stuck having to live according to that minimum.
Like c'mon. Working for less than a livable wage is just called making America worse. It would be much more productive to kill yourself and reduce the leverage employers have over the proletariat.
As for blacksmithing, yeah, the artisanship side of that would be cool. However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If that seems like fun to you, well, you still probably couldn't get that work, because there's just not very much demand for blacksmiths these days. :)
Blacksmiths don't make horseshoes either, that's a farrier's job (who still buy them off the shelf and finish them by hand). Being a farrier is also not an easy job, take a 3 or 4 apprenticeship to become one. There seems to be this viewpoint I see a lot on Hacker News that blue collar jobs are unskilled jobs. Most skilled trades require a 3 or 4 year apprenticeship, you can't just learn how to be a fitter and turner, or a carpenter, or a blacksmith/farrier in a couple of weekends. It's this kind of arrogant attitude that causes the tradies to have no respect for the book-learned engineers straight out of university that think because they have a degree they know how to build a road.
> ...I've done a stint in fast food. He specifically mentioned a gourmet burger place.
> However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If you're doing blacksmithing for a living, most likely you're a farrier. Demand for custom ironwork is very low.
The only farrier I know isn't a blacksmith. Actually I don't remember what her full time job is.
And the only person I've ever known who did custom ironwork was a software tester.
Go figure!
If working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sounds like fun to you, then I'd totally recommend it.
You'd probably spend most of your day cutting potatoes and washing dishes though, rather than actually cooking burgers. And even if you did get to cooking, you'd be making the same half a dozen menu items day in, day out. You won't have any creative control, you're a production line worker.
It's not even close, which is why it is easy to keep burger flipping jobs find without high wages even when unemployment is relatively low.
> This has been said countless times, but it's worth noting that although there are very few blacksmiths or peat cutters today, somehow we are still pretty close to full employment.
Because “full employment” is a decreasing-over-time share of the population that is actually working (and an even smaller decreasing share actually self-sufficient from work, as a large portion of the working population is dependent on public aid.)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a problem that people point to “near full employment” with advancing automation as an excuse to argue against the continued advance of social support structures necessary to make the declining share of the population working (and also the declining share self-sufficient from work) both nearly “full employment” and anywhere close to tolerate conditions.
We have folks living in tent cities.
12.8% is "on disability"
Yeah we're at full employment as long as you consider U6 rather than the old standard of U5.
Society shouldn't pretend these people don't exist but they're rightfully a different class of unemployed.
In any case, very few technologies (relative to everything that's created) actually make living standards better, mostly just things in healthcare. Almost everything else is pretty much a rats race fueled by business and profit, not by intentions of improving people's lives.
To make it a bit clearer...
Currently, humanity as a whole has the resources (materials, technology, etc), to provide good housing, education, food and healthcare for everyone on this planet. However, everyday we choose not to do that and do whatever else it is we do instead.
This is just an observation, not a moral judgement on anyone in particular. By the way, I'm personally not doing anything to change the current state of affairs, so I can't really point any fingers.
Hopefully the situation will change at some point.
Which percentage of society should be permanently alienated from ownership and engagement, and who decides?
And it's a valid point! If people really are choosing not to take jobs that are readily available, then automating those jobs is a net benefit.
Now, we should not ignore the fact that this is stated as a hypothetical! Are there a mass of unemployed who are choosing not to work? And would all of the people who lose their jobs due to burger flipping automation be able to find new jobs or be happy with no job?
Those seem like the more relevant questions.
June, 2018: "Disability Applications Plunge as the Economy Strengthens"
"The number of Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits is plunging, a startling reversal of a decades-old trend that threatened the program’s solvency. It is the latest evidence of a stronger economy pulling people back into the job market or preventing workers from being sidelined in the first place."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/business/economy/social-s...
U5 is at 4.6%... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
It is also, by definition, lower than U6.
Unless you plan on conscripting children, students, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, and the elderly into jobs (like Steve King[0]), we're at the long run full employment rate.
[0] https://twitter.com/stevekingia/status/967477703011119104
The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number. Again, fact, not a conspiracy.
A reasonable statement would note that the labor participation rate was at about 59% from 1950 to 1965, rose over several decades and peaked around 67% in the 90s as women entered the workforce in droves, fell 1% in the 00s and 3% following the recession. It would further be worth noting that the recent fall could be a result of a variety of factors - poor wage growth (might change the calculus of stay-at-home parenting), increasing numbers of young men that prefer to live with their parents and absorb themselves in entertainment rather than "getting ahead" (possibly also affected by the prior wage issue), or baby boomers retiring in increasing numbers, causing a bump in people moving out of the work force.
>The unemployment rate has been massaged and manipulated to the point where you need to stop citing it as a serious measurement of anything other than the scope to which otherwise intelligent people can be deluded.
>The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number.
Uh huh.
In any case, you might want to take a look at the 25-54 LFP. It currently sits at 82%, the same as the rate during the 2000s and two points shy of the all-time high during the height of the dot-com bubble. Prior to 1986 it had never reached this level.
"Some operators even say Uber is taking its toll. 'We have seen a number of our line cooks leave and say that they can make more money driving for Uber,' says Stacy Jed, co-owner of San Francisco’s Bluestem Brasserie. 'And if you think about it, the barrier to entry for Uber is much lower. All you have to do is know how to drive a car. And they can make more money and work less.'"
https://medium.com/@foodrepublic/how-can-restaurants-fix-the...
Don't you need to own a decent car too?
Imagine an employee at the burger place offering event planning services, not just catering. Or knowing that you have family coming in town next weekend for a baseball game and the gamw gets delayed and you're starving after the game, and the employee texts you "Hey, saw your game got delayed, hungry? I can have some burgers sent to the house for the whole family!"
It is automating a job, but I prefer to word it as reallocating resources to improve the experience.
FTFY