The most powerful tool in any union is a strike, but McDonalds is okay with that now, and won't be bringing in any scabs to replace those who are gone. They will be replaced by machines and the consumers are going to see a value-add.
This is tech fantasy, like Musk promising that Teslas will be fully self-driving any minute now.
Similarly, sometimes when I see a restaurant use Yelp for check-in, reservations, and queue management, I imagine that's a sizable fraction of a job.
No, we're talking about the making and packaging diverse types of food to order. That's why people go to McDonalds, and it's something that's surprisingly difficult to automate. McDonalds workers will be able to strike effectively as long as that's true.
Also, I don't consider ordering kiosks a value add for a customer. I've used them, they've been little to no benefit over ordering in person. It's just futzing around with yet another flaky touch screen, and who knows if the last person who used it had a cold or something. Their handling of process exceptions is like Google's customer support: non-existant. They're just a cost saving measure for business owners. It's not about "providing a value-add to customers" at all.
Remote ordering is a small value add, since it does permit some level of customer multi-tasking.
Or is that just a Canada trial thing?