Fast food restaurants are preparing for another set of walk outs as their employees push for an unrealistic $15 an hour.
I've written about this trend before (here and here) and it never fails to amaze me that these walk outs are largely organized by big labor unions, the leadership of which are more than aware that technology will soon replace these low-skilled workers. As Alexander C. Kaufman writes in the Huffington Post: it's going to be a robot Armageddon for fast food workers.
Momentum Machines of San Francisco has invented a fully-automated contraption that can grind meat, slice tomatoes, grill patties, wrap fully cooked burgers and do pretty much anything else human fast-food workers can do. The machine is capable of cranking out 360 burgers per hour, according to Momentum Machines' website.
The group plans to sell its invention to restaurants and, eventually, open its own chain to sell gourmet burgers at fast-food prices by eliminating the cost of paying line cooks. This, its website claims, will "democratize access to high quality food, making it available to the masses."
“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas Xconomy in 2012. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”
If big labor actually cared about these fast food workers, they would back off of these stunts. Unfortunately for these workers who are being fooled into believing these walk outs will help, they will soon be spending their days not walking a picket line but waiting in the unemployment line.