When I was a boy millions of people had jobs as telephone operators, service station attendants and unskilled assembly workers. Those jobs are gone. They have been replaced by automation. I fear fast food workers may be the next to go.
Being a fast food worker is not a profitable career choice. However, millions of young people have used it as an entrée into the working world and gone on to bigger and better things. Unfortunately that path may soon be cut off. There is a movement to impose a $15/hour minimum wage on fast food workers. Like it or not, the economic value of a fast food worker is lower than that. Since the work requires relatively little skill, it is fairly easy to automate it. Efforts are under way to do just that. It would be horrible if all those starter jobs went away. In effect, the message proponents are giving is to tell a young couple to drop out of school and make no effort to get marketable skills and earn $60,000 a year flipping hamburgers. What do these people do when their jobs disappear? Millions of families are in dire financial straits because they don’t have the skills and experience to succeed in the new economy. In the last election Clinton ignored them and Trump promised the old jobs are coming back. It’s time for someone to do something.
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