Render: Automation already taking over

I graduated from high school when I was 17 years old and started work at the then-minimum wage of $1.25 an hour.

The furnished room I rented cost $8 a week and the bathroom was down the hall.

Rube Render

In the 21st century, where all things can be fixed by government fiat, California has moved to pass legislation raising the minimum wage to $10.50 an hour next year, and then gradually raising it to $15 an hour. Santa Fe never saw a California labor law it couldn’t love.

Fifteen bucks an hour, to an employer, is actually $18 when you factor in Social Security payments, workman’s comp and unemployment insurance. In the larger California cities along the coast (San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego) businesses may be able to absorb the increase in the cost of labor this will entail, but in the rural areas this legislation could prove disastrous for small businesses.

A $5 an hour increase (actually $6.50 with FICA, workman’s comp and insurance) in an enterprise with 10 employees will cost the employer more than $135,000.00 a year. When you do the math, the threat of automation becomes a very real possibility.

The chief executive officer of hamburger chain Carl’s Junior predicts fast-food restaurants will soon lack any human workers. There are already restaurants in Clovis that have digitized ordering stations on the tables. People my age may not like them, but when I see four millennials gathered around a lunch table, all of them texting someone else with their smart phones, it really doesn’t seem like a reach to me. They have no problem communicating with a device, and in fact may prefer it.

Automation will become a problem for all employees sooner rather than later. Large corporations have already begun the move. Giant robots handle cargo in the port of Los Angeles.

Additionally, Ray Mabus, secretary of the Navy, maintains that the last manned fighter the Navy will purchase is the F-35.

A New York Times article by Nathaniel Popper from February of this year titled, “The Robots are Coming for Wall Street” notes that between a third and a half of current finance employees will lose their jobs to automation software within the next decade.

Computers are capable of parsing enormous sets of data far more quickly and accurately than humans ever could.

When it gets to the administrators, senior managers will panic. Silicon Valley will continue to get rich making machines to replace them.

Rube Render is the Curry County Republican chairman. Contact him at:

[email protected]