Obvious Obviation

Two headlines:

Fast-Food Workers Seeking $15 Wage Are Planning Civil Disobedience

The organizers say fast-food workers — who are seeking a $15 hourly wage — will go on strike at restaurants in more than 100 cities and engage in sit-ins in more than a dozen cities.

[Update, September 4th, NBC News: Fast food workers demanding “supersized” wages walked off their jobs Thursday morning in dozens of U.S. cities — with protesters in New York and Detroit arrested after sitting in the street. The workers, from fast food giants such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King, are calling for at least $15 an hour...]

Fast-Food Workers Could Face Robot 'Armageddon'

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 [snip].

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas Xconomy in 2012. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

(Note: obviate is a synonym for "eliminate." IMHO, any businessperson who uses that term when talking about workers isn't much interested in PR.)

We will soon witness the economics phenomenon of producer-good substitution. As the price of one good (labor) goes up, employers will buy more of a substitute (machines). The irony is that the strike will accelerate the process.

Irony, obviation, and substitution, all on this Labor Day 2014.

Restaurants in Asia have robot waiters