When you raise the minimum wage, it makes automation more effective in comparison. Which is why in NYC when they raised the minimum wage for fast food workers, most of the people at McDonald's who used to take orders just got replaced with kiosks. This is in effect a subsidy for the tech companies that automate labor, like the company that makes the McDonald's kiosks.
If a job can't be done for a livable wage, then we have to be willing to let those jobs go. Automate them, outsource them, let the companies who rely on exploitative labor fail -- the jobs are going to leave eventually anyway.
Meanwhile, we should funnel some of those productivity gains to build a robust social safety net (including education and job retraining) to give the displaced some dignity, and the ability to retool and become productive again if they so choose.
>Which is why in NYC when they raised the minimum wage for fast food workers, most of the people at McDonald's who used to take orders just got replaced with kiosks
Is it really true though? When you actually look at the real world, you'll find those kiosks at McDonalds in airports too, despite not being in districts that raised minimum wage. And what about McDonalds in other wealthy countries, that often have state mandated living wages much higher than in the US? They don't particularly seemed to have rushed to automate any quicker than in the US.
In fact, I think it's more likely that you are overlooking the myriad of other benefits: The kiosk can take orders in any language, for example. Perhaps the Kiosk was always the superior option for McDonalds to use for their store. It just took until the coincidental timing for the technology to become cheaper, and robust enough, to use in practice.
They've been superior for a while. We had touchscreen kiosks at a Jack-in-the-Box (cheap burger chain) at near my university back in 2007.
It was a pilot program, and the CEO said they found that young people preferred to wait in line for the kiosk rather than place their order with an actual human, but older people preferred the opposite, so they decided to wait before rolling it out to all their locations. I think touchscreen devices are finally omnipresent enough that the older age demographics can handle ordering via a touchscreen.
A more sinister take would be that the larger restaurant chains anticipated minimum-wage increases, and timed the rollout of touchscreen devices to coincide with the rollout of minimum wage legislation, so their lobbyists can make the argument that minimum wage increases cost jobs, because they're still going to have to pay the cooks in the back and the people to keep the place clean.
That automation is in competition with minimum wage is unsubstantiated. And if companies innovate to get rid of the need for minimum wage jobs when min wage is raised, the society's response should not be to throttle innovation or keep lower minimum wage, but to institutionalize changes to how we redistribute the gains of that innovation.
If this is true, then I would guess that eventually it would have happened anyways. Automation is only going to get more effective, and the costs to automate can only go down. So at the most, all this could do is speed up adoption (but I still question if it really has or is just a scapegoat).
Higher wages might make it easier to make a business case for installing kiosks, but it does nothing to lower the price of the kiosks. I don't see how it qualifies as a "subsidy".
Given a constant demand for, say, fast-food ordering services, there are two competing supplies addressing that need: minimum-wage labour, or automated kiosks.
By raising the minimum wage, you're shifting the supply curve up, which if sufficient, kicks the advantage to the kiosk manufacturer(s). Advantage: automation.
The kiosk vendors get a windfall benefit as they can now capture this share of the market.
The restaurateurs may wish to consider what their new market position vis-a-vis suppliers is. With minimum-wage labour, any one unit of input (worker) is fungible for another, and the employer has considerable leverage over the supply in that whilst a worker is out of a job, the employer need only find another replacement worker.
Up against a (likely) automation oligopoly or monopoly, the restaurateur is now at the short end of the market stick, and may face future price (or other) demands or concessions from the automation vendor(s). At least to the point of substituting back in human labour.
If minimum wage becomes a living wage then there are more people capable of accepting jobs that are needed and more difficult to automate - for instance, caregivers.
By which mechanism?