fast food.jpg

Fast-food workers have been fighting for a $15 wage, much to conservatives' consternation.

(Associated Press)

There's little that inspires conservative derision like fast-food workers demanding a fair wage.

For more than a year, there's been a union-backed campaign to pay these employees $15 an hour. That's double the federal minimum wage ($7.25). But when you consider that there's no state in the country where a full-time minimum wage job will get you a one-bedroom apartment -- you'd have to work 58 hours in Michigan -- that doesn't seem terribly unreasonable.

Fast-food CEOs also make 1,200 times what their average worker does. And this isn't necessarily reward for a job well done -- McDonald's sales have slumped considerably.

But conservatives have mocked the workers as lazy and lacking marketable skills. They deserve what they get. (These are probably the folks who go ballistic at the clerk for depositing two Splendas, not three, into their morning coffee, as the world's saddest ego trip).

My favorite is the catchy Facebook meme comparing "Sally McBurgerflipper" to noble U.S. military personnel. The point? We don't pay our military heroes enough (it's true!) so "Johnny Fry-Boy" shouldn't make $15 an hour.

This would be impeccable logic, if A) There was a limited amount of money people could make in America and B) Fast-food workers' salaries were paid by the U.S. government. Alas, neither is true.

But the rant sounds good, so it went viral.

Given this animosity, it's not surprising that conservatives smugly cheered news that robots will eventually replace fast-food workers. That's what you get for demanding higher pay, ha ha. Now you'll lose your job to a machine. We heard the same thing decades ago about greedy union auto workers, by the way.

Once again, there's a logical fallacy. Companies have been investing in automation technology for years to save money. This isn't a recent response to uppity workers (although many executives probably don't mind it being taken that way).

Automation was coming to the fast-food industry, regardless of whether the "Fight for 15" campaign existed or not. So workers battling to get paid more now only makes sense. Their labor is still worth something, and it's certainly worth more to these multi-billion-dollar corporations than $9.09 an hour.

But it truly is a brave new world. And the irony is that many of these conservatives sniggering at soon-to-be-unemployed fast-food workers may find themselves replaced by robots, too.

White-collar jobs used to be considered safe. But if you're a bookkeeper, you've got a 98 percent shot at having your job automated in the next 20 years. Those chances are 94 percent for accountants, 95 percent for paralegals and 94 percent for budget analysts.

Still, plenty of jobs demand creativity and critical thinking. But automation is catching up there, with computers capable of composing symphonies and original works of art.

So judges, librarians and economists may find their jobs on the chopping block in the not-too-distant future.

For some industries, that day is already here. Robots are already writing newspaper stories for the Associated Press. And they can do this far quicker than an actual human being, as an NPR experiment showed.

Sure, people produce better stories. But as a 14-year veteran of the industry, I can attest that the caliber of your work won't save your job. Too many publications just want clickworthy #content, quality be damned. And getting rid of reporters who dare question their bosses' news judgment? Bonus!

Luckily for right-wingers, it should be harder for computers to churn out conservative commentary than a story on stock market activity.

Then again, feed the computer some talking points and buzzwords, and it just might work. And if there's an algorithm for outrage, it's probably game over.

Susan J. Demas is Publisher and Editor of Inside Michigan Politics, a nationally acclaimed, biweekly political newsletter. She can be reached at susan@sjdemas.com. Follow her on Twitter here.