The Labor Movement is back.

“Comparing their campaign to the civil rights movement, fast food workers from across the country voted Saturday to escalate their efforts for $15-an-hour pay and union membership by using nonviolent civil disobedience.” — Associated Press

Meanwhile, this appeared as a warning on a billboard in San Francisco:

“San Francisco, Meet your minimum wage replacement (photo depicts a tablet computer). With a new $15 minimum wage, employees will be replaced by less costly, automated alternatives.”

Now imagine the year is 1863 and Abraham Lincoln has just begun giving a slightly different Emancipation Proclamation:

“In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves shall be then, thenceforward, and forever guaranteed a MINIMUM WAGE for their forced labor; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the right of such persons to UNION MEMBERSHIP OVER REPLACEMENT BY MACHINE, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for BETTER PAY AND WORKING CONDITIONS.”

This may look absurd, and rightly so. The idea that people should be forced to sell their labor at the threat of being replaced by robots, and in response call for the right to better pay instead of the right to be replaced by said robots is kind of absurd, isn’t it? Because, what exactly are robots for anyway?

Technological advancement is the boon of human progress, not its bane. Whereas once over 90% of human labor was dedicated to agriculture, in the U.S. it is now 1.1%. What if we had looked at the tractor in fear of it reducing the need for our labor? Where would we be now?

We must not be fooled however into thinking that just as agricultural labor moved to manufacturing, and manufacturing is moving to service industry labor, that service industry labor will be safe or move to something else again entirely. For this is no longer about tractors replacing human horsepower, but hardware and software replacing human brainpower.

Technological Unemployment

The potential for humans to become this century’s horses is real, inferior in almost every way for the jobs once best suited for us. More and more jobs will become more cheaply, efficiently, and just plain better done by machines. We have already reached this point for certain jobs, and this trend will only accelerate because that is the nature of technology — exponential growth. As evidence of this, I give you CGP Grey’s recent 15-minute mini-documentary, “Humans Need Not Apply.”

Still believe there is nothing to worry about and everything will be okay?

We need to understand and comprehend this ongoing replacement of human labor. It will not be stopped, nor should it. Humans need to sleep. Humans need to eat. Humans are slow. Humans make mistakes. Humans get bored. Humans take time to learn. Humans require wages and salaries… and that right there is the biggest issue of all.

There are already instances where it costs more to pay a human than to buy a machine or make use of an app. This point is even being reached in places of exceedingly cheap human labor like China, where even Chinese workers are now being replaced. However, instead of openly embracing this accelerating automation, wage laborers tend to fight against advancing technology for fear of losing jobs, because again, humans are the ones who need wages and salaries, not machines.

There already exists a hamburger making machine that can purportedly make higher quality hamburgers perfect every time, and far faster. But where are the fast food employees picketing to be replaced by this machine so they don’t have to make burgers themselves anymore? Applebee’s recently introduced table ordering via tablet computers and yet pledged not to in any way reduce their staff, citing “It’s not about saving labor.”

“Master, let me serve my purpose.” (Photo by Brett Davis)

Why not? Shouldn’t saving labor be technology’s entire focus? It certainly seems so, but we would all rather eat than watch robots do our work for us as we starve. But we could eat and watch robots do our work for us as we thrive. By forcing the false choice between the two instead of embracing both, we push against human progress, just as if we had pushed against tractors on farms.

A large increase in the federal minimum wage would mostly only help those at the very bottom of the labor market, leaving out in large part the great majority above the very bottom and all the unemployed denied access to the labor market entirely. Meanwhile, the increase in mandatory labor costs would only serve to increase automation in a way that only increases inequality. Owners of capital would come to own more capital, and those without capital would find it even harder to sell their labor at all.

Another group of workers a minimum wage does little to help are those increasingly employed within the “gig economy”, where people aren’t actually employees for companies like Uber and Lyft or TaskRabbit and Fiverr. Instead they are just earning microwages as independent contractors precariously gaining $10 here and $5 there from gig to gig, with nothing remotely close to being definable as job security. These are people who labor economist and co-founder of BIEN, Guy Standing has dubbed the “precariat” — the growing class of people who live day to day, never knowing if they will be able to earn enough to meet their needs.

To put it simply…

A higher minimum wage is a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem.

So what exactly should service industry workers, gig economy workers, and every other kind of worker be fighting for on Labor Day in the 21st century in a world of advancing technological unemployment and increasing financial instability?