Given the liberal media’s push for a higher minimum wage, The Washington Post made a startling front-page admission on Aug. 17.
That Post story pointed out that raising the minimum wage to $15, as the “Fight for $15” activists have been calling for, “could speed arrival of robot-powered restaurants” and kill millions of jobs in the industry.
Reporter Lydia DePillis wrote that increasing the minimum wage to $15-per-hour across the country would threaten the jobs of 5.4 million servers and cooks, and “many of the nation’s 3.3 million cashiers,” who worked at restaurants, especially in the fast food industry. This admission came as “a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nears” in Washington, D.C., and similar efforts have gained “traction around the country.”
“The problem with the minimum-wage offensive is that it throws the accounting of the restaurant industry totally upside down,” Persona Pizzeria franchise development vice president Harold Miller told the Post.
DePillis said many restaurants were “already at work looking for ingenious ways to take humans out of the picture,” including using robots and other automated technology as substitutes for human labor.
Back in 2007, The Washington Post celebrated the 13.5 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, along with other media including CNN, PBS, ABC and USA Today. The paper and others ignored economic common sense, since a survey of the American Economic Association at the time found that “over 73 percent of AEA labor economists believe that a significant increase [in the minimum wage] will lead to employment losses and 68 percent think these employment losses fall disproportionately on the least skilled.”
