Mandating minimum wage hike could backfire

McDonald’s is already moving toward touch screens to replace counter staff

Folks, it’s springtime in Alberta, so what better time could there be for some meta-analysis?

Now, as a rare, surviving member of those poor school kids force-fed Greek lessons at 11 years old, I shuddered when our labour minister recently came up with some bafflegab involving the meta prefix.

Perhaps Christina Gray also went through hell reading Plato’s Phaedrus out loud in original form, as the rest of the class sniggered or industriously picked their collective noses. If so, she has my sympathy.

But I doubt it. More likely, it’s another example of a politician trying to sound convincing by wrapping the tongue around some dead word to cloud the meaning, while thinking it sounds clever.

If people blew raspberries and pointed at the culprit whenever this happened, we’d all be better off as the pomposity bubble deflated.

This latest verbal monstrosity came as Gray defended her government’s push to jack up Alberta’s minimum wage in a series of hikes.

This October, we’ll get a $1.40 increase to $13.60 an hour before the minimum wage reaches $15 in 2018.

Small business owners complain these staggered increases will lead to less hiring, more firing and extra strain on finances already pinched. The NDP government doesn’t buy such arguments.

“The meta-analysis leads us to believe there will be no impact, or negligible impact,” is what Gray said.

A bit of Greek doesn’t hide the fact that economic push-and-pull arguments over such mandated minimums have raged for years, as it’s extremely hard to examine the effect of one specific measure with so much involved in a country’s or province’s overall economic performance.

And yes, it seems smallminded, if not downright nasty, to pontificate about people at the bottom end of the pay scale getting an extra few bucks in their paycheques. Good for them, I say.

Yet common sense is difficult to jettison, so when I wandered into the McDonald’s at Glenmore Landing a week ago, all the meta-analysis in the world couldn’t hide the reality on display.

It had been a while since I’d walked through the Golden Arches and much had changed.

Now, there was a big touch screen device near the door where you picked out your burger or — heaven, help us — salad.

Then, arriving at the counter, there was one young lad doing the serve-up end of the business. Gone were the days of lineups at eight stations and dozens of youngsters running hither and thither serving up bucketfuls of Big Macs.

Now, just as figuring out the precise effect of minimum wage hikes on employment is a devilish affair — despite Gray’s cavalier dismissal of any negative components — undoubtedly, McDonald’s has multiple reasons for restructuring its many outlets.

But when governments jack up the price of labour, then it would be silly to imagine that doesn’t affect future employment planning of a company with enough cash to consider robots or further automation.

And then there’s retail, an industry being assailed by the online giant that is Amazon. Many stores are already hurting, so making them pay more for sales staff could drive them to the wall.

And don’t look to Jeff Bezos’s company to pick up that slack. Oh no, it’s now experimenting with physical stores in the U.S., ones with zero cashiers, where sensors tally what’s in your basket, then send the bill to your Amazon ID account. Or, soon you can stay home and have a drone deliver your online order.

What’s next? Anyone for pizza?

Entry-level jobs are exactly that. They allow us to gain experience, or simply provide some ready cash for students between school terms. Hardworking and smart people move upward and get paid more soon enough.

Mandating that everyone should get at least $15 an hour may seem a gift horse to those at the bottom of the scale. That is until they’re fired.

As the Trojans learned to their cost, always beware Greeks bearing gifts.