If you don’t remember who Nina Turner is that’s really okay. She’s a socialist who ran in a special election in Ohio back in 2021 against a more moderate Democrat named Shontel Brown. It was a contest to see who would take the seat previously held by Rep. Marcia Fudge who left to become Biden’s HUD Secretary. Shontel Brown was endorsed by Hillary Clinton and Jim Clyburn (the latter endorsement was Turner’s fault) while Nina Turner was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC. The National Journal called the race a “battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.”

Nina Turner lost that race, though it was fairly close. And because it was a special election, there was a rematch a year later. Turner lost the rematch as well but this time the race was a blowout. She lost by 30 points. Rather than recognize that the electorate wasn’t interested in what she was selling, Turner promised she would consider running for president in 2024. Honestly, she’s be a better candidate than Kamala Harris but then who wouldn’t.

Anyway, Nina Turner has recently been turning her fire on McDonalds. In December when the company made news for launching its first partly automated restaurant, Turner made a point about the minimum wage.

The minimum wage in Texas is $7.25/hour. https://t.co/GVqCtW2VpO

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) December 22, 2022

The restaurant is in a suburban area of Fort Worth so I think she’s saying that this wouldn’t be an obvious place to try to reduce costs. In any case, this new test restaurant isn’t fully automated as the tweet claimed. There are still people inside cooking the food but if you want to you can completely avoid them.

 

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Anyway, this week, Turner is back at it. This time she made the somewhat dubious assertion that “without the workers, McDonald’s would close.” When someone pointed out the automated restaurant again as where things seemed to be headed, she agreed it would happen eventually but said until then workers deserve a “living wage.”

If they could automate, they’d have already done it.

If they can automate, they will do it eventually.

In the meantime, pay workers a living wage now. https://t.co/5Ap9KxSIHc

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) January 29, 2023

Well, they have done it, so obviously they can. They just haven’t done it everywhere. Not yet.

As for paying everyone a living wage. What is a living wage? Well, it’s a somewhat nebulous concept which says workers should earn enough to cover the costs of food, housing, taxes, all the basics for themselves and their dependents without spending more than about 30% of their income on rent. MIT created a living wage calculator which is update regularly and varies within each county in a given state based on the cost of living. Here’s the MIT chart for Orange County, CA.

There’s more to it, but as you can see a living wage for a single adult with 3 kids could be as high as $81 an hour (partly to account for the cost of child care). That’s an annual salary of $168,480 which is a lot of money to pay someone who flips burgers at McDonalds.

So a McDonalds in, say, Anaheim, CA staffed by 3 cooks, 3 cashiers and two cleaners could be spending well over a million dollars a year on just 8 employees. And most McDonalds are open at least 16 hours so with two shifts you’d need to double that amount. I think it goes without saying this “living wage” McDonalds would need to increase the prices of the their Happy Meals pretty dramatically in order to stay in business.

This is always the problem with socialism: Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

McDonald’s says they aren’t looking to reduce the size of their work staff. They claim they’re just looking to serve a different customer base that would like to get the food quickly without dealing with people. But economic necessity could change that and I think we all know that flippy the hamburger flipping robot is already a thing so even the kitchen jobs are safe in the long term.

I think McDonald’s is testing these partially automated restaurants on a small scale because right now it doesn’t make sense economically to automate everything, not so long as wages are $13-16 an hour. However, at some point in the future, when President Nina Turner signs the living wage law and wages suddenly double or triple, it will. So I think in some sense they are testing this now because Nina Turner (and other democratic socialists) are out there looking to make this kind of automation very necessary.

It would be interesting to see a debate on this topic between Nina Turner and someone who understands basic economics. But for the most part it seems she’s content to shout slogans on Twitter without having to explain how it would actually work once a Quarter Pounder, medium fries and a coke cost $26.50.