Labor

McDonalds replacing minimum-wage workers with "Big Mac ATMs"; Coffee stores replacing low-paid barristas with robots, and now Bank of America opening branches with no workers at all.

According to Reuters, the latest trend when it comes to retail banking is to do what every other industry is doing, and eliminate paid labor entirely. In that vein, Bank of America, has opened three completely automated branches over the past month, "where customers can use ATMs and have video conferences with employees at other branches."

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

What is going to happen to society when robots are able to do just about everything better, faster and cheaper than human workers can? 

While too backward looking to be actionable (it reflects the labor situation with a 2 month delay) especially in a time when everyone is focused on the future of Trump's fiscal policies (whose details have still to be revealed), today's JOLTs report showed few changes for "Janet Yellen's favorite labor market indicator": the number of job openings was little changed at 5.501 million, down from downward revised 5.505 million, missing expectations for a second consecutive month: consensus was looking for 5.568 million jobs.

Businesses in China have reported seeing a 250% increase in productivity after replacing over 90% of the workforce with robots.  Following a factory in Dongguan replacing nearly all of its human workforce with robots, politicians in China are now looking seriously at the prospect of replacing human workers with robots across the country. Zmescience.com reports: While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots.

Just last week, Americans were reassured (twice) that everything is awesome in the US labor market as ADP and BLS data showed jobs-jobs-jobs everywhere. However, along with wage stagnation (and a rising unemployment rate), there is a bigger problem, as Deutsche Bank warns, aside from soft earnings, hiring at America’s biggest companies is slowing down for the first time since 2010.