St Louis Post-Dispatch (USA):
Stacy Washington: Minimum wage hike will hurt city of St. Louis
10 March 2017
Researchers Maarten Goos and Alan Manning posit in “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: the Rising Polarization of Work in Great Britain” that there is a general “hollowing out of middle income routine jobs” while “high income cognitive jobs and low income manual jobs” continue to produce increasing job opportunities. While I disagree that entry-level food service and retail work is middle income, their point is well-made. Any human function that can be sequenced and programmed, such as taking orders, flipping burgers or operating fry baskets, can and will be automated to save money.
Related publications
‘Lovely and lousy jobs’, Alan Manning. Article in CentrePiece Volume 18, Issue 2, Autumn 2013 (http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/CentrePiece_18_2.pdf)