Richard D. Wolff

The fate of the McDonalds workers to be displaced by automated cashiers is like that fate most health insurance workers can expect if/when states or the federal government institute single payer: Being thrown away — UNLESS provisions are made for them in the programs and in the accounting claims of the programs.
The savings, whether by McDonalds or by instituting single payer, are made out of the wages of discharged employees.
Reforms which claim to be socially progressive, and really are such, weaken their claims by not having something to say to and say about the workers put at risk by the reforms.
Some of them may be reemployed in the new health care governmental systems, but those will require many fewer workers than now to the make-work required by the chaotic system we have now.
These issues of what are effect “cost-dumping” and people dumping are present in energy systems reform, criminal justice reform, demilitaarization — every reform.
I have heard of the Just Transition movement, which insists on specific planning. And I recall the Melman-Wimpisinger proposal of 1980 that every military contract have a plan for what will happen to the people when the contract ends.

What do you think of this point? Do you agree that progressive reforms are far less progressive if they don’t have something to say to and about the people? Aren’t they behaving like McDonalds?