$1:
But if the prophesy in this silly story comes to be, those robots would be entitled to legislation like "equal pay for equal work"
Robots don't have gender so I'm not sure how it would be applicable.
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And since they'd be more productive, presumably, than people, they'd earn much higher wages. Then human labour would be the cost-saving alternative, undercutting robot-labour just like Mexican beanpickers in California.
I don't think so....with a human, the employer is paying the entire wage. With a robot, they would simply be paying the tax and mandatory deductions on that wage. So for example a company used to pay a worker $100k and from that, the worker then paid $40k to the government for tax, CPP and EI: When he's replaced by a robot, the employer pays the $40k only, so has a savings of $60k, plus presumably benefits from productivity increases.
The article sounds like they haven't figured out the formula yet, but the gist seems to be that the robots would have some kind of 'deemed wage' for tax purposes, equal to what a human would have earned on that job, not a higher wage. And it sounds like applying normal workplace rules is exactly to ensure that happens. For example if a company has one robot that works 24/7 on its loading dock with no breaks, how many workers does that robot represent and at what rate of pay? Employment laws don't permit an employee to work 24/7 with no breaks so it would not be fair to say that one robot is simply one loading dock employee. In this case, the employment standards help form the framework for making that determination.