Fast Food Service Workers

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Fast Food Service Workers

• 1/8 people living in US have worked at McDonalds!
• 3.7 million employed world wide/year
• What groups have formed majority of workers?

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Meet the Team

• Women/ mothers
• Require extra income
• declining primary and secondary industry
• Pliable workforce
• Part-time and low pay acceptable
• seen as 2nd income earners
• Therefore no benefits required
• Teenagers
• Heavy recruitment initially occurred as baby
  boomers reached their teens
• Low wages are feasible live with family
• Initially limited skills to be attracted
  elsewhere
• Could work part-time schedules, flexible
  schedules
• Other marginalized groups
• The elderly
• The disabled
• Ethnic minorities

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De-skill and Control

• Highly de-skilled
• make the equipment intuitive, make it so that
  the job is easier to do right than wrongthe
  easier it is for him to use, the easier it is for
  us not to have to train himand if there are
  instructions, make them very simple, write them
  at fifth grade level, and write them in Spanish
  and English
• Jerry Sus, McDonalds
• Model of Zero Training but strictly controlled
• smile with a greeting and make a positive first
  impression. Show them you are GLAD TO SEE THEM.
• McDonalds training Bible

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And yet

• Under Targeted Jobs Tax Credit and Work
  Opportunity Tax Credit Industry earns 100
  millions in subsidies/ year for employee training
• Subsidies offered by Government as a tax credit
• over 2,400 per worker
• To hire low-income workers and provide job
  training
• BUT 1992 USD Labor study
• 90 would be hired anyway
• Part time, no training, minimal benefits
• Average worker leaves after 3-4 months
• 300-400 turnover rate

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Wages and Conditions

• Restaurant managers earn 23,000 a year, with
  benefits, bonus and profit sharing
• Highest rate of minimum wage workers of any
  industry
• National Restaurant Workers association opposes
  raising minimum wage

• Strongly anti-union
• Few workers qualify for overtime or benefits
• Carefully managed so everyone works 30 hrs or
  less
• Send workers home if quiet, have large,
  part-time work force
• Rewards for keeping labor hours low can lead
  to abuses
• EG Taco Bell, WA, Oregon, California 1997, 2001
• 1997 average corporate bonus 131,000

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Regulating the Fast Food workplace?

• High fatality rates due to robbery
• 4-5 deaths/ month in US
• 1998 higher death rate than in police force
• Often involves former/ current employees
• Women particularly vulnerable to violence
• OSHA suggest guidelines for protection
• Voluntary include lighting car parks
• National Restaurant Association enlists 100
  members of congress to oppose
• Resistance to government regulation preference
  for self-regulation/ voluntary compliance

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Industrialized agriculture
the value meals, two-for-one deals, and free
refills of soda give a distorted sense of how
much fast food actually costs. The real price
never appears on the menu

• Highly Efficient form of production and service
• Highly profitable
• Huge Employer
• Considerable individual, social, environmental,
  economic impacts
• The way of the future, an unsustainable
  model?...or both?

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• How does the fast food industry reflect and
  reproduce inequalities along lines of race, class
  and gender?

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Key Concepts

• Deskilling
• Vertical Integration
• Consolidation
• Agriculture to Agribusiness
• Mono-cropping
• Occupational Safety Health Administration
  (OSHA)
• Voluntary compliance/ self-regulation