Premarital_Sex

Gould 1 Emily Gould English 12 Professor Katherine Humel 4 October 2002 Fast Food Comes at a High Price for Workers McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Wendy’s, and other popular chains have brought countless innovations to the restaurant industry, delivering food fast and at low cost year after year. Convenience and value have come at a price, however, and many believe that benefits to the public are outweighed by the costs that this giant industry imposes on its workers. In his best-selling book Fast-Food Nation, Eric Schlosser shows just how much such popular chains revolutionized America’s eating habits. In 1970, Americans spent $6 billion on fast food. By 2000, that figure had soared to $110 billion. Schlosser says Americans “spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined” (3). Every day about a quarter of the U.S. adult population eats fast food in some form. Few, however, give much thought to the workers who prepare and deliver their meals. Hiring teenagers to serve us food in a fast-food setting has become “so natural, so normal, and so inevitable that people often think little about it,” says Stuart Tannock, a lecturer in social and cultural studies at the University of California at Berkeley (qtd. in Ayoub A20). Nevertheless, while fast-food workers have become an essential component in the service industry, a fast-food job is usually viewed as undesirable, Gould 2 dead-end work. One-third of all workers under the age of 35 have gotten their jobs working for restaurants (Yum! Brands), and about one-eighth of all workers in the United States have, at some point, worked for McDonald’s (Schlosser 4). Yvonne Zipp of the Christian Science Monitor observes that such jobs have become “a teen rite of passage as universal as driver’s ed” (1). They are ideal for teens because they require no special skills, and many believe that such jobs provide the educational benefit of teaching responsibility and good time and money management. These benefits may be more than offset by costs; however, Zipp cites a study by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine in Washington that teens who work more than 20 hours a week are “less likely to get enough sleep and exercise, less likely to go on to higher education, and more likely to use alcohol or drugs.” These findings are disturbing, since four-fifths of American teens work at least part-time during the school year, and of these, half work more than 20 hours weekly (Zipp 1). Child labor laws offer some protection, governing the number of hours teens can work and the kinds of work they can do. Those who are 14 or 15 years of age may work up to three hours on a school day and up to eight hours on other days, for a maximum of 18 hours during a school week and 40 hours during a non-school week. They may work only between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., except in the summer, when the hours extend to 9 p.m. Once they reach 16, however, teens may work an unlimited number of hours (“General”). Gould 3 These boundaries were set by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and many believe they are no longer suitable to current realities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most teens left school at 16, and restrictive laws for children up to 15 years of age were designed to introduce them to the workforce before becoming full-time workers at 16. Today, however, 90% of teens graduate from high school at 18, and most work primarily for extra spending money or luxuries such as new cars. Relatively few now work to help support their families (Zipp 1). Since 2000, the Congress has been debating the Young American Workers’ Bill of Rights, a bill that would update the 1938 labor law. If it is enacted as law, 14- and 15-year-olds could work no more than 15 hours weekly, and teens 16 and 17 would be limited to a 20-hour work week (Kiger). While this bill would only affect work hours, some critics of teen employment, such as Janine Bempechat, assistant professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, want to keep teens away from fast-food counters altogether, claiming that they can get a similar sense of responsibility and self-esteem from jobs such as peer tutoring or volunteer work. Others, however, noting that some teens use their paychecks to save for college, worry that limiting hours could keep them from earning enough to pay for tuition (Zipp 1). Teens are also restricted in the kinds of work they can do. Workers at 14 or 15 are not allowed to cook and are limited to jobs such as cashier, bagger, or member of the cleanup crew. More options are available at 16-and 17-year-olds, who can cook but cannot use hazardous machinery such as automatic slicers, grinders, choppers, or machines that form hamburger patties (“Prohibited”). Even though such regulations are Gould 4 intended to ensure safety in the workplace, many employers are either not obeying the laws or not doing enough to protect young workers. A teen gets injured on the job every 40 seconds, and one dies from a work-related injury every five days. Responding to these alarming statistics, the U.S. Department of Labor has tried to crack down on violation of child labor laws with heavy fines (Kiger). Funding for these efforts has increased, with money going toward inspection of workplaces, investigations, and occasional sweeps of industries suspected of serious violations. The Department can impose fines of up to $10,000 on employers who willfully break labor laws and can sentence individuals to six-month jail terms for each employee working in violation of the law. One of the largest fines was incurred by a fast-food company in Ohio, when a 15-year-old cut her finger while using a meat slicer, a piece of equipment that should have been off-limits to her according to federal law. The company was ordered to pay $333,450 after it was found to have 32 other unauthorized employees using similar equipment, including one under the age of 14 (Pass and Spector). In recent years, reported cases of employer misconduct have declined, but the injury rate among teens at work has not seen a similar drop. Although fines for violators are steep, critics worry that the Labor Department is not doing enough to reduce violations. Only a thousand inspectors are responsible for the safety of all 100 million workers in the nation. As a result, most employers are not fined until someone is injured. Under the proposed Young American Workers’ Bill of Rights, an employer who willfully ignores child labor laws could be sentenced to as long as five years in prison for each teen who is seriously injured on the job and up to ten if a teen dies as a result of the Gould 5 employer’s neglect. Regardless, however, of whether stricter child labor legislation is passed, companies and young workers alike have a strong economic incentive to break whatever laws are on the books. U.S. businesses save an estimated $155 million each year by employing teens, and the economic gains that result from hiring them to do jobs meant for older, more experienced workers often outweigh the consequences of getting caught (Kiger). Furthermore, teens are unlikely to refuse an illegal assignment and risk losing the only job they are qualified to hold. Because most fast-food jobs require little skill, they are among the worst paying in the United States. The fast-food industry pays minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other sector of employment. While a minimum-wage job may be a good source of spending money for a teenager living at home, it is nearly impossible for an adult to live such wages, much less support a family. Between 1968 and 1990, the boom years for fast-food restaurants, the purchasing power of the minimum wage dropped 40 percent, and even now, despite increases mandated by federal law, it still purchases about 27 percent less than it did in 1968. At the same time, the earnings of restaurant executives have risen dramatically. Nevertheless, the National Restaurant Association opposes any further increase in the minimum wage, and some large fast-food chains, such as Wendy’s and Jack in the Box, have backed legislation that would allow states to exempt certain employers from federal minimum-wage regulations (Schlosser 73). Critics of a higher minimum wage fear the effects of increased labor costs on restaurant industry. Scott Vincent, director of government affairs for the National Gould 6 Council of Chain Restaurants, says, “A lot of chains are franchised, which means they’re small businesses with thin profit margins that can’t handle more labor costs” (qtd. in Van Houten). Higher wages, he maintains, would result in reduced hiring, layoffs, or even closings. The only way to compensate would be price increases, which would lessen the appeal of fast food to customers with limited means and therefore reduce business. A spokesperson for the Coalition on Human Needs expresses a contrary view, asserting that the effects of previous increases in the minimum wage suggest that no serious consequences to the restaurant business would result, while low-income neighborhoods would derive the greatest benefits from a minimum-wage increase (Van Houten). Author Eric Schlosser calculates that an increase of one dollar in wages would cause the price of a hamburger to increase only two cents (73). Furthermore, Jill Cashen, a representative of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, argues that better wages and working conditions for workers would actually benefit the consumer: The service that customers get when going to shop is one of the main reasons why they’ll come back and be repeat customers . . . . When workers are happier – when they have better wages and feel like they have a voice at work -- their service is going to be better, and customers are going to come back, and that’s what helps build a good company. Without a minimum-wage increase, however, the pay that fast-food workers receive is unlikely to rise because they have so little bargaining power. The industry recruits part-time, unskilled workers, especially young people, because they are more willing to accept lower pay. Today, fast-food restaurants also hire disabled persons, Gould 7 elderly persons, and recent immigrants, for similar reasons (Schlossers 68, 70). When such employees grow dissatisfied, they are replaced quickly and easily, with little disruption of the restaurant’s operations. Fast-food restaurants see an annual turnover rate in employees of over 75% (White). To accommodate easy replacements of workers, companies are steadily reaching a goal of “zero training” for employees by developing more efficient methods and adopting the most advanced kitchen technology. The fast-food kitchen is like an assembly line. Food arrives at the restaurant frozen, and preparation, which involves little actual cooking, is regimented by a manual, which includes such details as how hamburger patties are to be arranged on the grill and the thickness of the fries (Schlosser 68-72). One college student who worked at Wendy’s said, “You don’t even think when doing work, and you never make any decisions. You’re always told what to do. When you make hamburgers there are even diagrams about where the ketchup goes” (Williams). All these factors have contributed to the “de-skilled” nature of fast-food jobs, which corporations believe to be in their best interest because it increases output and reduces the cost of training and wages. Others, however, claim that the high turnover in fast-food costs employers more than they save through low wages. Fast-food restaurants lose at least $500 for each employee who has to be replaced. Managers are forced to spend time in recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, and additional staff is often needed to help process applications. Current employees are also burdened with extra responsibilities when they pick up the tasks of replaced workers (White). Gould 8 Other controversies involving wages have plagued the fast-food industry. In 1998, a Washington state jury found Taco Bell guilty of cheating as many as 13,000 workers out of overtime pay (Broydo 20), which, according to federal law, must be paid whenever an employee works more than 40 hours in a week and must be at least one and a half times the normal hourly wage (“General”). In the Taco Bell case, the jury found that managers had forced workers to wait until the restaurant got busy to punch in, had them work after punching out, and failed to record hours correctly. One worker claimed that she regularly worked 70 to 80 hours a week but was paid for only 40. While these are among the worst violations, there is evidence that many other companies deprive workers of earned overtime pay. The Employment Policy Foundation estimates that employees lose $19 billion in unpaid overtime wages every year (Broydo 20). Fast-food restaurants adopt several other tactics as well to lower costs. Workers are employed “at will,” meaning that they are employed only as needed, so if a restaurant is not busy, a manager can send them home early. Managers also avoid the cost of benefits for full-time employees by hiring large crews and keeping all workers employed for less than 30 hours per week. Fast-food chains often reward managers who keep labor costs down, leading to such abuses as compensating workers with food instead of money and requiring them to clean the restaurant on their own time. When such abuses do occur, corporations try to distance themselves from responsibility. For example, the McDonald’s corporation has no formal wage policies, so it accepts no blame for the abuses of its franchisees (Schlosser 74-75). Gould 9 In various industries, dissatisfied workers have turned to labor unions to gain a voice in the workplace and to secure better wages and working conditions. At fast-food restaurants, however, union representation is rare. Organizers attribute their failed attempts to unionize McDonald’s restaurants during the 1960s and 70s to the higher turnover of workers and the corporation’s opposition to unions. John Cook, U. S. labor-relations chief for McDonald’s during the 1970s, said, “Unions are inimical to what we stand for and how we operate” (qtd. in Royle 40). While the company no longer publicizes its anti-union stances, its efforts to forestall unions have continued. In 1998, two McDonald’s employees in Ohio claimed that they were fired for trying to organize a union (Hamstra). In 1973, during a union drive at a McDonald’s in San Francisco, a group of employees claimed that they had been threatened with dismissal if they did not agree to take polygraph tests and answer questions about their involvement in union activities. The company was found in violation of state law and was ordered to stop; nevertheless, the attempt to unionize was unsuccessful (Schlosser 76). Ads for fast-food companies always show smiling, well-scrubbed, contented workers, and the corporations boast of their employee-friendly policies. Restaurants recruit workers with slogans such as “Everybody’s Somebody at Wendy’s” (Wendy’s) and “A Subway restaurant is a really neat place to work” (Subway). On its website, McDonald’s proclaims, “We’re not just a hamburger company serving people; we’re a people company serving hamburgers,” and it claims that its goal is “to be the best employer in each community around the world” (McDonald’s). While many thousands Gould 10 of teenagers who annually accept work serving fast food find the experience rewarding, many others regard the job as anything but friendly. As author Eric Schlosser concludes, “The real price [of fast-food] never appears on the menu” (9). Number of words: 2,547 Gould 13 Works Cited Ayoub, Nina C. “Nota Bebe.” Rev. of Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast-Food and Grocery Workplace, by Stuart Tannock. Chronicle of Higher Education 25 May 2001: A20. Broydo, Leora. “Worked Over.” Utne Reader Jan./Feb. 1999: 20-21. Cashen, Jill. Personal Interview. 10 Sept. 2002. “General Information on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).” U.S.Dept of Labor Employment Standards Administration Wage and Hour Division. 29 Sept. 2002 . Hamstra, Mark. “Unions Seek Momentum from Canadian McD’s Certification.” Nations Restaurant News 7 Sept. 1998: 3. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCOhost. 15 Sept. 2002 . Kiger, Patrick. “Risky Business.” Good Housekeeping Apr.2002: 114. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCOhost. 15 Sept.2002 . McDonald’s USA. “Why McDonald’s Has a People Promise and a People Vision.” 22 Sept. 2002. . Pass, Caryn G., and Jeffrey A. Spector. “Protecting Teens.” HR Magazine Feb. 2000:139. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCOhost. 15 Sept. 2002 . “Prohibited Occupations for Non-Agricultural Employees.” U.S. Dept. of Labor. Elaws –Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor. 29 Sept. 2002 . Gould 14 Royle, Tony. “Underneath the Arches.” People Management 28 Sept. 2000: 40. Scholosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton, 2001. Subway Restaurants. “Subway Job Opportunities.” 22 Sept. 2002 . Van Houten, Ben. “Moving on Up'” Restaurant Business 1 July 2001: 15. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCOhost. 15 Sept. 2002 . Wendy’s International. “Welcome to Wendy’s Career Center.” 22 Sept.2002. . White, Gerarld L. “Employee Turnover: The Hidden Drain on Profits.” HR Focus Jan. 1995: 15. InfoTrac OneFile. 21 Sept.2002 . Williams, Tamicah. Personal Interview. 24 Sept. 2002. Yum! Brands. “Great Jobs.” 22 Sept. 2002. . Zipp, Yvonne. “Virtues of Work vs. Finishing Homework.” Christian Science Monitor 15 Dec. 1998: 1. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCOhost. 15 Sept. 2002 . FORMAL OUTLINE Fast Food Comes at a High Price for Workers I. Introduction A. Thesis: Benefits outweighed by cost to workers B. Background information about fast-food use C. Benefits and costs of teen employment II. Workplace issues A. Hours worked 1. Current government regulations 2. Proposals for new regulations B. Safety issues 1. Restrictions on permissible jobs for young workers a. Teens endangered by lax enforcement b. Proposals for better enforcement 2. Economic incentives for employers to violate laws C. Wage paid 1. Minimum wage a. Decline in purchasing power b. Proposals for increase (1) Opposition from restaurants (2) Support from unions 2. Lack of bargaining power by workers a. Unskilled work – duties highly mechanical b. High turnover D. Instances of unfair practice 1. Overtime not paid 2. Other abuses E. Unsuccessful efforts to unionize III. Conclusion A. Benign public image created by restaurants B. Reality: high price paid by fast-food workers F