McDonald's

So, I think that reading Fast Food Nation for BLA has really gotten into my head. Every time I pick it up, I find something either disturbingly disgusting or morally repulsive. I'm constantly tapping people around me on the shoulder and saying, "Oh my gosh did you know that at Taco Bell in 1978..." or "I'm never eating at Wendy's again because..." So I've decided to write my persuasive blog post on fast food. And I'm probably ruining the whole entire thing by having this little introduction, because it makes me sound unprofessional. So long, ethos.

The fast food industry is junk. Not just the food, either. The way that business is run, and most of all the way that employees are treated. There needs to be a way for the workers to organize unions and demand benefits that any employee of any business rightfully deserves. However, the corporations that run the restaurants will do anything in their power to prevent unions from forming, in order to save money. Because of this, there needs to be legislation enacted in the interests of employees of fast food restaurants.

Employees of fast food restaurants are discriminated against and seen as simply commodities, easily fired and replaced. The restaurants try to mechanize as much as possible, in order to be able to hire the cheapest, least-skilled workers. These workers are usually teenagers or immigrants, who are then taken advantage of. They aren't allowed to form unions, though some have tried. The corporations will do anything and everything to prevent the organization of workers in the hopes of receiving more than minimum wage or some basic benefits like healthcare or seniority privileges. But every such attempt has failed - in a San Francisco McDonald's in 1973, workers trying to create a union were subjected to lie detector tests, interrogations, and threats of dismissal if they refused to answer questions, and in Montreal in 1997, when workers tried to organize a union, the McDonald's was shut down weeks before the union's certification. To compensate for the horrendous treatment that employees receive, site managers resort to making them feel like they are a valuable part of a team through a technique called "stroking." This allows companies, like Taco Bell, to underpay their workers. For example, in 1997 a Washington Taco Bell was discovered to have coerced its workers into working off the clock in order to avoid overtime pay, forced its workers to wait until the restaurant got busy before officially starting their shifts and to work after their shifts had ended without pay, required them to clean the restaurant on their own time, and compensated its workers with food instead of solid wages. When they were convicted of these crimes, Taco Bell didn't even admit to its wrongdoings! The "fast food mentality" has swept our nation, turning even clothing stores into factories designed to generate the most possible revenue for the lowest price, with no regard to the well-being of consumers or of workers.

Those companies that claim that their actions are perfectly legal and that they wouldn't be able to afford to continue if they gave their workers more benefits are ridiculous. The McDonald's Corporation grosses over 9 trillion dollars in revenue each year (as of December 2008), so obviously allowing for healthcare for employees wouldn't cause too many problems.

Legislation needs to be put into effect that will stop these, and many more, injustices in the fast food industry. Workers deserve, as do employees in any other line of business, to have steady incomes that actually allow them to live life and to have benefits that equal those of other industries.

Wow, I could actually go on for days and days about this issue if I had the time. But I think this is enough information to make my point. I couldn't even think of any rebuttals besides the money one, so that part of my post was pretty weak, I guess. Anyway, all of the information comes from Luke Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch website.