Fast Food Nation: Behind the Counter

¶ … Fast Food Nation" Chapter 3 "Behind the Counter"

Would you like to be exploited with those fries?

In Chapter 3, "Behind the Counter," of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation Schlosser portrays an underage teenage workforce exploited by managers and often forced to work in unsafe conditions. Companies justify this by stating that young workers benefit from the discipline and skills learned on the job. However, time spent behind the fast food counter is time spent away from studying or building a resume for college with valuable extracurricular activities. Students are seduced with a relatively tiny paycheck to give up a better future. Furthermore, it is often the poorer members of the student population, who need a good college education the most to succeed.

Wealthier students can afford to take unpaid internships where they learn real skills. Wealthier workers can afford to take classes to improve their skills and get a promotion. Often, employers will subsidize degrees that directly relate to the employees' work to improve productivity. However, low-wage workers only receive training in limited, job-specific skills. Instead of subsidizing fast food companies, grants should be offered to organizations to students directly teach students transferrable skills, rather than to simply punch keys on computerized cash register. The question should not be: does such work prepare you for the real world, but what kind of real world does it prepare you for -- a real world with a future and a good income or a future in fast food?

The fast food jobs for which companies like McDonald's receive government subsidies are rapidly being eliminated. Almost everyone has walked into a fast food restaurant in which he or she is required to fill his or her own drink, select the burgers, and do more and more of the tasks once relegated to individuals working behind the counter. This means that technology and automation, along with consumers themselves, are performing many of the tasks these workers are being trained to perform -- tasks that will become obsolete. Jobs that pay a decent wage that will form the new backbone of the American economy, such as jobs in medicine to care for a rapidly-aging population, would seem to be more valuable occupations in which to train workers.

The high turnover in the fast food industry belies the claims that it is helping employees. Employees are more likely to remain within organizations that make an investment in their skills and development as people. Workers know that they are disposable. When faced with poor treatment, they act accordingly. The high turnover also suggests that the discipline the company claims to teach to employees hardly has taken hold. Furthermore, the attitudes of employees to their jobs are contemptuous and filled with barely-concealed rage, given their low pay and lack of advancement. Workers routinely act in an unsanitary manner on the job, despite what they are taught, because of sublimated rage they feel for the company and customers. This hardly exemplifies the success of training programs.