The Oppression Fast Food Workers (Particularly Women)

We eat it all the time. It’s quick, easy, and cheap. Yes, you know what I’m talking about… fast food. The fast food industry has been around for quite some time. However, not much has changed since their origins, particularly their working conditions. According to the film “Fast Food Women” (1992), 90% of the workers in the restaurants featured were women. “Fast Food Women” explores Louisville, Kentucky and several fast food restaurants within it. These ladies have little to no benefits, hardly any sick days or vacation time, and the pay is awful for the amount of time they have spent working there (years). Often the ladies are injured on the job; burns are one of the more common injuries. The women cannot get medical care for the injury because they do not have insurance, they cannot afford to miss the hours at work, and if they inform a manager they could lose their job. Job security is not guaranteed and for every working woman “there are five women waiting out of the door to replace them”. This fact alone gives management tremendous power over its workers. If the employee complains about wages, injuries, hours, treatment, etc. then they can be easily replaced by someone that won’t make those complaints. The upper management staff of one of the restaurants was featured, and a key thing to notice is that they were all men. Not just that, but they appeared to be clueless as to who works for them. They appeared to be under the impression that only teenagers worked for them that didn’t need benefits because they have their parent’s benefits. The women’s labor is invisible because management has supposedly devised a system where the workers don’t even have to think, just do the motions to get the work done. Management thinks the jobs are wonderful and require low skill, so everyone should be happy.

You may ask “Why don’t these women just quit and work somewhere else?” Well they can’t exactly. They are very poorly educated, their husbands are often unemployed, and they obviously cannot afford to go back to school. Several of the women have worked for the same restaurant for over ten years and only make 15 cents above minimum wage. These women are simply parts of a machine so that coupled with lots of people willing to replace them, squashes all individualism. Another factor that contributes to the high number of women in the fast food work force is the region where the film takes place. In Louisville, there are not many occupations for uneducated women. The main occupations are teaching and nursing, which of course require significant education. Food service is pretty much their only option in that rural area.

This concept of fast food women reminds me of the women taken hostage in Wilk’s “Home Cooking in the Global Village”. These women are taken from their native lands and put on a boat with buccaneers that require them to cook and clean for them. Obviously these women do not have much of a choice in the matter, and the same is true for the fast food women. The men probably don’t pay much attention to them until they need something and the same is true for the fast food women and their situation. The buccaneer women know they can be replaced, but in that replacement they may be killed or left in a random place abandoned.

A lot of these themes are echoed in the book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” by Eric Schlosser (2001). However, this book looks more at the issues young workers face, not just women like the film mentioned above (Schlosser 2001). But it also addresses the low pay, how they are “a dime a dozen”, and other similar issues and concerns (Schlosser 2001).

                     http://fastfoodnationhonorsproject.weebly.com/working-conditions.html

             My final thought is that the management teams seem to think they have everything figured to a science when it comes to their employees. However, this is clearly not the case when time and time again it has been proven that if employees are treated fairly and respectfully they will exceed performance because they are more invested and motivated in the success of those around them. So if the management teams would actually follow through these principles they would have a significantly lower turnover rate and have better/happier employees that perform at an exceptional pace/rate.

 

References

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Houghton Mifflin Company; 1 edition (January 17, 2001)