Backwards Hamburger

"Backwards Hamburger" is a promotional cartoon that was made for the release of the film "Fast Food Nation." It's short and fun, with good quality Flash animation, but it also introduces a number of the issues around fast food labor, ranching, and the meatpacking industry that are covered in Schlosser's book.

Defense of Fast Food Labor Conditions

I stumbled on this short position paper published in something called Opus1: The Journal of Undergraduate Research. In it, the author (whose name is not given) makes an argument in defense of the fast food industry's focus on hiring teens and praises the "extreme division of labor into simple repetitive tasks" (in other words, the Fordist model of food production we've been discussing in class) as a way "to tap inexpensive footloose labor." Since this is precisely the opposite of the position most people in the class took in response to the "Behind the Counter" chapter of Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, I thought it would be useful to post it here.

By the way, Opus1 is a strange publication -- I'm not sure what to make of it. Apparently it publishes papers by college undergraduates, though strangely none of the papers are attributed to individual authors. There is an editorial board that apparently selects the work published in the journal, and the board includes mostly people who work at universities -- but none of their credentials are given, and the site doesn't give any details about the editorial process. The site seems to focus primarily on economics, with a bias toward neoliberal or free market economics.

The Invincible Happy Meal 2

Ryan Vera, who is blogging for Dr. McCormick's "Eat, Read, Write" class this semester, passed on a link to this Morgan Spurlock video in a comment on my earlier post. In the video, Spurlock tests the decomposition time of various McDonald's foods against that of a hamburger and fries purchased from a mom-and-pop restaurant. The results are startling, particularly in the case of the french fries, and may give us some insight into the use of preservatives in the fast food industry. These foods are designed to appeal to our senses of taste and smell, so it's easy to forget that they're also designed to fit the needs of industrial production, to sit in warehouses for long periods of time, and to be transported over long distances before they reach the walk-in freezers of local franchises.

You can catch a glimpse of that production process in this post about a McDonald's factory in Russia. Don't miss the McDonald's Bun Guide and Bun Troubleshooting Tool!

Wendy's Training Video from the 80s

Over at Dr. McCormick's "Eat, Read, Write" blog, she has posted a Wendy's training video that makes truly embarrassing/hilarious use of rap music and dated MTV-style special effects to explain how to flip burgers. Not to be missed!

Sometimes I feel sorry for the 80s.

Scientific Management and the "Deskilling" of the Fast Food Worker

During today's class discussion, several students raised the point that the fast food industry promises teenagers "work experience" but doesn't provide any training, skills, or knowledge that can be used outside of the fast food industry itself. To paraphrase Claude, the industry can give teens a line on their resume, but it doesn't give them the opportunity to develop new skills that they can take forward to the next job -- let alone challenging them to develop as people. Fast food workers don't even learn to cook!

We're going to talk more on Tuesday about the industry's assembly-line model of food production, but in light of today's discussion I dug up the following reference to the work of the labor sociologist Harry Braverman. Braverman's pioneering work in "labor sociology" was one of the first examinations of the effects of assembly-line labor on the workers who are subjected to it. As Martin Slattery explains in Key Ideas in Sociology:

The purpose of new technology, however, argues Braverman, is not only to increase productivity, but to increase management's control of the work force... The traditional craftsman of the early Industrial Revolution was, in a sense, self-employed and independent. He owned his own tools and place of work, bought his own materials and sold the finished product directly to the consumer. He alone possessed the necessary skill and knowledge required for the whole production process, from conception through to execution. He had a certain status and power in relation to the employer... Scientific management, argued Braverman, deskilled the industrial worker and left him helpless, powerless, and skill-less, controlled from above by factory managers and reduced on the shop floor to simply a unit of production. The epitome of scientific management was Henry Ford's giant assembly lines and the mass production of the early Ford motorcar (98).

You can read the rest of Slattery's chapter summarizing Harry Braverman's critique of scientific management and the "deskilling" of the worker in modern industrial labor at Google Books.