Union Vote at Minnesota Fast Food Restaurant

This afternoon's New York Times has an article on the ongoing unionization efforts at a Minneapolis, Minnesota franchise of Jimmy John's, a Subway-like fast food chain with 1,000 locations nationwide.

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.

George Lopez on Fast Food + Immigrant Labor

Here's a great George Lopez routine on immigrant labor in the fast food industry. I think Lopez is really funny, but I also find his stand-up work insightful when it comes to thinking about issues of labor and immigration in the U.S.

Thinking about today's class discussion, I wonder if what Lopez is saying contradicts Schlosser's emphasis on teens in the fast food workplace. Is Schlosser out of date on this topic?

McDonald's Training with the Nintendo DS

The Japanese branch of McDonald's is reportedly preparing to extend its collaboration with the Nintendo Company, expanding the use of the Nintendo DS portable game system to employee training.

McDonald's already has a "synergistic" relationship with the Japanese video game company as one of only two providers for its wireless "Nintendo Zone" service (available only in Japan). "DS owners who visit McDonalds shops with their system... have access to such free services as character distribution, digital stamp rallies, coupons for McDonalds food items, comic distribution, and exclusive game demos" (Nintendo Partners With McDonalds for New DS Service). The other provider is the "third sector" Tsukuba Express rail system.

Now, the fast food corporation is developing game software for the Nintendo DS that will be used to train its new employees. "Using the new DS software, McDonalds believes it can cut training time by half over conventional methods, in part due of the familiarity of the DS system" (McDonalds Uses DS To Train Part Time Workers). The US military has been using video games for combat training for decades (in recent news, see here). The corporate sector has made also been using games technology for training. But, to my knowledge, both military and corporate efforts have focused primarily on games developed in-house: this seems to be the first time that an existing game system will be used to train employees in partnership with the corporation that developed the game system. As such, the McDonald's-Nintendo partnership represents a significant new development for the gaming industry. One thing will remain the same, however: as legacy games, the end products of this collaboration will undoubtedly become the horrid "training videos" of the future.

I'm curious to see how far McDonald's will take this effort if it turns out to be successful, for example whether they will retool their own equipment along the lines of the Nintendo DS gaming system or its controller in order to create a more fluid transition for new employees. Again, such efforts have long been under discussion within the military-industrial complex (for example).

Finally, I can't end this post without making some kind of reference to the popular 1984 film "The Last Starfighter," in which a teen boy discovers that his favorite arcade game is actually a training tool that an alien civilization is using recruit pilots for a battle in space. (No kidding.) Imagine how he would have felt if he'd been training for a job at McDonald's all along.

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.