chapter 3: fast food/ work and economy

This chapter of JBC is about the globalization of fast food restaurants, the effects they have on our society and the fight for a 15 dollar minimum wage. fast food has become a popular option in deciding what to eat for dinner. usually its easier, cheaper and less time consuming for someone to decide to run down to the nearest McDonald’s to get some burgers and fries than it is too make dinner at home. because its cheap delicious and fast we have seen fast food joints spread there franchises all over the world in the last several decades. These fast food giants like McDonald’s employs thousands of people worldwide and i myself are one of them. I work as a cashier at my local McDonald’s. in the chapter they explain how the number of unions has decreased in the past couple of decades and that there is no unionization for fast food workers because we are seen as expendable and easily replaceable by our corporation. when i first applied at my job, they were having opened interviews and they had many spots available and this was because a few weeks before that, a few employees at that McDonald’s walked out in protest and demanded better wages. Of course McDonald’s wasn’t going to do that so they fired them instead. In my experiences working there you arnt really treated fairly. they make us work on thanksgiving and Christmas and don’t even give you holiday pay. corporate acts like you dont have family’s to go home and see. if you try and call in sick or get out of work on those days they fire you. an argument that companies use to justify low wages and shorter hours is that most fast food workers are teenagers fresh out of high school but as the chapter states the median age for a McDonald’s worker is 28 years old. id say at more than half of my coworkers are over the age of 30 so its not all young faces and many of my coworkers have family’s themselves. these fast food jobs are definitely not enough to escape poverty and this is why there is a huge movement to try and change that. in the state of California, they passed a law that will raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour over the next few years so we can see that the fight for 15 movement has made progress.