Fast Food Nation: Ch 3 and 8

I have read fast food nation before, but reading it from a less "personal" perspective has shed more light on the disturbing content of the book.

Ch 3:
The two things that made my stomach churn the most after re-reading this chapter were how Mc Donald's finds new places to put their franchises and how they are working so hard NOT to train their workers. McDonald’s uses space technology to exploit urban sprawl to its advantage. McDonald’s spends (I assume) a ton of money on where to pave over land to put their new chains, but to my knowledge does very little to protect the natural land that their franchises help destroy. Why does the public not care more about this? Are there studies out there that show where a McDonald’s goes; consequences follow, such as increase in crime rate, decrease in natural wetlands? Also disturbing is how McDonald’s creep up in towns who are changing from liberal towns who would cringe at the idea of a chain, to an average American town covered in strip malls. The other thing that bothered me, among the other bothersome info in this chapter, was how hard these fast food companies work not to train their worker. Since 75% of their workers are young, you would think they would want to train them so they can be “valuable members of the company”. Apparently the only thing of value is efficiency, and training takes away from that, so they try to make their workers as replaceable as possible. This means nothing good for the worker, as jobs are meant to create work experience. Without experienced, inexperienced candidates for new jobs, will never move up very easily, because fast food jobs no longer create transferable skills.

Ch 8:
As I don't eat meat, and hate the idea of fast food (I was raised to dislike fast food) this chapter was barely tolerable for me. The conditions of the slaughterhouses are not surprising to me. Neither is the treatment of their workers. Society has made it so that unions have so little power, and immigrant workers have so little power that slaughterhouses can exist in the conditions that they do today. Slaughterhouses remind me about readings I have done about sweatshops. Especially how workers who are injured are “encouraged” to quit by getting worse pay, worse jobs, and getting yelled at by their line boss. For the nations most dangerous job, the cleaning crew, the industry only employs workers who can’t fight for their rights. The slaughterhouses are well aware of the dangers of working there and do nothing in terms of insurance or actual protection on the job to avoid the perils. It isn’t surprising to me that workers, even after terrible injury go back to their jobs, they have nowhere else to go, and the only tools they have our their bodies. Perhaps if more people choose to read books like this, and open their eyes and brains enough to believe it isn’t just propaganda, than the quality of life for these workers may change.