Low-Level Employees At Fast Food Restaurants

Have you ever felt like you were being under paid by your boss? There were many strikes held in North Carolina to raise the payment for low-level employees at fast food restaurants. There have been many problems arising about low-level employees not being paid enough to support themselves, not being valued, and raising payment to workers. Frank (2015) interviewed many people in the strike who were trying to raise the salary of minimum wage who worked at fast food chains and talked about how little the corporations value there employees by replacing them with robots and constantly buying and selling these fast food chains.in an article. I do agree with what Frank had to say about how fast food chain restaurants do not care about their own employees.

Frank (2015) interviewed an experienced fast food employee who had said to work 16 years in the burger franchise, raising two children at the same time. Even after working a decade and a half she was forced to move in with her grown son’s spare room (p.3). Experience is not valued in the fast food industry because it is a job that can be completed by anyone willing to do the work. This type of industry does not allow experienced workers to move up the flag pole to management because of how these types of jobs are for young adults who can just replace the experienced workers. Frank (2015) discovered that, “in North Carolina, many if not most fast-food workers receive food stamps or some other form of government assistance” (p. 4). When corporations pay their employees so little that they need to live on food stamps, it shows how lazy and greedy they really are. The government needs to throw all the workers a life line while the corporations overseeing the employees watch. The government should not let private corporations push them around. When a family uses food stamps to buy food, you are placed on the bottom of the social ladder. This can be very embarrassing for people because they are hardworking and have a paying job, but their paycheck does not reflect that or their social status. The corporations value their employees similar to what they

Frank (2015) explains that, “The food arrives at the restaurant mostly frozen; the machines that do the cooking are foolproof; virtually no skills are required” (p. 3). When the process of producing food is made simple enough, the experienced cook who had the skills to cook food is no longer valued. Now, since making the food is so simple, someone with no cooking experience at all can replace the cook with a worker who will take lower pay than the cook. This is an example of how the corporations are ‘de-skilling’ the fast food industry by replacing skilled cooks with machines and people who accept lower pay. Corporations will constantly buy and sell the label for a company such as Burger King, which was sold over five times to different corporations in the span 17 years, including just last year. When corporations continually sell companies, they are not showing that they care about their employees. Many family run businesses would keep the company name for a long period of time which gives the owners an opportunity to grow a professional relationship with their employees. The corporations would only need to have a small increase in payment to employees to show they value