Working At Mcdonald's Summary

Thesis: Part time jobs are beneficial to high school students if utilized correctly. Though part-time jobs can be beneficial for high school students- teaching them skills and providing work experience- not everyone thinks so. In his essay “Working at McDonald’s”, Amitai Etzioni explains to his readers why part time jobs in fast food restaurants and places equivalent to them are suboptimal for high school students. Firstly, he claims that there is no room for advancement on the career ladder at these part-time jobs, but this is not true. Stating that “fast-food chains and other such places of work (record shops, bowling alleys) keep costs down by having teens supervise teens” (262), Etzioni completely contradicts his overall claim that there

Secondly, Etzioni claims that a student who holds a fast food job sees a decline in school performance. This is true in some cases, but to conclude that a part-time job is the sole reason for a decline in school performance is fallacious. There can be numerous reasons a student sees a decline in school performance, such as a student may not be interested in school anymore or they have extracurricular activities as well and cannot balance them all. To immediately assume a part-time job at a non-entrepreneurial job is the reason for the decline is a hasty generalization. Lastly, Etzioni belittles fast food jobs by saying the student does not learn essential skills needed later in life. Contrasting fast food jobs and entrepreneurial jobs, Etzioni uplifts the entrepreneurial job’s ability to create “self-reliant, work-ethic-driven, productive youngsters” (261) while belittling fast food jobs considering they are “[f]ar from providing opportunities for… self-discipline, self-supervision, and self-scheduling” (261). These pieces of evidence are false; giving up on an entrepreneurial job after a brief time provides no self-reliance, work ethic, or productivity and sticking to a fast food job