16 Ester Reiter

FAST FOOD: IS OUR FUTURE FRIED?

Ester Reiter

How does freedom and empowerment become defined as the choice of topping with which one orders a hamburger? How are the fixed tastes and focused desires, which limit decisions to which name brand of product to buy, replacing the critical thinking involved in exploring notions of the public good? McDonald=s Corporation is the leader in this area.

Global Expansion

In 1995, thirty years after took over the profitable hamburger stand in California, McDonald0s Corporation reported $30 billion in system- wide sales in 89 countries around the world. ($29,914,000,000 to be exact.) Fourteen billion dollars in sales were outside the United States. Employees numbered more than one million in 18,000 restaurants. In their words,

McDonald0s vision is to dominate the global foodservices industry. Global dominance means setting the performance standards for customer satisfaction while increasing market share and profitability through our Convenience, Value and Execution Strategies.1

These figures are hard to grasp, so perhaps some comparisons will help. Three quarters (eighteen of twenty four) of the countries in Latin America each

1 McDonald0s, Annual Report (1995).

had a Gross National Product (GNP) in 1987 that was less than the gross sales of McDonald0s.2 When one looks at the development of the industry, the creation and expansion of the market, and the use of a division of labour in the home for both production and consumption purposes, one begins to realize that the fast food industry is not just about food. There is a political, social, and cultural message, and a powerful one quite suited to the nineties, that is being sold along with the hamburgers. The fast food industry has become a symbol of the advantages of a 00free00 market. People want a taste of American culture, an American way of life, a market-driven free enterprise economy, and so American fast food restaurants enjoy an extraordinary popularity across the globe in places as far flung as Russia or China. I was in Nanjing, China, during the summer of 1995. The two Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants (owned by Pepsico Corporation) were always jammed, and the Chinese watched expectantly as the first McDonald0s was being built. Indeed, the students I treated to lunch with the offer of any place in town chose the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Why? All they would say is that they liked it and admired the technology.

2Ruth Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures, 1991 (Washington: World Priorities, 1991).

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The advertising budget of McDonald0s alone counted in the billions (1.4 in 1993), inviting potential customers to 00get up and get away,00 a catchy slogan that has an influence. Indeed, Ronald McDonald is a more familiar figure than is Santa Claus.3 The 1990s are a time when structural adjustment policies reign globally, self-imposed in the first world and demanded by the international banking system in the third world. Structural adjustment policies require internal economies to restructure in order to get loans from world financial institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The adjustments require an increase in exports and a reduction of imports, or the production of goods and services for the international market. This goes along with cuts in public expenditures, reduction in public sector employment, and deregulation or reduced government intervention in the economy. Thus, for example, the use of land for growing beans or corn for local use is unproductive, while establishing cattle ranches to provide beef for North American fast food companies is a good investment. In 1994, over 48 million pounds of beef were purchased in Canada alone. Where is this beef produced? Who is going hungry while we die of cholesterol-induced heart attacks? Is there a relation-ship between the global expansion of a transnational chain like McDonald0s and structural adjustment policies? The individual or the individual firm is the primary unit of analysis. Rich or poor, whether or not we can afford to purchase the good life, the ideology of free choice and consumer sovereignty is a potent international force. The culture-ideology of consumerism in a global system creates tastes and aspirations that are supposed to be met through individual effort.

3 Andrew E Serwer, 00McDonald0s Conquers the World,00 Fortune 130, no. 8 (17 October 1994): 103-116.

Fast Food: Is Our Future Fried? 19

All countries are encouraged to embrace the new religion, that of the 00free00 or unregulated marketplace. The gospel is one of com-petitiveness and privatization. The public domain is a waste of money and resources, while the private sphere must be supported (if necessary by public monies) so that it will grow. The profitability of large transnational fast food companies, such as Pepsico, McDonald0s and Grand Met PFC, is admired, and the hopes are that the wealth of these large transnationals will trickle down into the countries in which they locate. Indeed, the words 00Big Mac 00 and 00Quarter Pounder00 are part of the vocabularies in more than 40 different languages.4 The commoditization of increasingly wide arenas of social life in North America has made it more economic for women to enter wage labour even in menial, low-paid jobs, than to produce goods and services at home. Thus, the period when the fast food industry grew in the 1960s and 1970s also marked the vast increase in women entering paid labour, as well as a substantial increase in teenagers who looked for part-time employment while they were full-time students. Indeed, McDonald0s is the largest employer of young people in Canada. The first labour force used for what is now called 00numerical flexibility00 were young people. In Ontario, in 1993, at any one point in time, 42 percent of teenagers 15 to 19 years of age held part-time jobs. A Financial Post article in 1993 estimated that, on average, a teenager spends 50 to 60 hours each week on schoolwork and employment combined. In any school year, approximately two thirds of high school students in Canada work at some point. Working a moderate number of hours is not particularly detrimental for school performance. However, beyond 14 to 16 hours of work a week, grades begin to fall and the dropout rate increases.5 Exploring the Fast Food Industry

My information about the fast food industry comes from participant observation. I tried to get access to McDonald0s. I did get as far as an interview with the president, George Cohon, who was concerned that I might

4 McDonald0s Restaurants of Canada Limited, McFacts about McDonald0s (McDonald0s Restaurants of Canada Ltd, 1995). 5"Kids At Work C Close-up On Trials of Young Workers," Th e Financial Post (June 19-21,1993): s18-s19.

20 Ester Reiter attempt to use the Asecrets@ I might discover to either launch a rival fast food chain or foment discontent which could lead to unionization C I0m not sure which. They are so far ahead of other restaurants in Canada, that they feel no need to cooperate with anyone else in the industry, even restaurant programmes such as one I attended at George Brown college, where a number of restaurants formed an advisory body for a program training students as fast food supervisors. I had more luck with Burger King. 6 When I started this research, fifteen or so years ago, Burger King was just expanding in Canada. As Burger King was then owned by the Pillsbury Corporation (since swallowed up by Grand Met PFC), investment funds were not a problem. This expansion led to a rapid restructuring, doubling their revenue and number of outlets in Canada, and making them the fifth largest food services company in Canada by the end of the eighties. One might have expected this American takeover by a megacorporation to elicit objec tions from the Canadian Restaurant Industry. On the contrary, they applauded the company and gave them an award as a Hospitality Leader. The head of the food services program at George Brown felt the industry had exerted a downward pull on the quality of all restaurants. Few could afford, for example, to hire a pastry chef to bake fresh goods. It was not possible to compete with the economies of pre-prepared, mass- produced food. Burger King would give me the information I needed, since the organization of work there is not only influenced by the same philosophy, but was designed by the same man, Donald Smith, lured away from Director of Operations at McDonald0s to overhaul Burger King as its president in the late 1970s. I0ve discovered that insight into the work culture from actually working in a place is substantially greater than what could be learned from passive observation or just reading what others have to say.

6Ester Reiter, Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996)

Fast Food: Is Our Future Fried? 21

Over the last fifteen years, I have worked with school boards and unions interested in unionizing fast food places to tell them what I know about the industry. My research was used in an award-winning play called 00Flipping In00 written by Ann Chislett about the fast food industry. That play, put on by the Young People0s Theatre, was performed in various high schools in . I heard McDonald0s was so annoyed by the critical look at the industry, that they threatened to encourage corporate donors to withdraw funding from Young People0s Theatre if the play was mounted as part of the regular offerings for the season. So much for artistic freedom and the community benefactor image they cultivate!7 Nevertheless, the play continued to be produced around the country. The fast food industry led the way in the development of a workplace design and a technology for a service industry which made maximum use of an unskilled workforce that could perform with limited training. This was celebrated as a brilliant invention in the early 1970s. The methods of the factory assembly line were adapted by McDonald0s to the service industry. Thus, Theodore Levitt, a business analyst writing in the Harvard Business Review, admired the operation of a fast food outlet as,

a machine that produces, with the help of totally unskilled machine tenders, a highly polished product. Through painstaking attention to total design and facilities planning, everything is built integrally into the machine itself, into the technology of the system. The only choice available to the attendant is to operate it exactly as the designers intended.8

Many people credit the Japanese for the introduction of work management methods in their primary sector, known as Total Quality Management, Team Concept, and Continuous Quality Improvement. These management practices, however, tended to include guarantees of job security and a job ladder. However, by the 1980s, the large fast food industries were innovators in promoting a version of 00team concept00 to their employees that was not coupled with any guarantees of employment, nor was much above

7 Board member, Young People0s Theatre (January 1996). 8 Theodore Levitt, 00Production-Line Approach to Service,00 Harvard Business Review 50, no. 5 (September/October 1972): 41-52.

22 Ester Reiter the legal minimum in remuneration. The 00interchangeable00 worker was cross- trained so that any crew member could do any job. In RAP sessions (Real Approach to Problems), selected crew members were invited to express their grievances, thus providing a way for managers to monitor whether there were any 00bad apples00 (i.e., discontented workers) in the crew. An emphasis on 00teamwork00 between workers and managers to serve 00them00 (the customers) was part of this approach. Supplementary activities using sports imagery occurred in the outlet in contests for the fastest worker. When I was at Burger King, there were Burger King Olympics, Burger King dances, picnics, a bowling team, and a baseball team that played other outlets. At Burger King headquarters in Miami, known as Burger King University, training for managers in 00people skills00 emphasized that low morale is their (the managers 0) fault. Decent wages and working conditions are not the first concern of their workers. 00Appreciation of work done00 and 00feeling in the know of things going on00 head the list.9 The idea of adapting the task breakdown and systematizing operations from a manufacturing to a service setting was an innovative breakthrough for the industry, and in this, McDonald0s took the lead. However, they did not stop there. In what Arlie Hochschild called the 00managed heart,0010 the fast food companies attempted to harness human emotions for a dual purpose. On the one hand, it was a good way to expand the market; and on the other hand, it proved a very effective technique to monitor workers0 acquiescence to the very restrictive work practices imposed. Applying 00people skills00 to the adult workforce was not so difficult. As one (ex) manager said:

9Burger King, Basics Restaurant Operation Course handout (Burger King, 1981). 10Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1983.

Fast Food: Is Our Future Fried? 23

Let0s face it, what other kind of jobs are available? Where else can they go? To a variety store? They have responsibilities to their kids, want to see them off to school, and be there for them when they get home from work at night and want to be looked after. The job at Burger King gives them a bit of extra money. They live nearby and even if the job isn0t too pleasant, well, it0ll do. [The young people can present more of a challenge.] Let0s think of, say a Roman ship that0s being rowed by a galley of slaves on its way to war. You want them to work hard, your business needs them to work hard. How do you get them to smile? It0s hard. After all, the work is rush, rush, rush, clean, clean, clean. Having those kids lined up begging to work. How do they do it?11

Anyone who has worked in fast food has some idea of how the system operates. Virtually no cooking is done on the premises. Rather, each outlet is an assembly plant. Even the lettuce comes preshredded, and the eggs prescrambled in a carton. Each motion is timed to the second, and a labour schedule prepared in advance for each hour (half hour during the rushes) so that workers rushing around at full speed should be able to serve the customer within the allotted time. Everything has been taken into consideration and timed, from the assembly of the food to getting it to the customer, including details such as the number of pickles (four, not three and two halves) on a burger, the amount and placement of the mustard, the number of fries that the scoop will hold (too many is cheating the store, too few, cheating the customer). The friendly greeting, the suggestive selling, are all part of the centrally organized system. Workers are told that their responsibility is not to themselves or to their families. If they find they have a conflict between their grandmother0s birthday or a final exam, and a scheduled shift at Burger King, it0s Burger King0s priorities that should dominate. Why? Because the most important thing is to serve the customer. Counter hostesses (cashiers) are to treat customers as guests and make them 00happy00C 00Your job is a sort of social occasion. You meet people - you want these people to like you, to like visiting your restaurant.00 Innovations in using new technological advances, work organization, and training have been designed and implemented exclusively for management0s benefit. Thus the computerized cash registers monitor sales, and are used to

11Vince Callaghan, former Burger King manager, conversation with author (30 October 1981).

24 Ester Reiter plan scheduling so that there will be as few workers as possible on the floor. A fair hour0s wage in Burger King terms means the physiological maximum. Computerized cooking equipment for the fries and the hamburgers mean that the criterion for good work is speed rather than skill. Because unionization in this industry has been so strongly resisted, a worker0s point of view has not been articulated in any systematic fashion. Despite the formidable odds, there have been a few organizing drives in the past year. Why would I support such efforts? One will never get rich slinging hamburgers, even with a slightly improved union wage. Sarah Inglis, who led the almost successful organizing drive of a McDonald0s in Orangeville in 1994, explained that having a union can offer workers things like dignity and self- respect, something to which she felt young workers were also entitled.

Citizen Into Customer: Cultural and Ideological Implications

As privatization, deregulation, and the rule of the 00bottom line00 deplete the resources available to the public sector in Canada, we see private fast food companies moving in to fill the gap. Presenting themselves (and perhaps sincerely believing it) as charitable, community-minded citizens, fast food companies find lucrative markets in the schools, hospitals, and other publicly funded resources such as zoos and sports arenas. For example, marketing gimmicks, such as the Pizza Hut and McDonald0s literacy programs, reward first graders with fast food certificates, helping to promote their product and a benign image simultaneously. While the marketing image may be benign, the effects of the growth of the fast food industry have not been healthy from the point of view of ecological concerns, or of feeding the people in countries which are sources of meat for the hamburgers North Americans consume. What gets lost in this brave new AMcWorld@ is the respect for what Ursula Franklin calls the 00indivisible benefits00 that form the basis of civil society.12 We lose our sense of ourselves as citizens, with justice, fairness, and equity as operating principles. Instead, we become customers, whether choosing which brand of hamburger to eat, or running hospitals, schools, and social service agencies. Some customers (the under-five -year-olds in day care and Junior Kindergarten, for example) are not very profitable, so we drop them.

12Ursula Franklin, The Real World Technology (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1992), 117.

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As I was picketing in front of a University of Toronto building for the October Days of Action in Toronto in 1996, I had an argument with a young man who insisted that, although he opposed the policies of Premier Mike Harris, it was his democratic right to cross the picket line. This is successful McDonald0s marketing in action. We are called on to see ourselves as private, individual, and solitary, in a society where there is no 00we,00 only a 00me. 00 The choices are narrowed, within a range that empowers individuals in their decisions regarding which brand of hamburger to consume. Collective action to defend public interests such as environmental protection, social safety nets, health, education, and a public sector then become infringements on an individual0s right to choose. We develop public policy based on a fast food model of organizing services. In the United States, Burger King has opened Burger King Academies, fully accredited quasi-private high schools in fourteen cities in the USA. There are plans to do the same in London, England. In this new entrepreneurial model, a voucher system is used, where parents are given money and choices as to how they will use it, and schools don0t teach so much as sell. They also shape a way of looking at the world, and, as education critic Jonathan Kozol put it, develop 00predictability instead of critical capacities.0013 Children are described as Afuture assets@ or Aproductive units.@ The child becomes Athe product.@ This is a language becoming quite familiar as our education system in Ontario is gutted, funding for junior kindergarten removed, grade thirteen gone, and teachers facing larger class sizes with less time for preparation. The same holds true of health care. Can you distinguish which of the following statements is about running a health care service and which is about hamburgers?

(1) As an industry leader, we provide cost effective services of premier quality in an environment which values our people and partnerships while focusing on our customers within a profitable and innovative organization positioned for the future.

(2) . . . we work together to take advantage of enhanced skills, attitudes, and behaviours of all our people and to share knowledge across geographic and organizational borders . . . As the industry leader, we0re

13 Jonathan Kozol, 00The Sharks Move In,00 New Internationalist (October 1993): 8-10.

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embracing change from a position of strength, challenging ourselves to reach even higher levels of excellence in understanding and meeting the needs and expectations of our customers.14

The first is MDS laboratory services, a for-profit health-care company enthusiastically supported by the NDP government in a public-private venture which essentially meant public funding for their health care investments. The second is from a McDonald0s annual report.

14 Vision 096. Press release from Medical Diagnostic Systems announcing the 00Clinical Laboratory Management Association (CLMA) 1995 Quality Management Award00 (n.p., 1995); McDonald0s, Annual Report (March 3, 1997).

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In a very popular book, called Re-engineering the Corporation, Hammer and Champy talk about the shift of power from producers to consumers. According to them, it is the customer that now calls the shots and we are told 00individual customers C whether consumers or industrial firms C demand that they be treated individually.0015 The discourse is one of democracy and responsiveness, but what does the rhetoric really mean? Noam Chomsky, the United States critic, describes democracy as really meaning:

a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly.

Chomsky observes that the War aims of the Allies in World War II were formulated as the Four Freedoms: the Freedom of Speech, of Worship, from Want, and from Fear. In his view the one that really counts is the fifth, the guarantee of the 00freedom to rob and to exploit.0016

Is the Future Fried?

I think Marx described it best of all:

The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization

15Michael Hammer and James Champy, Re-engineering the Corporation (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 18. 16Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky On Power and Ideology (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987), 6-7.

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into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. All that is solid melts into air, all is that is holy is profane, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relation with his kind.17

In Beijing, at the Fifth International United Nations Conference on Women in 1995, I learned what that meant. As one listened to women from 128 countries over the earth and looked at the results of market policies, it was clear to us all that these policies did not work. Inequality, destruction of the environment, poverty, immiseration, and war in which women suffer unduly, have been the result. According to a poverty line defined by the World Bank (the equivalent of $370 a year), in the eight -year period from 1985 to 1993, the number of poor people increased by 20 percent, to 1.2 billion. While poverty has increased, so has wealth. From 1960 to 1991, the share of the world0s income for the richest fifth of the world rose from 70 to 85 percent, while the share of income for the poorest fifth dropped from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent. These figures become even more dramatic when gendered. The UNDP 0s Human Development Report found that over 70 percent of the people now living in absolute poverty are women.18 A Toronto Star article, published in 1996, announced, 00Metro0s Sad Title: Tops In Poor Kids.00 The article read,

One in three children in Metro lives on welfare C twice the 1989 ratio C and the depth of their poverty has increased dramatically since the province cut social assistance rates by 21.6 percent this year . . . Now 75

17Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, (Chicago: H. Regnery Company, 1954), 24. 18Fact Sheet on Poverty distributed by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Wo men for participants in the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, 1995.

Fast Food: Is Our Future Fried? 29

percent of children live in families that have to divert at least some of their food money for rent.19

You thought this chapter was to be about hamburgers, and now I0ve drifted quite far away? Actually, no. Sure, we eat the stuff. A lot. But what we need to understand is that fast food is not about food. As the Nation0s Restaurant News remarked, the idea is to:

19 Elaine Carey, 00Metro0s Sad Title: Tops in Poor Kids,00 Toronto Star (19 November 1996): A1.

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promote consumer allegiance to what, without the hype, could be seen as relatively dull, undifferentiated products. As blind tastings have proven, it0s easier to ellt a Whopper, , or Wendy0s Single apart in 20 television commercials than when you0re eating them.

The labour process in fast food is not about the quality of the food produced, nor is it about how best to serve customers. Indeed, in a book called Participation and Democratic Theory, Carole Patemen refers to the difference between the psychological feel-good effects of what she calls 00pseudo participation00 and genuine full participation which is of a different order. Democratization requires full participation at the higher level where important decisions get made. Rhetoric about empowerment, about workers and managers sharing a common goal in serving the customer, is not a replacement for the real thing: an authority structure that is not top-down, where workers share in all the rewards of doing business well in gains (profits), knowledge and power.21 Is the fast-food management model our future? Perhaps it is. But we need to understand that there is nothing inevitable about a future based on the bottom line. And as a measure for future planning, this top-down approach to feeding the world has not worked very well. The proliferation of the has occurred in a world where over one billion people, most of them women, live in poverty; neonatal deaths due to maternal malnutrition number in the millions; child labour proliferates, inequalities between rich and poor increase; more people than ever are poor; forests disappear, drought and water contamination threaten safe water supplies as communal lands and forests disappear for export agriculture.

20 Nation0s Restaurant News: The Newspaper of the Food Services Industry, Volume 18 (New York: Lebhar Friedman, August 1984): 3. 21Carole Patemen, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge, 1970), 77.

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Fast food and what it represents is the problem, not the solution, despite what George Cohon, president of McDonald0s Canada, may sincerely believe. The challenges to this way of thinking around the world have often come from indigenous peoples who, as Chomsky puts it, have 00an unfortunate tendency to succumb to strange and unacceptable ideas about using their resources for their own purposes.0022 In her address to the plenary session of the non-governmental organization conference in China in August 1995, a first nations woman, Winona LaDuke, asked, 00What gives corporations a right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, our nations, and us as women?0023 When one reads the business magazines, impressed with how McDonald0s is conquering the world, and the 00world of opportunity overseas,00 one begins to think about the implications of this in a global context. Adbusters has a campaign called 00Buy nothing day,00 although American stations such as CBS and NBC won0t accept their paid ads. It is not just McDonald0s that is the problem. Back in the beginning of the second wave of the women0s movement, the privatized patriarchal nuclear family where the 00breadwinner00 called the shots was analysed as a limiting, oppressive place, and for many women a dangerous place as well. The housewife=s economic dependency gave her few choices. She served her family, and no one noticed. Women put forward the idea that the work that takes place in the domestic sphere is not only real work, but is socially useful and important as well. Living in a civilized society means providing all members, waged and unwaged, with access to services that meet their basic needs. Indeed, it could be argued that one of the great

22Chomsky, Noam Chomsky On Power and Ideology, 9. 23Winona Laduke, Indigenous Women=s Network, Seventh Generation Fund, United States. Keynote address to Opening Plenary, NGO Forum on Women, Beijing, China, 1995. Reprinted in Eva Friedlander, ed. Look at the World Through Women=s Eyes: Plenary Speeches from the NGO Forum on Women, Beijing 1995 (New York: Women, Ink, 1996).

32 Ester Reiter achievements of this century is the creation of a public sector, flawed though it is. These values, this commitment to a common good, are undermined by the consumer model designed to sell hamburgers, that of 00subordinating communities and their goods to individuals and their interests.0024 Winona Laduke0s parting words posed a challenge that needs to be carefully considered, as we attempt to 00give ourselves a break today.00

Frankly, it is not that the women of the dominant society in so-called First World countries should have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continue to be based on a consumption model which is not only unsustainable but also causes violation of the human rights of women and nations elsewhere in the world. It is essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth.25

24Benjamin R Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballentine, 1996), 220. 25Winona Laduke, Look At The World Through Women=s Eyes.