English is now the second language: Cited in Rita Rousseau, “Employing the New America,” Restaurants and Institutions, March 15, 1997.
71 a 1999 conference on foodservice equipment: The conference was COEX ’99, the Twenty-sixth Annual Chain Operators Exchange. The panel was Breakout Session C: “Too Many Cooks… Cutting Labor Cost in the Kitchen.” The participants were Larry Behm, vice president, restaurant systems engineering, Taco Bell Corporation; Dave Brewer, vice president, engineering KFC-Tricon; Jane Gannaway, vice president, restaurant planning, design and procurement, Hardee’s; Jerry Sus, home office director, equipment systems engineering, McDonald’s Corporation; and John Reckert, director of strategic operations and research & development, Burger King Corporation. The session was recorded by Convention Tapes International, Miami, Florida.
72 an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor: Cited in L. M. Sixel, “Giving Tax Break a Second Chance; Credit to Hire Disadvantaged Returns,” Houston Chronicle, October 16, 1996. See also Ben Wildavsky, “Taking Credit,” National Journal, March 29, 1997.
as much as $385 million in subsidies: Cited in Sixel, “Giving Tax Break a Second Chance.”
“They’ve got to crawl”: Quoted ibid.
about 1 million migrant farm workers: See Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields.”
73 about 300 to 400 percent: The lower figure is cited in Jennifer Waters, “R&I Executive of the Year: Robert Nugent,” Restaurants and Institutions, July 1, 1998. The higher figure, remarkably, comes from Denise Fugo, treasurer of the National Restaurant Association, quoted in Lornet Turnbull, “Restaurants Feeding Off Fit Economy,” February 23, 1999.
a higher proportion of its workers: Interview with Alan B. Krueger.
73 the real value of the U.S. minimum wage: See Krueger, Myth and Measurement, p. 6.
In the late 1990s, the real value: Cited in Aaron Bernstein, “A Perfect Time to Raise the Minimum Wage,” Business Week, May 17, 1999.
a federal guest worker program: See Jerd Smith, “Undocumented Workers Enliven State’s Economy, But at What Costs to Other Residents and Agencies?” Rocky Mountain News, April 18, 1999.
a 1997 survey in Nation’s Restaurant News: Alan Liddle, “Demand Fuels Salary, Bonus Surge; Wages Still Lag,” Nation’s Restaurant News, August 18, 1997.
Increasing the federal minimum wage by a dollar: According to economists Chinkook Lee and Brian O’Roark, every fifty cent increase in the minimum wage leads to a 1 percent price increase at restaurants. A McDonald’s hamburger costs 99 cents; a 2 percent increase in price is about 2 cents. See Lee and O’Roark, “Impact of Minimum Wage Increases.”
Roughly 90 percent of the nation’s fast food workers: Of the roughly fifty to sixty employees at a a typical McDonald’s, only four or five are full-time, salaried managers. See Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk, p. 50–54.
74 an average of thirty hours a week: Cited in Robert W. Van Giezen, “Occupational Wages in the Fast-Food Restaurant Industry,” Monthly Labor Review, August 1994.
earn about $23,000 a year: Cited in Liddle, “Demand Fuels Salary, Bonus Surge.”
training in “transactional analysis”: See Boas and Chain, Big Mac, pp. 91–93; Ben Wildavsky, “McJobs: Inside America’s Largest Youth Training Program,” Policy Review, Summer 1989.
75 forced to clean restaurants… compensated with food: See Gillian Flynn, “Pizza As Pay? Compensation Gets Too Creative,” Workforce, August 1998.
As many as 16,000 current and former employees… a high school dropout named Regina Jones: See E. Scott Reckard, “Jury: Taco Bell Short-changed Its Employees,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1997; Steve Miletich, “Taco Bell Is Found Guilty of Worker Abuses,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 9, 1997; Stephanie Armour, “One Woman’s Story: More and More Workers Are Being Asked to Work Overtime Without Pay,” USA Today, April 22, 1998.
the trait most valued: Reiter, Making Fast Food, p. 129.
76 A “flying squad” of experienced managers: See Love, Behind the Arches, pp. 394–95; Boas and Chain, Big Mac, pp. 94–112.
amid a bitter organizing drive in San Francisco: For the events in San Francisco, see Boas and Chain, Big Mac, pp. 104–12
77 employed fifteen attorneys: Cited in Bill Tieleman, “Did Somebody Say McUnion? Not If They Want to Keep Their McJob,” National Post, March 29, 1999.
“one of the most anti-union companies on the planet”: Quoted in Mike King, “McDonald’s Workers Win the Union War But Lose Jobs,” Ottawa Citizen, March 3, 1998.
a money-loser: See Mike King, “McDonald’s to Go,” Montreal Gazette, February 15, 1998.
77 about 300 to 1: Roughly three McDonald’s closed per year in Canada during the early 1990s, while about eighty new ones annually opened. Cited in King, “McDonald’s to Go.”
“Did somebody say McUnion?”: Tieleman, “McUnion?”
80 Numerous studies have found:” See Protecting Youth at Work, pp. 225–26. Teenage boys who work longer hours: Ibid., p. 132.
“IT’S TIME FOR BRINGING IN THE GREEN!”: The ad appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette on March 20, 1999. My account of the working conditions at FutureCall is based on conversations with former employees. For more on FutureCall, see Jeremy Simon, “Telemarketing,” Colorado Springs Gazette, February 15, 1999.
82 George, a former Taco Bell employee: Whenever a person is identified only by a first name in this book, the name is a pseudonym. All of the people described really exist; none is a composite.
83 The injury rate of teenage workers: Cited in Protecting Youth at Work, p. 4. about 200,000 are injured on the job: Ibid., p. 68.
Roughly four or five fast food workers are now murdered… more restaurant workers were murdered on the job: In 1998, the most recent year for which figures are available, fifty-two police officers and detectives were murdered on the job — and sixty-nine restaurant workers were murdered on the job, mainly during robberies. The vast majority of restaurant robberies occur at fast food restaurants, because they are open late, staffed by teenagers, full of cash, and convenient. The homicide figures are cited in Eric F. Sygnatur and Guy A. Toscano, “Work-Related Homicides: The Facts,” Compensation and Working Conditions, Spring 2000.
more attractive to armed robbers than convenience stores: See Laurie Grossman, “Easy Marks: Fast-Food Industry is Slow to Take Action Against Growing Crime,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 1994; Kerry Lydon, “Prime Crime Targets; Highly Publicized Restaurant Crimes Have Drawn Both Criminal and Customer Attention to Security Lapses,” Restaurants and Institutions, June 15, 1995; Milford Prewitt, Naomi R. Kooker, Alan J. Liddle, and Robin Lee Allen, “Taking Aim at Crime: Barbaric to Bizarre, Crime Robs Operators’ Peace of Mind, Profits,” Nation’s Restaurant News, May 22, 2000.