Theres been a lot of talk about the health implications of eating fast food lately, from Eric Schlossers Fast Food Nation (which has been made into a feature film by Richard Linklater) to Supersize Me where Morgan Spurlock goes on a steady diet of McDonalds for a month and gets very, very sick, to Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food, Schlossers book about fast food for kids.
Another thing to take fast food corps to task on is the way they treat their workers. Not only the behind-the-counter workers — usually youth or other marginalized workers who are treated like a temporary workforce undeserving of rights, benefits or respect but those farm workers who pick the vegetables that end up on Bic Macs and cheeseburgers.
According to the Voice at Work Network, farm workers who pick tomatoes for McDonalds and Chipotle (a US healthy burrito chain owned by McDonalds) earn only about 45 cents for every 32-pund container of tomatoes they pick. Workers cant live on these wages, and the rate of pay hasnt increased for almost 30 years.
The site reports that Taco Bell signed an agreement to raise its pay, but McDonalds and Chipotle refuse to sign on. With the click of a button you can send the companies an email here, an easy way to try make life a little easier for tomato pickers.
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Related: Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association. This battle has been fought before, and it will likely be fought again in the future. Chavez was one of the successful ones.
Interestingly, one of the books I'm reading at the moment theorizes that while Chavez made a major impact in organizing farm workers and improving their lot—especially migrant workers from Mexico and beyond—the longer-term effect was to push corporate-owned farms towards greater mechanization of farming techniques. In the process those corporations created the industrial farm system we have today (and is arguably detrimental to our health and livelihood).
Posted by Wesley
May 26, 2006, 10:59 PM
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