How do fast food restaurants benefit from having ‘de-skilled’ workers and a high turnover of staff?
A reliance on cheap labour has been crucial to the fast food industry’s success. The chains have worked hard to ‘de-skill’ the jobs in their kitchens by imposing strict rules on how everything must be done, selling highly processed food that enters the restaurant already frozen or freeze-dried and easy to reheat, and relying on complex kitchen machinery to do as much of the work as possible. Instead of employing skilled short-order cooks, the chains try to employ unskilled workers who will do exactly as they’re told. The chains are willing to put up with turnover rates of 300 to 400 percent in order to keep their labour costs low. It doesn’t really matter to them who comes or goes, since this system treats all workers as though they’re interchangeable. Was it difficult to get people involved in fast food, meatpacking, and farming to talk to you for the book? The workers, farmers, and ranchers I met were eager to talk. They often feel cut out of the story, as though nobody in the media
