Thread: The burger-oisie

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The burger-oisie
You may figure you know who works in fast food. But think again.

By Mick Dumke. Mick Dumke has written for the Chicago Reporter and the Chicago Reader. He teaches journalism at Columbia College Chicago

March 5, 2006

It is Friday night at the Burger King at 55th Street and Pulaski Road. As a group of teenagers files in, Bob Davis is in the kitchen, scooping hot fries into a small box and, in one sprint-speed motion, delivering it to a customer at the front of the restaurant. Meanwhile, someone is pulling up to the drive-thru speaker outside.

"Welcome to Burger King," Davis says into his headset while scooting over to check on the deep fryer. "Can I take your order?"

Davis, 49, is now the restaurant's general manager, but in his 25 years in fast food he has held just about every lower-rung job there is, starting with making sandwiches and cleaning up as a 16-year-old in need of gas money. He's done a few other things along the way-as a young man, he worked construction for a while, and a few years ago, went after an opportunity to manage a group of gas stations. The hours were easier and the economics of the oil and gas industry fascinated him. But Davis missed the interactions with people and the pace of the work in fast food, so he came back.

"I never thought I'd be in this business as long as I have," he says. "But you know how sometimes people think they were meant to do something? I think this is where I was meant to be."

A few miles away, at State Street and Jackson Boulevard, is the McDonald's where Ed Mosley works. At the beginning of his shift one recent night, Mosley is emptying trash cans and analyzing football with an older man sitting in a booth. "I'm going with the Panthers," Mosley says. "The way they've been beating everyone, I've got to."

As Mosley ties the top of a bulging bag of garbage, two women in another booth start giggling.

"Hey, there," one of them shouts at Mosley.

He shrugs, slings the bag over his shoulder and moves off. He is a big, stocky man, and his movements are deliberate and weighty, as if the ground might thunder and shake when he walks.

The woman persists. "I'm just trying to make you smile," she says.

Mosley shrugs again and does his best not to smile. "Man, I got a job to do," he says, grabbing a broom and dustpan.

Closing in on 50 years old, Mosley makes $6.50 an hour with no benefits. It's not enough to live on, but along with his pay from two other manual-labor jobs, he says he does all right. "Food service is a fast-paced industry, and I like it because you meet people," he says. "I mean, I meet all kinds of people." He does not gesture toward the woman in the booth, but he doesn't have to.

Two men, both quite different. But each has found a home in fast food, the quickest-growing sector of the American economy. By now, it's not news that the service industry has replaced manufacturing as the public symbol of U.S. business. According to Louis Cain, an economic historian at Loyola University Chicago, manufacturing accounts for only 20 percent of today's economy while the service industry makes up about 75 percent.

And fast food-or the quick-service restaurant industry, as it prefers to be known-now employs a hefty 2.5 percent of the civilian labor force (the construction trades account for 5.4 percent, by comparison).

What is more surprising, though, is the diversity among the 3.8 million Americans working in the country's roughly 185,000 fast food restaurants. There is room within the industry's tent for all kinds of people, unlike the manufacturing world of yesteryear, where male dominance and the frequent necessity of union membership often made it exclusionary.

Those in the most visible fast-food jobs-people who prepare the food, take customer orders and maintain the restaurants-include college graduates and individuals with decades of customer-service experience working alongside teenagers, undocumented immigrants, former welfare recipients and unskilled laborers who have spent years moving up through the burger and fish-sandwich ranks. And, contrary to what many believe, thousand of positions, such as those in management and marketing, demand people with years of training and experience specifically in the fast-food world.

DAVIS CLEARLY ISN'T the stereotypical fast-food worker. A middle-class father of four, he has worked at the same Burger King for three years, driving an hour each way from his home in Crown Point, Ind. His father was a pipefitter at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company plant in East Chicago, but even as a boy Davis knew he wanted to do something else. "I really didn't have any interest as far as working in a steel mill," he says.

But when he graduated from Crown Point High School in 1974, he couldn't find work, so his uncle, an officer with Local 41 of the Laborer's Union, helped him get a job as a construction laborer, and for extra cash Davis went back to Burger King as a part-time shift manager. He liked it.

"Doing it part-time gave me the inkling that it was something I wanted to do [as a career]," he says. Five years later, he got married and moved into fast food as a full-time manager.

Along the way, Davis tried doing a few other things. He managed six Little Caesar's carryout stores for a year in the mid-'80s, and then ran gas stations from 1999 to 2002. The few times he considered looking for other kinds of work--as the manager of a full-service restaurant, for example-he didn't get very far. "I guess it's the notoriety," he says. "Once you've been in the fast-food business, you've been labeled as a 'working manager.' It's more hands-on, and there is that stigma that you can't adapt."

But he's compensated well, he says. Burger King managers are paid up to $48,000 a year or more, with excellent benefits. Davis, for example, gets an additional $500-a-month car expense allowance for the Toyota Highlander SUV he drives. But he says he has a simple reason for looking forward to the work: The restaurant's owner lets him run the place day to day. "He entrusts a $1 or $2 million business to me," he says. "As long as I do the job, I'm my own boss."

ON SOME LEVELS, Ed Mosley seems, more than Davis, to fit the common assumptions about fast-food employees. His formal education stopped after high school, a one-time drug habit cost him jobs and promotions over the years and his work experience has largely been limited to a succession of entry-level food service positions, leaving him with few marketable skills. Yet Mosley also shrugs off any suggestion that he's stuck. "It doesn't make a difference where you work," he says. "What is your identity in life? People say, 'You're just working at McDonald's.' But it's not where you start off, it's where you finish."

Mosley was between jobs four years ago when he met a McDonald's executive in church. She recommended him for an opening. For a while, Mosley worked full-time at McDonald's, but chats with customers led him to other opportunities that paid better. One man told him about a food service opening at a school in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Another tipped him off to a loading position with FedEx. Mosley ended up getting both jobs.

He now follows a grueling schedule. Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m, he's at the James Shields Elementary School, 4250 S. Rockwell St. (he recently moved there from the Pilsen school). On Tuesdays through Fridays, he then takes a bus and train downtown to McDonald's for a three-hour, late-afternoon shift. By shortly after 7 p.m. each weeknight, he's on his way to the FedEx sorting center in the southwest suburbs, where he works until as late as 3 a.m. When it's over, Mosley catches a bus to his home, in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood on the South Side.

"I get home, lie down for three hours and go back to the races again," he says. All told, he says, he makes about $2,200 a month.

Mosley once wanted to join the police force, but after graduating from Emil G. Hirsch High School in 1973, he began working a string of manual labor jobs for hospitals, hotels and food companies.

"I messed up when I was a kid," he says. "College was an option offered by my dad, but I didn't want to go. I wish I did. I blew that."

He admits that he's made other major mistakes. After a friend shared some PCP with him, he was fired from a kitchen job at an area hospital, which forced him to go on public aid.

"It was one of the lowest times in my life," he says. Yet Mosley's also the kind of person who frequently recites spiritual aphorisms and truly seems to believe them: "Life is what you make of it"; "You just do the best you can"; "God will open doors."

While most of his contact with customers is pleasant, Mosley said he's grown a thick skin. People say, "You got a little McDonald's job," he notes. "Hey, I got three jobs. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I just work."

At 7 p.m., Mosley disappears into a bathroom to change into his FedEx uniform. He dons a windbreaker and grabs his Chicago Bulls gym bag, which carries the clothes he needs for each of his jobs. Then it's off to catch his bus in the rain.

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Robin Leidner thinks the standardization stressed by fast-food restaurants accounts for the diversity of their work force. People eat at such restaurants because they know what to expect, from the menu to the way employees interact with customers. Paradoxically, this means that no one type of employee is necessary to keep a fast-food store running, says Leidner, who worked in an Evanston McDonald's and attended the company's Hamburger University for her book, "Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life."

"You can have a much wider range of people," she says. "You don't have to hire people who are especially smart and especially nimble. There are relatively low training costs, but higher turnover."

Still, she adds, "Just because it's all structured, I didn't find these jobs easy. There's a lot to remember, and you're always under pressure."

But given the growth of the industry, the flexible hours the jobs offer, the limited skills needed to get started and the shortage of other employment options, fast food has become a viable option for thousands of people who never imagined they would be working in a burger or chicken joint. Many in the business now say it is practically impossible to point to a "typical" fast-food worker.

Leidner says she was surprised to find that a lot of the fast-food employees she met were, like Mosley, older people with long commutes. "It was amazing the amount of effort people put in for a minimum-wage, manual-labor job," she says.

Because fast-food jobs are so orchestrated, some customers treat the people who hold them as if they're stupid or disposable, Leidner says. Even standard lines like, "Do you want fries with that?" give the impression that workers aren't smart enough to communicate on their own.

"Even if most people are perfectly polite, if just a few treat you contemptuously, it can make you enraged. And you can't fight back," she says. "So you see employees rolling their eyes or looking sullen. It's a passive means of asserting your dignity. . . . It can be quite hard to dismiss all the negative messages about how dumbed down they are."

EMMANUEL PEREZ ISN'T SURE where working at McDonald's will lead him. Right now, it seems like his only option. His first child was born in July. Within a week, he had begun his first job: cleaning up at his neighborhood McDonald's on the 4600 block of West Diversey Avenue.

At 16, Perez is barely old enough to work. A year ago, he was turned down everywhere he applied because no one would hire a 15-year-old. At that time, he wasn't too upset. His parents weren't making him get a job, and he enjoyed hanging out with friends and his girlfriend, Bianca. But with the birth of their son Alexander, Perez decided he had to make some money. He'd tried working construction with his 21-year-old brother, Mario, but didn't have enough experience or training. So he turned to fast food.

"It's my first real job with my own paycheck," he says. "My parents used to say I was lazy, but I'm a pretty good worker. I still know a lot of people-my friends-who are all freeloaders. Now they're asking me to help them find jobs."

Perez, known to friends as Manny, has a young, happy face that he tries to conceal with a thin mustache and a McDonald's ball cap pulled low. He smiles a lot, and wears a cloth bracelet that says BIANCA. The couple named their son after Alexander the Great-an inspiration that struck Perez after he saw Oliver Stone's movie. "Alexander was really brave, and I don't want my son to be scared or anything," he explains.

He says that this story really started four years ago, when he was in 7th grade and Bianca in 6th. "She liked me but I didn't like her," he notes with a sly grin. By the next year, he'd changed his mind.

As a freshman at Carl Schurz High School, Perez blew off his classes, failed pretty much everything and had to take the year over. "Since it was my first year there, I was always with my friends, not doing the work," he explains. So Bianca caught up to him in school. Then they found out she was pregnant. Her parents were upset, having just been through a pregnancy with her 18-year-old sister. They told Bianca she would need to pay rent to stay with them.

She and Perez found this cruel, so they moved into his parents' home. But by Christmas, Perez's life had changed even more. The baby was limiting his sleep, and after struggling for months to balance child care, work and classes, he decided he just couldn't continue with school. "I wasn't doing too good," he says. Seeking better pay, he again investigated construction or electrical work, but it's clear he'd have to enter a training program first. Working part time at McDonald's at $6 an hour, Perez earns about $290 every two weeks.

Meanwhile, Bianca has left him, and tending the baby has become a complicated series of arrangments among the two of them and their parents. "I've been trying to get her back, but she says she needs time," he now says. "So I think I'm going to have to let her go."

In the meantime, he is getting as much work as he can at McDonald's. One night in early January, Perez was scrambling to keep up with the workload at the restaurant. His headset on, he had been taking drive-thru orders for four hours nonstop. During a short lull, he emptied the trash. "It can be like this, real quiet, and then all the sudden, it's blowing up," he said.

He'd barely finished when another car pulled up. Perez jerked to attention and trotted to the window, then returned to the front, examining a computer monitor to make sure orders were being filled right. A teenager approached the counter and asked for hot sauce; Perez found it for him, then hurried to the freezer, removed a bag of frozen fries, and emptied them into the deep fryer. Another young man let Perez and the woman behind the register know that he was still waiting for his Big Mac.

"There's good days and bad days," Perez said a few minutes later. "Once in awhile, I get those people who are just rude-they're just in a rush, and I have to kind of deal with it. But my managers are cool. They support me."

Customer demands sometimes get to Marie Plantier during the 10-12-hour shift she works entirely on her feet-manning the register, setting up, cleaning and taking inventories at a J&J Fish take-out restaurant at Chicago and Kedzie avenues on the West Side.

"People ask for free things," she says, "or they ask for their food a certain way. I'll tell the cook, and if the cook forgets, they complain to me. And I say, 'I didn't cook it-I'm right here with you.' Or they'll complain the pieces [of fish] are too small.

"I have lost my patience sometimes with people who are very mean," she adds. "I tell them, 'I'm not here to be insulted.' It's really, really hard sometimes. My boss says, 'The customer is always right.' But this isn't true. They're not always right."

After a recent 60-hour work week, Plantier spent a Sunday relaxing-reading Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," catching a TV documentary on the history of bread and watching her spindly 10-year-old son, Kevin, play the video game "WWE SmackDown." As he lifted his hand in triumph from his sprawled-out spot on the carpet, she started shaking her head.

Plantier is a big woman who seems ready to hug much of the world at any given moment. At this point, though, as much as she was amused by Kevin's gaming success, she was second-guessing her decision to buy "Smackdown" for him. "I don't like this game," she said in an French-tinged accent. "It took me a long time to agree to it. It's violent and fake."

It is still strange to Plantier that she spends her work days in a fast-food restaurant. Her family was originally from Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean, but she grew up with her mother in Paris. Work there was scarce, though, so in 1989 Plantier moved to Los Angeles and found a job in sales for a clothing company. It paid well, and at first she enjoyed the travel it required. But once she had two kids and her relationship with their father ended, she decided she needed to be home more. At the suggestion of friends, she decided to search for a new job in Chicago, where, she was told, the prospects were better.

That's how it looked initially: Plantier was hired at a suburban nut-processing factory. While the $8.50 hourly wage wasn't great, it was above minimum, and the job came with benefits. But after 9/11, the federal government began pressuring businesses to crack down on employees without proper documentation. Plantier, a French citizen, didn't have a Social Security card. She was fired.

She and her family went through a dire period after that. Plantier tried to scrape by on temp work, but it was touch and go. Then their West Side apartment building burned down. While no one was hurt, they lost all their possessions, including much of the poetry Plantier enjoys writing.

For the next few months, she and her children bounced between homeless shelters. Her daughter, Gaby, 15, recalls getting beaten up defending her brother from another boy and fleeing from a woman who pulled a knife on them; Plantier remembers sleeping on mats on the crowded floor.

Plantier started taking classes at Truman College, eventually earning an associate's degree, and took a job at a Subway sandwich shop in the Lakeview neighborhood. For the next year, she worked 60 to 70 hours a week at $6 an hour, with no benefits. She was worn out by the time a friend put her in touch with the owner of the J&J Fish. The job paid $1.50 an hour more, and promised more reasonable hours and a less exhausting environment. Plantier took it.

"I do everything there," she says. Even if she doesn't love every minute of it, she enjoys meeting the people who come in-from doctors to the unemployed. And she's treated with respect by the customers and her boss. "They do treat me like a lady."

This year she has been fretting about her kids. Kevin has a learning disability and is attending a school that offers specialized instruction. More disconcerting to Plantier is the fact that Gaby sails through school with good grades but never studies. To Plantier's horror, she never even wants to read.

"I decided this year I'm going to make her study more," Plantier proclaims.

The conversation turns to the more serious issue of Plantier's immigration status and the chances of her finding work if she needs to return to Paris. She says it is much easier to make a living in the U.S. "Here, if you don't work, you don't want to work," she says.

PEOPLE DESPERATE FOR employment end up in fast food for a reason: The jobs are plentiful, and more are materializing all the time. In 2003, about 51,000 Cook County residents worked in what economists call "limited-service eating places." By 2005, the number had grown to 53,600, and this year it's up to 56,000, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

Pay hasn't kept pace with the job growth, however. In fact, it hasn't even kept pace with inflation. While the number of such jobs has grown nationally by more than 6 percent over the last three years, typical hourly wages in the field are up only half that amount, to $7.30 an hour, and average annual income has increased just 1 percent, to $17,020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cain, the economic historian, says it's a mistake to think of service jobs as taking over those in manufacturing. The fast-food industry is growing simply because more people are demanding its services.

"It is certainly independent of the decline in the Southeast Side's steel mills," he said. "But when people went looking for those [old] jobs, this is what they found."

TOM MLEKO'S FATHER was a metalworker at several North Side factories that made trophies and mixing bowls. But Mleko has spent 20 years in fast food. It's not all he'd hoped for, but early on he had sworn he would never do factory work. After dreaming of becoming a baseball player, his career on the diamond ended with a knee injury in high school, and he graduated not knowing what was next. He found work as a clerk at Walgreens, faring well enough that the company offered to help him go to pharmacy school. Instead, he told them he wasn't interested. "At the time, I was young and stupid," Mleko says.

Over the years, he moved from job to job, working as a retail clerk and bank teller before managing a KFC restaurant. A few years later, he moved over to Popeyes. "It's better than no job at all," he says

Mleko, 58, is a tall man with big hands who wears thick, plastic-rimmed glasses. For 15 years, he managed the Popeyes at Ashland Avenue and Irving Park Road. He knew the regulars, the complainers and the off-centered. Everyone was fine with him as long as they didn't bother anyone else.

One morning last fall, two customers stepped up to the counter. A stout woman ordered a three-piece meal to go, then sat down to eat at a side table. Next in line was a man wearing a grubby work shirt and suspenders. He took his chicken sandwich to a spot near the front window where he proceeded to talk to himself out loud. It was the very beginning of the lunchtime rush and Mleko was ready.

"I'm basically easygoing," he said. "That's what they say is my downfall around here: 'You're too easy.' I'll go so far, then I'll get mad and have to put my foot down and I get my way. I had a girl miss a couple of days. She said she had to work another job. I said to her, 'Well, pick a job, or tell us when you can work.' "

The "to go" woman suddenly marched up and complained that she didn't get her drink. Off to the side and out of earshot, Mleko said he can't even pretend to be sympathetic. "Yeah, like it's our fault they forgot their drink," he said. "People will call: 'I had something that was much too spicy.' They just want free food. Other people say, 'I don't have the money-can you help me out?' I say, 'I wish I could, but if I did I'd be feeding the whole city.' "

Mleko met his wife, Mari Jo, in 1980, when both worked at Gold-blatt's department store. They have two children, who both live at home-Kristin, 18, a freshman at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Tom, 21, who is enrolled at DeVry University. Mleko is proud of having two kids in college, but he frets about the costs.

Health problems have added to his worries. Last year he suffered what was diagnosed as a minor stroke; a couple of years before that, he underwent a triple bypass. He has deteriorating sight in his left eye. One leg continues to swell up and his doctors aren't sure why-but it limits the time Mleko can be on his feet during his 50-hour work week.

"My family, my kids-I've got to take care of them," he says. "I'm waiting for [the kids] to get older so I can quit and get a halfway decent job, because I'm not getting any younger."

In his spare time at home, Mleko enjoys downloading old showtunes and film scores or playing the computer version of Strat-O-Matic baseball, a simulated, odds-based game.

But he's had less spare time lately. A few weeks ago, a health department inspector visited the store on Mleko's day off and left a ticket for inadequate paperwork. Along with slumping sales-which Mleko blames on another Popeyes just opened by the same owners about a mile and a half away-the incident upset his boss, who transferred him to a restaurant in northwest suburban Melrose Park. He now has to drive an hour from his home on Chicago's Near West Side, and he's assigned to nights. His staff is young and inexperienced.

It upset him, but Mleko feels he doesn't have any recourse. "What are you going to do?" he says. "I got two kids in college."

WHEN NATASHA HUDGINS went to work at McDonald's as a Morgan Park High School student in the late 1980s, she wanted to make a little money and get some job experience. After moving on to Northern Illinois University, she took on a few shifts at a McDonald's near the DeKalb campus to cover some of her school expenses. She assumed that earning a bachelor's degree in biology signaled the end of her time in fast food. She was shooting for a position in medical research.

But she married in 1993, and before she launched that research career, she and her husband Robert had their first child, Jocelyn. While Robert had a reliable job, as a City of Chicago sanitation worker, the couple decided they needed to bring in more money. Natasha started looking for something that offered hours she could fit in around her husband's job and the baby's schedule.

She ended up at Wendy's. After six months, she was recruited into the company's management program. "So I took it," she says. "Now I'm not serving burgers and fries-I'm running a business. This is a multimillion dollar company, and I'm part of it."

When she directs traffic behind the counter of the restaurant, she is efficient, deliberate and patient, even when it's busy-as it often is in the Wendy's at Addison Street and Western Avenue, just across from Lane Tech High School.

Unlike entry-level employees, who start at minimum wage, managers typically begin with annual salaries around $28,000 a year, with vacation, health benefits and, of course, opportunities to move up. Hudgins logs at least 50 hours a week, and while her schedule varies, it typically involves evening and Sunday shifts. Most of the time she's on her feet, often performing the same tasks her employees do: taking and filling orders, checking on food, cleaning up.

High school students dominate the place from afternoon through early evening, and Hudgins knows the habits of the regulars. "We hit all the lunch periods and at 3 o'clock they're right back in here. We're like, 'You just ate the same sandwich two hours ago!' These kids are hilarious. We hear all the gossip. We ask about their report cards."

Hudgins also has to budget energy and time for her family. On a recent Friday when she was off work, Hudgins was in her home in the Ashburn neighborhood on the South Side, planning the weekend's shopping and meals. She was certain about one thing: That night's dinner menu would not feature burgers. "It's amazing," she says. "The girls can eat burgers every day."

The family room was dominated by a couple of leather couches and telltale evidence of young girls, including a plastic glow necklace lying on the floor. The coffee table held a Bible and a plastic model of a cheeseburger. A little while earlier, Hudgins had walked her kids-Jocelyn, 10, and her sister, Janee, 8-the few blocks to their school. As she described their schoolwork, Hudgins got excited.

Jocelyn, who's in 4th grade, has been working on a research paper on the Great Depression. She is also a singer, and Hudgins has promised her she can audition for a citywide children's choir if her grades stay up. Music runs in the family-Hudgins' sister, Tiffany Lee, is a gospel recording artist, while Hudgins and her husband are leaders of the music ministry at Prince of Peace Apostolic Church, at 68th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Hudgins says she would love to try singing professionally, but it's got to wait until the girls are older. "It's kind of a fantasy," she said. "When you have a family and work, the little time you have you spend with your family."

The phone rang-it was a friend who wanted to discuss investing in mutual funds. Hudgins loved the idea, but wasn't sure where to find the money. "I have to pull $50 here and there," she said. "But I want to see if I can pull it off so when we get old, we've got some money."

She's also thinking about her long-term prospects in the fast-food business. Hudgins says she still reads science journals when she takes the girls to the library, and she and her husband have discussed the possibility of each going back to school when the girls are older. She still thinks about doing medical research.

At the same time, with a few more years at Wendy's, Hudgins could become a general manager of a group of restaurants, or perhaps even an owner. "I have family members who say, 'You have a bachelor's degree-why are you doing this?' " she says, and then repeats what she tells them: "There are places to go up. I'd like to own a restaurant and have something set up for my girls."

For now, Hudgins has plenty of day-to-day issues to deal with at the restaurant, from keeping a multicultural, multilingual staff in synch to ensuring that the occasional visits from drunk customers don't alienate others to finding and retaining good workers.

"Let's try to respect one another," she tells the staff. "Not just with other employees, but also customers. It's a relationship you have to build."

Last year, more people applied to work at the restaurant than she can remember at any time before. Many had been laid off from other jobs, but others were looking for a change or new opportunity. "We ask, 'How long are you looking to be here?' " she says. The answers they give vary, but as she could tell them from her own experience, few of them really know for sure.

So, who wants fries with that? How about supersizing your order? Seriously, if illegal alien cheap foreign workers had not flooded the fast-food industry - along with many other industries that used to pay liveable lower class middle wages often w/benefits, I bet the wages and benefits for US citizen fast-food employees would be much higher now. The big rich corporations are increasing and reaping in their profits while they continually downsize by replacing Americans with cheap foreign slave labor. This makes me want to puke!

http://www.despair.com/potential.html

Okay! Illegal aliens employed in McDonalds or other fast food flunkie positions deserve the link above. I haven't figured out the copy/paste function yet for downloading pictures so anyone wanting to view will have to click the link.

In no way am I trying to insult an American LEGAL citizen who works in the fast food industry. Our high school and college students need these jobs as well as many senior citizens who want to supplement their retirement incomes. In addition, many other citizens deserve these jobs as full-time employment and deserve decent wages, benefits and respect. People employed in service jobs deserve more respect and pay than they receive. They perform valuable service to American's everywhere by waiting on them and serving them in a number of ways. They just need more pay.

Originally Posted by noillegalimmigrationannie

This makes me want to puke!

Thought you might want to use this.

Originally Posted by Brian503a

Originally Posted by noillegalimmigrationannie

This makes me want to puke!

Thought you might want to use this.

Thanks! I needed this! I'd need it even more if I ate more often the crappy food McDonald's and Co cook up! :P