US fast-food industry thriving on poverty-stricken workers
by Finian Cunningham - PressTV
The plight of poverty-stricken fast-food workers in the US epitomizes the general breakdown of American society. Millions of workers in that industry are so exploited it is estimated that more than half of them can only make ends meet by relying on some form of government handout.There are even reports of fast-food employees who finish their shifts only to return to homeless shelters because they can't afford to buy or rent a basic apartment for their families.
Spare a thought for poor Maria Fernandez. The 32-year-old woman was working for the firm Dunkin' Donuts, doing several back-to-back shifts at various outlets in the greater New York area. Poor Maria was so tired from overwork she fell asleep in her car between shifts in a car park. She died from asphyxiation caused by her car's exhaust fumes. She is just one of millions of downtrodden, overworked employees in America's fast-food industry.
Yet when these victims of industrial-scale exploitation take their plight to the streets in protest, as they did this week, hundreds are arrested by truncheon-wielding police officers. What kind of society is that?
This is the degenerate state of today's American economy and society. For the past two decades US companies, in general, have been shifting American manufacturing jobs overseas to dirt-cheap labor locations. Apple, for example, is supposed to be one of the great American technology success stories. But all of Apple's computer and smart phone products are now made in China, exploiting workers there for a fraction of what the company would pay American workers. Meanwhile, what's become the norm for many Americans back home are low-paid service jobs, such as in the fast-food business.
There are estimated to be around 2.25 million Americans working in fast-food restaurants and eateries across the US. Most of them are working part-time, although they would prefer a full-time job that pays a decent wage. But part-time workers are easier to exploit because they hold insecure terms of employment and are not given any company benefits. And that's just the way the companies want it.
This week, the workers mounted their biggest campaign yet to protest poverty wages and meager conditions of employment, including the prohibition on joining trade unions. Protests were organized in some 150 cities across the US, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles. Employees are simply calling for a minimum hourly wage of $15 - enough to live on - and the right to join a labor union to protect their interests going forward. The companies typically ban union membership.
However, instead of their reasonable demands being met, they were met this week with heavy-handed police tactics that saw the arrest of over 450 protesters in several cities. Is this a modern society, or an open-air cheap-labor gulag?
The fast-food industry in the US is worth about $200 billion a year to some of the most profitable companies in the world. At the risk of giving them free advertisement, the household names of shame include McDonald's, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway and Domino's. The industry is dominated by just 10 companies, which rake in a total $7.5 billion in annual profits.
But the millions of workers that make those astronomical figures for the industry are paid pittance wages. One study at the University of California-Berkeley puts almost half of all front-line employees in the fast-food industry in America as subsisting on some form of government aid to supplement their low wages. Other studies have found that 20 per cent of families reliant on an employee in the fast-food business are living below the official poverty line.
At the obscene other extreme the executives of the fast-food companies earn multi-million-dollar salaries, bonuses and other corporate perks. Donald Thompson, the CEO of McDonald's, is awarded some $13.7 million a year. That's 900-fold more than one of his employees scraping by on a salary of $15,000.
The upshot of this American-style capitalist exploitation is that the rest of society subsidizes the fast-food companies because poorly paid workers are forced to claim government benefits in order to survive on their miserly wages.
Government revenue is down historically because American companies have shifted operations overseas, and those companies that remain in the US to exploit low-paid labor are being subsidized to the hilt by the ordinary taxpayer. And yet, we are told, this is supposed to be an economic paradigm to aspire to.
The National Employment Law Project in the US estimates that fast-food workers cost the American taxpayer around $3.8 billion a year from claims on the federal government for low-income support, Medicaid and food stamps. If the fast-food companies were to pay out $3.8 billion from their vast profits in the form of a decent wage in the first place then the American taxpayer would not have to foot the bill.
But don't expect the American duopoly of Democrats and Republicans to do anything about this corporate racket. They both serve big business and the rich getting richer at the expense of ordinary workers.
So, there you are: American capitalism and free enterprise is anything but - at least in the fast-food sector. It is propped up by the hard-pressed taxpayer, while corporate executives cream off millions of dollars for a business model that is nothing short of modern slavery.
A bitter irony is this: the fast-food business is doing such a roaring trade in America because many US workers and unemployed are so impoverished that all that they can afford to eat is a lousy burger. A US Federal Reserve study this week confirms that the wealth gap in America has hit record proportions. So the vast majority of Americans are finding the only way they can subsist is to take their families down to some cheap fast-food restaurant instead of putting decent, fresh food on the table at home.
Meanwhile, those poor families looking out the restaurant window might just see military-clad police officers arresting fast-food workers on the streets for protesting their poverty wages. Or they might even see other officers shooting dead a poor black unemployed youth just because he didn't have the right look in his eyes when they roughed him up on the sidewalk.
Or they might look up at a TV screen and, while chomping on a fake-nutrition burger that makes them obese, they may notice that their government is planning to spend millions of their taxpayer dollars on more air strikes, along with other NATO states, on killing militants in Iraq and Syria whom they set up in the first place.
Indeed, there's something dead rotten about American capitalism.
FC/SS
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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