Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser [175]
Robert Emerson’s The New Economics of Fast Food has useful material on the labor costs and policies of the major chains, as do John Love’s Behind the Arches and Big Mac, by Max Boas and Steve Chain. Robin Leidner and Ester Reiter are sociologists who worked at chain restaurants in order to write about the nature of such employment. Reiter’s Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1991) focuses on Burger King, while Leidner’s Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) looks at McDonald’s. Quick Service that Sells!: The Art of Profitable Hospitality for Quick-Service Restaurants (Denver: Pencom International, 1997), written by Phil “Zoom” Roberts and Christopher O’Donnell, reveals some motivational tricks of the trade.
Working in the Service Society, edited by Lynn Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni, suggests how the labor policies of the fast food industry are now being adopted throughout the American economy. Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, outlined for me some of his research on the fast food industry and the minimum wage. I also found the book that he wrote with David Card, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), to be useful. A recent study by the USDA Economic Research Service cogently refutes the argument that higher wages will harm the fast food industry. The study, written by Chinkook Lee and Brian O’Roark, is titled “The Impact of Minimum Wage Increases on Food and Kindred Products Prices: An Analysis of Price Pass-Through” (Washington, D.C.: Food and Rural Economics Division, USDA Economic Research Service, Technical Bulletin No. 1877, July 1999). A report by the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Health and Safety Implications of Child Labor — Protecting Youth at Work: Health, Safety, and Development of Working Children and Adolescents in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998) — outlines the social consequences of a teenage workforce. Many of its conclusions were foreshadowed by a National Safe Workplace Institute report, Sacrificing America’s Youth: The Problem of Child Labor and the Response of Government (Chicago: National Safe Workplace Institute, 1992). Two other reports were useful: Janice Windau, Eric Sygnatur, and Guy Toscano, “Profile of Work Injuries Incurred by Young Workers,” Monthly Labor Review, June 1, 1999; and Report on the Youth Labor Force (Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Labor, June 2000). For the section on fast food crime, I interviewed law enforcement officers in Colorado Springs, Los Angeles, and Omaha — as well as Joseph A. Kinney, president of the National Safe Workplace Institute, and Jerald Greenberg, an expert on workplace theft and a professor of ethics and business management at the University of Ohio.
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61 About a third of the city’s inhabitants: Cited in “Colorado Springs Facts,” Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce.
the population