ENGL101 Word Count: 950 SUMMARY 09/07/05. Summary. After reading through the article McDonald s----we Do It All For You

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1 ENGL101 Word Count: 950 SUMMARY 09/07/05 Summary After reading through the article McDonald s----we Do It All For You written by Barbara Garson and McDonald s Crew Member written by Kysha Lewin, a sixteen-year-old girl, I began to become familiar with the working situation in McDonald s in the U.S. In this paper, I will summarize the three main ideas demonstrated by these two articles. They are the attraction of working at McDonald s, the mechanization of its system and the treatment of employees in McDonald s. People were attracted to work in McDonald s for many different reasons. People do not need to have any work experiences before they apply for a job in McDonald s, so there are about 8 million Americans, which equals 7 percent of the American labor force who have worked at McDonald s and moved on (Garson). Many high school students worked there to earn money for college, to help their parents, or just to have fun. For example, as stated in McDonald s Crew Member, Kysha Lewin s parents are divorced and her mother needs to take care of all the bills for the three kids in her family. She wrote, Sometime I see her all depressed and crying and stuff over bills and I feel bad (Lewin). In order to help her mother, she began to work in McDonald s at the age of 15 and has worked there twenty hours a week for more than a year. She turned in half of her check to her mother to reduce her mother s pressure. For another example based on the article McDonald s----we Do It All For You, Damita, one of the four interviewees of the author, has to earn spending 1

2 money by working hard in McDonald s. She needs to pay the tuition of extension courses in psychology at New York University (Garson). Although McDonald s may not be the best working place for her, she said the first thing [she] needed was a job (Garson). McDonald s provides such opportunities to people like Kysha and Damita. With these many opportunities, it s not surprising that people want to work there. Although the job in McDonald s is attractive, there are thousands of employees who quit their job from there because of the mechanization of their systems, which is the second point in both articles. McDonald s has a completed automatic system in each store. Employees working there all complained that the procedures makes the burgers but not the people (Garson). Every step in McDonald s is controlled by machines from the cashier to the burger-making. When new employees enter McDonald s, they will be first taken in to the crew room which is a room in the basement with lockers, a table and a video player (Garson). The only training is watching the video player in the crew room. After that, everything is not creative anymore, but mechanic. For instance, the keys on a McDonald s cash register say lge fries, reg fries, med coke, and so on instead of numbers (Garson). When people order, the cashier only needs to enter the button without knowing the price of the item. When the prices change, the numbers will be entered in the store s central computer (Garson). All the cashier needs is continue[ing] to press that button. For another example of mechanization in Garson s article, people who make burgers will follow several different beepers and timers, sear the meat, turn the meat, line it up, and give it each a squirt of mustard and 2

3 a squirt of ketchup and so on. The whole process takes only 90 seconds to make a burger and people usually can make more than ten burgers at the same time. Even managers in McDonald s do not actually learn anything. As described in McDonald s We Do It All For You, Jon Deangelo, a McDonald s manager for three years, used computers to set up the employee s schedules and even calculated the crew labor productivity, a economically sound concept. The schedules and numbers came out automatically for each period. Based on the examples, we can see all the stores of McDonald s are full of mechanization and people can in fact learn nothing. Aside from the overly mechanize process, there is another factor that makes people leave McDonald s, the bad treatment of employees. Almost every person in these two articles complained that they were not treated well when they worked in McDonald s. Kysha said her boss yelled at [her] one time when [she] was two minutes late, after [she] worked [there] for a year (Lewin). As a sixteen-year-girl, she was really upset. Other employees have also been treated badly. According to Garson s article, June Sanders, one of the interviewees, was told her hours would be 4 to 10 p.m. when she went in the store but the manager changed her schedule from 4 to 1 a.m. the next day. She did not have that much time to work because she needed to do school work. But she could not say NO because in that way she would be fired and she may be replaced by a high school kid half an hour later. As Jason Pratt, another interviewee, said, You need to have two hands and two legs and move them as fast as you can (Garson). As summarized by those 3

4 examples, bad treatment of employees in McDonald s is common and almost all the people worked there had experiences of bad treatment. In conclusion, the two articles introduced the working situation in McDonald s in three aspects, including the attraction of working there, the mechanization of its system and the bad treatment of employees. McDonald s, the most famous fast food chain store in the world, attracts thousands of people to come and work for it everyday; however, it may also lose more people at the same time. 4

5 Works Cited Garson, Barbara. "McDonald's---We Do It All For You." Literature, Class, Culture. Ed. Paul Lauter, and Ann Fitzgerald. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Lewin, Kysha. "McDonald's Crew Member." GiG. Ed. John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter. New York: Three Rivers Press,