Fast-Food Nation Summary Response

                                                           Treatment of Workers

In chapter 7 of Fast-Food Nation, one of the issues Schlosser goes over is the poor treatment of workers and and how companies used them. Meat packing businesses would high a high hiring rate of workers because of many workers wanted to quit or just get fired within the 4 months they were hired and purposely hired illegals and immigrants for cheaper cost (162). Although this creates a good economy for the business, this created huge issues for the immigrant and illegal workers by creating harassment from other co-workers. The companies also had high turnover rates with low wages and poor working conditions (163). With these causes, there was a reason why the hiring rate is so high. With lots of workers constantly going in and out, the health care must be good but, health insurance isn't offered until 6 months of working, and get a paid vacation after a year (160). As was said, most workers didn't even make it to 4 months let alone 6 months for the health insurance. Lots of workers were injured on the job and wasn't able to cover it because of the low pay they received. The company was among the first to recognize that recent immigrants would work for low wages for their American citizenship (162). The companies soon learned that hiring illegals from Mexico let's them be able to pay less for them to work. Most of the workers at this point were either illegal or immigrant just because of the low pay wage. Today, the treatment of citizen workers have changed drastically and now provides better healthcare and higher wages. The one issue that is struggled with nowadays is jobs pertaining immigrants.

Even today, immigrant workers can be threatened with deportation in their own job by their     co-workers. All the co-worker has to do it report something, that can be really anything, and take it as harassment from the immigrant worker and like that, they are sent back. With all this being ok to do, this puts a high stress level on these immigrant workers knowing that if they make a wrong move, they can be kicked out at any time. Even if it feels like they deserve it, in whatever way, most immigrants are forced to come here because of an act the was passed in 1994 called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA made it a lot harder to get jobs in places like Mexico so many Mexicans are forced to migrate north to find jobs. For example, lots of farmers came from Mexico to North America to try and at least make some money to support their family. If they are essentially being forced to migrate here, the least we could do is treat them like any other human being because getting citizenship in America is a long process. Even still though, sweatshops in Mexico are still being ran by big companies like Nike because they can still pay them low wages and have poor healthcare.