Working at mcdonalds: overview

Dillon mundy Mr. Varner Composition 1 11/4/21 “ Working at McDonalds” Amitai Etzioni In the passage “ Working at McDonalds” by Amitai Etzioni he starts off by stating that “ McDonalds is bad for your kids”. He doesn’t feel this way because of thefood, but instead of the mass production jobs they offer our youth. He says studies show two thirds ofhigh school studentshave part time jobs in the food chain business, and McDonalds is the pioneer, trend-setter, and symbol.

Amitai states that of course at first these jobs seem right, and may seem to bring up work driven, self-reliant youngsters, but what they really do is undermine school attendance and involvement, teach you few skills that are useful in life, and demean the values of teenagers. He thinks work should teach you the fruits of labor and self-discipline. He said that McDonalds has a job that is uneducational in several ways. He says it is far from providing opportunities for entrepreneurship, self-discipline, self-supervision, and self-scheduling. He feels most teenage jobs these days are what most social scientists call “ highly routinized” which means that everything you do at the job is the same all the time, which offers no room for creativity or initiative. There are very few studies on if today’s jobs are turning our youth into assembly line robots, but one of the few is a study conducted by Ivan Charper and Bryan Shore Fraser in 1948. The study relied mainly on what youth wrote on a questionnaire rather than observations offast foodjobs.

The study revealed that the jobs have nothing to offer skill wise. A 1980 study be V Harrel found that among students that worked 25 hours per week while in school their unemployment rate years later was half of that of the seniors who didn’t work. This goes to show that most kids that work in fast food while in school are usually stressed to drop out of school and get swallowed up in the fast food world. The studies conducted do show that they develop teamwork and working under supervision, however it must been seen that this learning is not exactly educational or wholesome and that it’s trying to teach us blind obedience. It shows that teens are more interested in the reward ofmoney, and status, than credits in a calculus course. So parents should see that teen employment isn’t exactly educational though it does offer some things, but it can also be abused. I have to agree with Etzioni, I myself have worked in fast-food jobs and have gained nothing from them except a quick dollar.

He is very persuasive in this essay, and makes some really good points. I like when he talks about today’s jobs turning the youth into assembly line robots, I completely feel him on that, because the job is so repetitive you never do anything different. He really caught my attention with this essay.