Comment 65329

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 29, 2011 at 11:33:53

McDonalds pays low wages because its workforce is disposable. The McDonalds model (groundbreaking for its time, but now followed by countless others) is essentially a tiny factory standardized factory for food. Each job is designed and mechanized down to the last detail, to the point where nearly anyone can walk in off the street and do it. In many ways it's a perfect model of Taylorist or Fordist production, and it can be rebuilt anywhere.

Is this what we want to strive for? Mechanization and standardization driving all skill out of work? Businesses so standardized they everything from the furniture to the menu is virtually identical across continents? Business practices that drive independent, local alternatives to the brink of extinction? Quality so low that it literally kills customers en masse?

As Ryan pointed out in his article, virtually all of the explosion of wealth and productivity in the last four decades has gone to a tiny elite of owners and managers, leaving the rest of us working far more for real wages that haven't budged at all - if we're lucky. If the businesses that employ us aren't providing quality products for decent prices, fair wages or a diverse and interesting set of options, then what's the point of participating at all?

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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