What Fast-Food Establishments Really Offer Working Teens
Nowadays when teens are job hunting, one of the first places they go to are fast food establishments. Some may say this is an excellent way for teens to start off as they prepare for their lives in the real world, however not all agree. Amitai Etzioni the author of the article “Why Fast-Food Joints Don’t Serve up Good Jobs for Kids” argues that these corporations offer very little, if any, positive feedback or any useable knowledge and are basically just plain bad for these adolescent teens.
As these kids punch in and out day after day, the knowledge they could have gained is loss in repetitive tasks which most would render useless. In the words of Etzioni “There is no room for initiative creativity, or even elementary rearrangements” (280). Fast food enterprises control all marketing and regulations for serving sizes and prices, all that’s left to do is to take peoples orders and serve, no skill or critical thinking needed. Some of the employees may say that they learned a number of skills, including how to manage the till box and push a couple buttons on the appliances in the kitchen. According to the author “Little attention is paid to how long it takes to acquire such a skill, or what its significance is” (280). In other words the “skills” learned in these low-proficiency jobs are acquired in a matter of minutes and are usually counterproductive trades which most will find useless when and if they choose to pursue a career. With no skills or usable knowledge these young adults are no better than the machines they operate.
Having a job and being a student at the same time isn’t always the easiest of things to manage. “58% of the seniors” quoted Etzioni “acknowledged that their jobs interfere with their schoolwork” (281). A lot of these fast-food restaurants often have their employees work extensive hours which usually go on until late evening or even midnight. There are some instances where some students even dropout and continue working in the same sub par job for the rest of their lives with no hope of aggrandizement. As Etzioni wrote “They provide no career ladders, few marketable skills, and undermine school attendance and involvement” (281). Education is an important thing, many of these establishments fail to take into account that some of their employees are still enrolled in school and the work schedules they provide often clash with the students schooling.
Lastly, the amount of responsibility and lack of supervision among these kids is ridiculous. The author states that the fast-food employed teens are taught “the wrong kinds of compliance; blind obedience” (281) and even have “teens supervise teens with often no adult on the premises” (281). With the combination of these two bad scenarios many of these teen have no one to look up to and will often fail to succeed with goals they set forth, they may learn how to work together but they still fail to learn the real educational value of real obedience from an educated and skilled supervisor. Etzioni also goes on to say the teens are “driven to buy objects of no intrinsic educational, cultural or social merit” (282). In the past most of the time especially for those families who had a hard time paying the bills would have their children help with the payments to be made, but nowadays these same kids will blow their money on useless and silly apparel or knick-knacks.
With all these downsides to the employment these fast-food institutions offer, kids still go on and partake of the poor employment these corporation offer. Most often because of the money it offers but with all this information presented before them they just might reconsider what they want to do. Etzioni went into great detail to emphasize the fact that these places fail to offer three important variables in life: Useful life skills, the true value of an education and responsibility. Some suggest that parents take a slight charge in what and how these youngsters spend their cash, and help them invest in something beneficial. These working kids need a real role model whether it be a parent or an adult who will have a trade to pass onto them.