The part about work from a book review on "Fast Food Nation":
http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2511/mason2511.html
> Everyone knows that fast food jobs suck. They're greasy, low-paid,
> short-term, unskilled and without benefits, and among teen-agers, who fill
> nearly all of them, they're not even cool. The cumulative impact of the
> fast food economy is stark: The restaurant industry is the largest private
> employer in the United States, and the great majority of these jobs--3.5
> million of them--are in fast food. These workers comprise "by far the
> largest group of minimum wage earners." McDonald's hires 1 million people
> a year, "more than any other American organization, public or private";
> one in eight American workers have worked at McDonald's. In addition to
> its restaurants, McDonald's exerts near-total control over the production
> of commodities of which it is among the largest buyers: beef, potatoes,
> pork and poultry. And McDonald's competitors, fast food chains like Burger
> King and KFC, ape one another's tactics with great precision.
>
> Fast food workers rarely have benefits of any sort, and typically turn
> over at several hundred percent each year. And they are never, ever
> unionized. In addition to being low-paid and transient, fast food work is
> dangerous: the rate of injury in fast food jobs is among the highest of
> any job category. But if that weren't bad enough, fast food workers are
> now more likely to be murdered on the job (four to five per month) than
> are police, and though precise statistics are unavailable, Schlosser says
> they're probably more likely to be the victims of violent crime on the job
> than any other class of workers.
>
> Led by the fast food chains, the restaurant industry has spent vast sums
> to oppose the minimum wage (yes, the minimum wage itself--not just hikes
> in it), federal protections for union organizing, federal food safety
> regulations and enforcement, and OSHA workplace safety standards. It was
> among the first industries to apply the principles of Taylorism --
> standardizing and simplifying each stage of production to eliminate
> the need for skilled workers--to every aspect of its business,
> aspiring to a "zero-training" work force of interchangeable and
> disposable part-timers.
>
> Workers in fast food restaurants may be more likely to be murdered at
> work, but the nation's most dangerous job also owes its current scope,
> structure and working conditions to fast food: The meatpacking industry
> has been thoroughly transformed by the vast buying power and cost-cutting
> demands of the burger regime. In the past 30 years it has recrudesced
> from the well-paid, unionized profession of the '60s--the product of
> decades of worker activism and progressive government regulation, building
> on Upton Sinclair's revelatory The Jungle--into yet another fin-de-siècle
> recreation of the 1890s: an extremely low-paid, dangerous and filthy job
> filled by desperate, powerless immigrants without unions, health care or
> job security.
