Job Comparison

I have only worked one job in my short life. Thank God the job is almost parallel to the job that Ritchel described in her article. The job that I worked at, as you can tell, was McDonald’s. I was a lobby maintenance worker who worked my way up to a cashier. McDonald’s is one of the most difficult jobs to work at. Everyone from your managers to customers look down upon you, sometimes even co-workers, when you work maintenance as I did. I worked at the McDonald’s at Navy Pier, a huge summer tourist site, which thus made this McDonald’s a seasonal employer. They hired loads of workers for the summer months and laid most workers, or as management called them, “under performers” off. This, like the red box, inspired workers to do as much as they could to show that they were dedicated employees and worthy of keeping after the summer tourist season had ended. Most of the employees were young, as was Ms. Vargas, most got paid minimum wage which was $7.75 at the time of my employment, I later heard that it was raised to $8.00. Like Ritchel’s article, our break time was recorded also. Workers were given a thirty minute lunch break, during that time, they had to punch out of the work clock when there order was being taken and punch in once they were done. We also were being watched every minute to ensure that performance wasn’t slipping and that worker weren’t “stealing from the corporation”. There were cameras everywhere from the lobby to the freezer, our privacy was really invaded. The last thing I want to share is that on Labor Day when most people were fired, it was payday, and in order to extract that last little bit of labor time, management made sure that everyone worked their full shift before they got their check and found out if they were being dismissed or not. True work of a capitalist.