The Franchisee Loophole

Even before COVID, a typical suburban fast-food outlet might have earned 70 percent or more of its revenue through its drive-through window. When the pandemic hit, contact with strangers became not only undesirable but unsafe, so the industry’s architecture of fleeting interaction — drive-throughs, in-store ordering kiosks, and dedicated parking for curbside pickup — seemed prescient. People who ate fast food rarely started going often, and people who normally ordered at the counter started ordering from the safety of their cars. From 2019 to 2022 — the year of my brief tenure — drive-through orders rose 30 percent.

As drive-through traffic surged, fast-food workers were designated “essential workers” alongside nurses and doctors. But they rarely got the protective gear necessary to limit their viral exposure, and their pay remained dismally low. In response, the Fight for $15 movement saw a resurgence of worker interest in California, culminating with the state’s passage of a long-awaited minimum wage increase last September.

Yet what the movement’s leaders touted as a victory also signaled, in part, a tactical retreat. In years prior, the movement had more on its mind than wages. Fight for $15 in California had been pressing for new rules ensuring that large fast-food corporations would be just as liable for labor abuses as their franchisees — the independent companies that own most of the restaurants and directly employ the vast majority of the state’s half a million fast-food workers. But to pass the reform bill, legislators scrapped the proposed corporate accountability rule in favor of a minimum wage increase: $20 per hour for fast-food workers.

As the entire restaurant industry headed for its best year on record, fast-food outlets had promised higher pay. But they had also maintained the structure that shields large corporations from accountability over working conditions. And those corporations are writing the scripts my coworkers and I follow, the ones that induce so much stress every day.

Fast food promises to fulfill a customer’s desires in seconds flat. But companies can’t deliver on this promise of convenience unless somebody is forced to work at an unnatural and unsustainable pace. In fast food, stress is not a rare condition suffered by the inexperienced. It is a constant reality for every employee, no matter how seasoned or capable.

Without the ability to hold fast-food corporations accountable for what happens at their franchises, every instance of workplace abuse is treated like a local aberration. In reality, abuse is the business model.

Management By Stress

When fast food emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, it enticed investors with the promise of turning the restaurant business into something more like a factory, which could rely on tight labor control to achieve high output, mass production, and record profitability.

In the kitchen, signs along the point-of-sale screen list “target times” for taking an order (twenty-five seconds or less), confirming it (three seconds), and handling the payment (fifteen seconds). These numbers originate at McDonald’s’ corporate headquarters before being passed down to the franchisees, to Tranh, and to us.

The gentle phrase “target time” implies that serving eighty cars per hour on a busy day is only an expression of optimism, a goal and not a requirement. In truth, we have to serve every car, and these times are estimates of how long we have given how staffed we are. McDonald’s doesn’t have to speak in the harsh language of dictates to get its point across. It has other ways of communicating what it really wants and getting us to comply.

As the late labor organizer Mike Parker wrote in Catalyst, in the 1980s, American automakers (taking a cue from their Japanese rivals) reduced each job on the assembly line to its base functions and rotated them between positions over the course of a shift. The “flexible work system,” as they called it, sounded good for workers — a break from the monotony and repetition of assigned, fixed posts on an assembly line. But what management presented as a perk was really just a way to de-skill and thus cheapen manufacturing labor.

As Parker wrote, illusory enticements like “flexibility” trump force as a means of controlling workers and keeping their wages down. Enticements like these are essential to a system that gets workers to fit themselves into the manufacturing process — what Parker and others called “management by stress.” It’s an affective labor management strategy that convinces workers to take the onus on themselves to complete tasks in a way that elicits rewards, not reprimands. The result is greater compliance and a faster pace, propelled by workers’ own fear of dropping the ball.

As a manufacturing industry, fast food has adopted a similar means of controlling workers. If we don’t hit “targets,” we get yelled at by managers who are just as stressed out as we are. On the flip side, the industry often subjects workers to random tests of service acumen under the guise of regional “competitions.” When we won one such contest, my store got a prize basket, hat pins, and a couple minutes away from our stations to take a group photo.

For the most reliable workers, enticements can take the form of apparent career advancement. But managerial roles are often not all they’re cracked up to be. In exchange for slightly higher pay, assistant managers can expect a job that is little different from that of an ordinary crew member, and a schedule that is more demanding and more random.

When she was promoted, Danielle, an assistant manager a few years my junior, told me that she signed an agreement promising to be available virtually any time the restaurant was open. In a workplace where people often quit unexpectedly or didn’t show up, the arrangement meant that she, like all the other assistant managers, often had to come to work on what should have been her day off.

“Move the Cars!”

Even in the space of a minute, taking orders is only half my job. Six or seven feet to the right of my screen, there’s the fry hopper — a freezer the size and shape of a home refrigerator that dispenses frozen potatoes into baskets underneath. To the left, toward me, there’s a vat of hot oil with room for four baskets, followed by a terrarium for made fries. When a customer pulls up to make an order, a bell rings in my headset and I say the standard greeting, ask if they intend to use the McDonald’s app to track their purchase, and listen to everything they ask for as I shovel fries into bags.

Before they say too much — but not before I’ve stuffed at least one bag of fries — I step over to the screen, assign the order to my lane, and punch all its components into my screen from memory. Then I ask about drinks, punch those in, ask if they want anything else, punch that in, slide right to the deep fryer, Risky Business–style, yank a basket of fries, shake off the excess oil, slide left to the fry box, dump the hot stuff as I lean left to read the total to the customer and tell them to pull up to the first window, then lean right to drop the empty basket in the fryer, and left again to send the order up the chain with a reach and a tap with one hand while I salt and toss fries with the other.

It won’t be five seconds before the bell sounds again and I’m taking another order, but I have to make use of the time, so I go back to the hopper, the deep fryer, or, most likely, the fry box to shove fries into bags, for the last order or the next one, all while Tranh yells from behind.

“More fries!” she shouts, like a captain of a warship under fire, ordering her crew to load the cannons. “Move the cars!”

The simplicity of the various tasks necessary to make a fast-food kitchen run is the industry’s long-standing labor advantage, the reason it hires kids as young as thirteen (a violation of federal law that put a California Popeyes franchisee in the national spotlight) or fourteen (with some restrictions, a perfectly legal practice), along with immigrants with limited command of English. (In California, more than 60 percent of fast-food workers are Latino, many of them immigrants.) It’s why a fast-food restaurant can replace employees with the same ease that it cycles through cups and burger wrappers: so long as there are people wanting a job who can stand for hours on end and use their hands, the industry can put them to work.

But when it’s busy, it’s definitely not easy, even though the individual tasks are theoretically simple. I not only have to perform every task in rapid succession, but my eyes also have to be on everything: the fries, the screens above the fries, the deep fryer (which beeps loudly thirty seconds after I drop a basket and then again when the fries are ready), and the hopper, just to be sure it’s churning out fries. When I can, I check the supply of frozen fries as well. If it’s low, one of my coworkers will likely make the trip to the walk-in freezer in back and get more for me. But when we’re short-staffed, or so busy that we might as well be, I get the fries myself and ask, and apologize when I ask, for the person handling money at the first window to cover my lane for a few orders along with their own.

In one 2021 study, a third of Los Angeles fast-food employees said there had been too few staff to work safely at some point in the past year. Forty-three percent said they’d been injured, and 40 percent of injured workers said they’d struggled to pay bills as a result.

Back at it.

“Hi, welcome to McDonald’s. Will you be using the mobile app today?”

“Does That Happen Here?”

I’m finally good at it, I think. The fries. It isn’t long after the thought crosses my mind that Olivia asks me to take the drive-through register at the first window.

The first window is where the two drive-through lanes converge, so I take orders for one lane but handle money for both. Most people pay in cash, so after I confirm their order (“You had . . . a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a large Coke, large fries. . .”), I take the bills, punch the amount into a screen on the right, add the money to the till, and give the customer their change — all while speaking with another customer through my headset and ringing up that order on a screen on the left.

There is joy in feeding people, some lazy, some lonely, some who want the small comforts of an ice cream cone and the briefest interaction with another person but are overwhelmed by anything more. There is also the sense of vulnerability that comes with any job facing hungry strangers. It can feel dangerous in that way — and in fact, it is dangerous to be a fast-food worker.

“When you get a fifty or a hundred, you want to put it away,” Olivia says, showing me how to deposit the money into a safe under the register. “Because you don’t want to get robbed.”

“Does that happen here?”

“Yes. Especially during the holidays.” According to a 2007 Bureau of Labor statistics report, the risk of getting murdered on the job was higher for fast-food workers than for cab drivers or convenience store clerks.

When she comes back later to check on me, I ask Olivia how long she’s been at this McDonald’s. I mean how many months or years, but she takes it to be about her hours.

“Oh, you know. I’m not a single mother, but my husband is in Mexico. He was deported. So . . . ten, twelve hours, six days a week?” she says, walking off again. “I’ve got bills, you know?”

“Where the Fuck Is Your Manager?”

At home, bad memories form an indistinct morass. The good times stand alone.

During one shift at the front counter, an old man with a dirty cloth mask who looks like he’s spent the night at a bus stop approaches the register. “This man is a regular,” Danielle, another assistant manager, tells me. “Make sure the coffee is fresh brewed and fill it all the way to the rim.”

I don’t speak Spanish and Danielle is one of the few native English speakers on staff. I want her opinion on everything, and when she tells me I’m doing well, I beam.

Yet after four weeks, the constant sense of inadequacy overwhelms any sense of pride. Nearing the end of dinner one evening, I see Rosa, one of my coworkers, walk down the hall from the first window and whisper to Olivia, who promptly closes the pickup window. A minute later, a thirty-something man with a Cleveland Indians hat shoves his way past a few customers on his way to the counter.

“Where the fuck is your manager?” he yells to no one in particular. I freeze in place by the fry station. “Get my fucking order right! This is McDonald’s! Your food sucks! Your service sucks!”

“I’m the manager,” Olivia says with the confidence of someone who’s seen his type before. She walks up to the man and points to the door. “You need to leave.”

Quitting Time

It’s been a few weeks since I was at last in the kitchen. The day after I gave her my notice, Tranh had asked if I could put in two shifts per week. The store was understaffed, she said. She needed me. I agreed, reluctantly, but she never added me to the schedule.

Danielle and I converse over text. “Today was crazy. I feel like I survived a horror movie,” she says.

“It’s only Wednesday.”

“It’s only heat. The people come out when it’s hot. Like ants.” Her last day off was six days ago. Her next is tomorrow, then the cycle begins again, just in time for the weekend, with all its usual trials. Her week had lasted sixty-five hours, and the next is likely to be just as long.

I go over the list of old coworkers. The ones who haven’t quit are working as hard as she is, she says. “Tranh has no voice but she is still trying to yell.” There’s a divide among the staff that’s only more visible to me after leaving. Most don’t last long, but a few — the ones I worked alongside most often — have been on the job for years and seem likely to stay put, no matter how hard it gets. No matter how much they dream of leaving.

I check the forecast. It’s only April but the whole week looks hot.

“Are you nervous about the summer?” I ask.

“Yes.”

Need for Speed

In his 1974 classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, the labor theorist Harry Braverman wrote that the assembly line’s leading advantage for manufacturing is “the control it affords over the pace of labor.” When management wants to increase the pace of the floor, it just speeds up the assembly line. Workers who can’t keep up often find themselves out of a job.

In fast food, the line of customers serves the same purpose, and, if only for that reason, the pressure to work faster seems less arbitrary. Seeing the customers’ faces is reason enough to want to help them out. It’s also why the job comes with a constant sense of inadequacy. No matter how fast workers move, a line of cars outside is always evidence they are not moving fast enough.

There are a few slow periods, when the cars are fewer, and workers can catch their breath and speak to each other. But the industry is constantly in search of ways to lure new people in to fill those gaps. Taco Bell started selling breakfast in 2014 to boost morning sales, and by 2016, breakfast made up 10 percent of its sales. Not to be outdone, Wendy’s added a breakfast menu in 2020. As Parker writes, a common yardstick for success of a “management by stress” system is “how much waste time can be squeezed out of a job.”

The constant stress of the job is one reason employee turnover typically exceeds 100 percent in the fast-food industry. Yet a steady churn of workers conceals the fact that many stay on the job for years, often out of sheer desperation. In California, perhaps 1 to 2 percent of the industry’s workforce (more than ten thousand in all) are homeless, according to a study published last year. Another 10 percent have somewhere to stay but spend 70 percent or more of their household income on rent — twice the proportion of workers in other industries.

“Eight and Eight”

I pick up my last check at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night when I know the drive-through will be slower.

A few nights before, Danielle told me Tranh had been sick for two weeks now. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. “She could be burnt out,” she said. Still, things are desperate enough that Tranh came in last week, teetering, to help Olivia write schedules.

I buy a card and a bag of dried tangerines on the way and take a seat in the dining room. I write something plain about getting better soon. I’m tempted to say I can work again, thinking maybe it’ll liven her mood. But I stop myself and end with a signature.

“I got one hour left,” Danielle says, collapsing into the bench opposite mine. “I think I’ll just hang out in back. As long as I don’t have to interact with customers.” She’s felt nauseous all day, she says. Some new people have come on and she’s had to train them. The customers have piled up. “I think I’ll call in sick tomorrow.” That sounds wise, I say. She doesn’t need my advice. “I’m going to take some time off next month, also. They said everyone’s gotta be here, all the assistant managers, but I just told them no. So what you got going tonight?”

After some prodding, I confess I might go to the Jack in the Box around the corner. Before the job, I’d been a spare fast-food patron, but after taking the job, there was a thrill to feeling the machinery of a drive-through work on my behalf. I go occasionally, during their slow hours.

“I have a friend who used to work there,” Danielle says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, he said they get a lot more junkies.”

“It’s 24 hours,” I say. The dining room is smaller but the drive-through is open all hours of the night, often with a line of cars that stretches beyond the parking lot entrance, like a tail wagging in the street.

“Yeah, that’s why he worked there. Here and there,” she says, wide-eyed. “He used to work here, a whole shift, close with me after midnight, and then he’d walk over there and do another.” There’s alarm in her voice, a recognition that a person shouldn’t have to work a job like this twice in a day. “And Rosa? You know she works sixteen-hour days. That’s what she told me yesterday. Eight and eight. She starts at 5 a.m. at her other job, she comes here, and she does another shift. And people wonder why they’re so ready to quit.”

“Who’s quitting?” Besides me, I mean.

Danielle clarified that she meant leaving at the end of their shift, not leaving the job.

She checks the clock on her phone for the third time since we started talking. Her break has ended. “I’ll get this to Tranh,” she says as she grabs my token gift and slides off the bench. She walks back to the kitchen without another word.

From Jack in the Box, it’s a 10 minute drive home, past a Popeyes and a Wendy’s, each with a few cars, waiting. When I check my calendar at home, I sigh, glad that Danielle plans to stay home tomorrow. It’s Easter Sunday. Holidays can be especially busy.