The explosion of children's advertising occurred during the 1980s. Many working parents, feeling guilty about spending less time with their kids, started spending money on them. One marketing expert has called the 1980s "the decade of the child consumer...." The growth in children's advertising has been driven by efforts to increase not just current, but also future, consumption. Hoping that nostalgic childhood memories of a brand will lead to a lifetime of purchases, companies now plan "cradle-to-grave" advertising strategies. They have come to believe what Ray Maroc and Walt Disney realized long ago -- a person's "brand loyalty" may being as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research as found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name . . . The aim of most children's advertising is straightforward: get kids to nag their parts and nag them well . . . As American cities and towns spend less money on children's recreation, fast food restaurants have become gathering spaces for families with young children. Every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit a McDonald's. The seesaws, slides, and pits full of plastic ball have proved to be an effective lure. "But when it gets down to brass tacks," a Brandweek article on fast food notes, "the key to attracting kids is toys, toys, toys...." A successful promotion easily doubles or triples the weekly sales volume of children's meals.

Return to Top

Food

Far from their natural habitat the cattle in feedlots become more prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of the disease . . . About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes -- the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters. The FDA banned such practices after evidence from Great Britain suggested that they were responsible for a widespread outbreak of . . . "mad cow disease." Nevertheless, current FDAregulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle . . . The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as little, are also being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in Preventative Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994 . . . The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of an animal's hide and the removal of its digestive system. The hides are now pulled off by machine; if a hide has been inadequately cleaned, chunks of dirt and manure may fall from it onto the meat. Stomachs and intestines are still pulled out of the cattle by hand; if the job is not performed carefully, the contents of the digestive system may spill everywhere. The increased speed of today's production lines makes the task much more difficult. A single worker at a "gut table" may eviscerate sixty cattle an hour. Performing the job properly takes a fair amount of skill. A former "gutter" told me that it took him six months to learn bow to pull out the stomach and tie off the intestines without spilling anything. Inexperienced gutters spill manure far more often . . . the hourly spillage rate at the gut table has ran as high as 20 percent, with stomach contents splattering one out of five carcasses . . . At SIS-C slaughterhouses, visibly diseased animals -- cattle infected with measles and tapeworms, covered with abscesses -- were being slaughtered. Poorly trained company inspectors were allowing the shipment of beef contaminated with fecal material, hair, insects, metal shavings, and vomit . . . .

Under current law, the USDA cannot demand a recall [of contaminated beef]. It can only consult with a company that has shipped bad meat and suggest that it withdraw the mat from interstate commerce. In extreme cases, the USDA can remove its inspectors from a slaughterhouse or processing plant for all intents and purposes shutting down the facility. That step is rarely taken, however ? and can be challenged by a meatpacker in federal court . . . The company has a strong economic interest in withdrawing as little meat as possible from the market (especially if the meat is difficult to trace) and in limiting publicity about the recall . . . Once a company has decided voluntarily to pull contaminated meat from the market, it is under no legal obligation to inform the public -- or even state health officials -- that a recall is taking place.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA chose meat supplier for its National School Lunch Program on the basis of the lowest price, without imposing additional feed safety requirements. The cheapest ground beef was not only the most likely to be contaminated with pathogens, but also the most likely to contain pieces of spinal cord, bone, and gristly left behind by Automated Meat Recovery Systems (contraptions that squeeze the last shreds of meat off bones) . . . During the 1990s, the federal government (which is supposed to ensure food safety) applied standards to the meat it purchased for schools that were much less stringent than the standards applied by the fast food industry (which is responsible for much of the current threat to food safety . . . .

Return to Top

Labor

No other industry in the United States has a workforce so dominated by adolescents. About two-thirds of the nation's fast food workers are under the age of twenty. Instead of relying upon a small, stable, wellpaid, and well?trained workforce, the fast food industry seeks out part-time, unskilled workers who are willing to accept low pay. Teenagers have been the perfect candidates for these jobs, not only because they are less expensive to hire than adults, but also because their youthful inexperience makes them easier to control . . . Teenagers have long provided the fast food industry with the bulk of its workforce . . . Since most teenagers still live at home, they could afford to work for wages too low to support and adult, and until recently, their limited skills attracted few other employers. A job at a fast food restaurant became an American rite of passage, a first job soon left behind for better things . . . Instead of giving written instructions to crew members [the company relies] as much as possible on photographs of menu items, and "if there are instructions, make them very simple, write them at a fifth?grade level, and write them in Spanish and English.-." The employees whom the fast food industry expects to crawl are by far the biggest group of low-wage workers in the United States today . . . The annual turnover rate in the fast food industry is now about 300 to 400 percent The typical fast food worker quits or is fired every three to four months. The fast food industry pays the minimum wage to a higher proportion of its workers than any other American industry . . . Roughly 90 percent of the nation's fast food workers are paid an hourly wage, provided no benefits, and scheduled to work only as needed . . . The high turnover rates at fast food restaurants, the pan?time nature of the jobs, and the marginal social status of the crew members have made it difficult to organize their workers. And the fast food chains have fought against unions with the same zeal they've displayed fighting hikes in the minimum wage . . . [In] Protecting Youth at Work, a report on child labor published by the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 concluded that the long hours many American teenagers now spend on the job pose a great risk to their future educational and financial success. Numerous studies have found that lads who work up to twenty hours a week during the school year generally benefit from the experience, gaining an increased sense of personal responsibility and self-esteem. But kids who work more than that are far more likely to cut classes and drop out of high school . . . .

Return to Top

Personal Story -- Fast Food Nation
(pages 187-190)

Kenny Dobbins was a Monfort employee for almost sixteen years. He was born in Keokuk, Iowa, had a tough childhood and an abusive stepfather, left home at the age of thirteen, went in and out of various schools, never learned to read, did various odd jobs, and wound up at the Monfort slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska. He stared working there in 1979, right after the company bought it from Swift. He, was twenty-four. He worked in the shipping department at first, hauling boxes that weighted as much as 120 pounds. Kenny could handle it, though. He was a big man, muscular and six-foot-five, and nothing in this life had ever been easy.

One day Kenny hear someone yell, "Watch out!" then turned around and saw a ninety-pound box falling from an upper level of the shipping department Kenny caught the box with one arm, but the momentum threw him against a conveyer belt, and the metal rim of the belt pierced his lower back. The company doctor bandaged Kenny's back and said the pain was just a pulled muscle. Kenny never filed for workers' comp, stayed home for a few days, then returned to work. He had a wife and three children to support. For the next few months, he was in terrible pain . . . He saw another doctor, got a second opinion. The new doctor said Kenny had a pair of severely herniated disks. Kenny had back surgery, spent a month in the hospital, got sent to a pain clinic when the operation didn't work. His marriage broke up amid the stress and financial difficulty. Fourteen months after the injury, Kenny returned to the slaughterhouse. "GIVE UP AFTER BACK SUGERY? NOT KEN DOBBINS!!" a Monfort newsletter proclaimed. "Ken has learned how to handle the rigors of working in a packing plant and is trying to help others do the same. Thanks, Ken, and keep up the good work."

Kenny felt a strong loyalty to Monfort. He could not read, possessed few job skills other than his strength, and the company bad still given him a job. When Monfort decided to reopen its Greeley plant with a non-union workforce, Kenny volunteered to go there and help. He did not think highly of labor unions. His supervisors told him that unions had been responsible for shutting down meatpacking plants all over the country. When the UFCW tried to organize the Greeley slaughterhouse, Kenny became an active and outspoken member of the anti-union group.

At the Grand Island facility, Kenny had been restricted to light duty after his injury. But his supervisor at Greeley said that old restrictions didn't apply in this new job. Soon Kenny was doing tough, physical labor once again, wielding a knife and grabbing forty- to fifty-pound pieces of beef off a table. When the pain became unbearable, he was transferred to ground beef, then to rendering. According to a former manager at the Greeley plant, Monfort was trying to get rid of Kenny, trying to make his work so unpleasant that he'd quit Kenny didn't realize it "He still believes in his heart that people are honest and good," the former manager said about Kenny. "And he's wrong."
As part of the job in rendering, Kenny sometimes had to climb into gigantic blood tanks and gut bins, reach to the bottom of them with his long arms, and unclog the drains. One day he was unexpectedly called to work over the weekend. There had been a problem with Salmonella contamination. The plant needed to be disinfected, and some of the maintence workers had refused to do it. In his street clothes, Kenny began cleaning the place, climbing the two tanks and spraying a liquid chlorine mix. Chlorine is a hazardous chemical that can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin, causing a litany of health problems. Workers who spray it need to wear protective gloves, safety goggles, a self-contained respirator, and full coveralls. Kenny’s supervisor gave him a paper dust mask to wear, but it quickly dissolved. After eight hours of working with the chlorine in unventilated areas, Kenny went home and fell ill. He was rushed to the hospital and placed in an oxygen tank. His lungs had been burned by the chemicals. His body was covered in blisters. Kenny spent a month in the hospital.

Kenny eventually recovered from the overexposure to chlorine, but it left Ins chest feeling raw, make him susceptible to colds and sensitive to chemical aromas. He went back to work at the Greeley plant. He bad remarried, didn't know what other kind of work to do, still felt loyal to the company. He was assigned to an early morning shift. He had to drive an old truck from one part of the slaughterhouse complex to another. The truck was filled with leftover scraps of meat. The headlights and the wipers didn't work. The windshield was filthy and cracked. One cold, dark morning in the middle of winter, Kenny became disoriented while driving. He stopped the truck, opened the door, got out to see where he was -- and was struck by a train. It knocked his glasses off, threw him up in the air, and knocked both of his work boots off. The train was moving slowly, or he would've been killed. Kenny somehow made it back to the plant, barefoot and bleeding from deep gashes in his back and face. He spent two weeks at the hospital and then went back to work.

One day, Kenny was in rendering and saw a worker about to stick his head into a pre-breaker machine, a device that uses hundreds of small hammers to pulverize gristle and bone into a fine powder. The worker had just turned the machine off, but Kenny knew the hammers inside were still spinning. It takes fifteen minutes for the machine to shut down completely. Kenny yelled "Stop!" but the worker didn't hear him. And so Kenny ran across the room, grabbed the man by the seat of the pants, and pulled him away from the machine an instant before it would have pulverized him. To honor this act of bravery, Monfort gave Kenny an award for "Outstanding Achievement in CONCERN FOR FELLOW WORKERS." The award was a paper certificate, signed by his supervisor and the plant safety manager.

Kenny later broke his leg stepping into a hole in the slaughterhouse's concrete floor. On another occasion he shattered an ankle, an injury that required surgery and the insertion of five steel pins. Now Kenny had to wear a metal brace on one leg in order to walk, and elaborate, spring-loaded brace that cost $2,000. Standing for long periods caused him great pain. He was given a job recycling old knives at the plant. Despite his many injuries, the job required him to climb up and down three flights of narrow stain carrying garbage bags filled with knives. In December of 1995 Kenny felt a sharp pain in his chest while lifting some boxes. He thought it was a heart attack. His union steward took him to see the nurse, who said it was just a pulled muscle and sent Kenny home. He was indeed having a massive heart attack. A friend rushed Kenny to a nearby hospital. A stent was inserted in his heart, and the doctors told Kenny that he was lucky to be alive.

While Kenny Dobbins was recuperating, Monfort fired him. Despite the fact that Kenny had been with the company for almost sixteen years, despite the fact that he was first in seniority at the Greeley plant, that he'd cleaned blood tanks with his bare hands, fought the union, done whatever the company had asked him to do, suffered injuries that would've killed weaker men, nobody from Monfort called him with the news. Nobody even bothered to write him. Kenny learned that he'd been fired when his payments to the company health insurance plan kept being returned by the post office. He called Monfort repeatedly to find out what was going on, and a sympathetic clerk in the claims office finally told Kenny that the checks were being returned because he was no longer a Monfort employee. When I asked company spokesmen to comment on the accuracy of Kenny's story, they would neither confirm nor deny any of the details.

Today Kenny is in poor health. His heart is permanently damaged. His immune system seems shot. His back hurts, his ankle hurts, and every so often he coughs up blood. He is unable to work at any job. His wife Clara was working as a nursing home attendant when Kenny had the heart attack. Amid the stress of his illness, she developed a serious kidney ailment. She is unemployed and recovering from a kidney transplant.

After almost sixteen years on the job, Kenny did not get any pension from Monfort. The company challenged his workers' comp claim and finally agreed -- three years after the initial filing -- to pay him a settlement of $35,000. Fifteen percent of that money went to Kenny's lawyer, and the rest is gone. Some months Kenny has to hock things to get money for Clara's medicine. They have two teenage children and live on Social Security payments. Kenny's health insurance, which costs more than $600 a month, is about to run out. His anger at Monfort his feelings of betrayal, are of truly biblical proportions. "They used me to the point where I had no body parts left to give," Kenny said, struggling to maintain his composure. "Then they just tossed me into the trash can." Once strong and powerfully built, he now walks with difficulty, tires easily, and feels useless, as though his life were over. He is forty-six years old.