ethics of food:comments please

Kadeshia Shirley




The separation of workers and their employees is gapped with a
surprisingly very large amount of unequal power. Workers from many
countries are being shipped around to work in large production
corporation to factories and farms such as Strawberry fields and
McDonald’s manufacturing factories.  The employer severely overpowers
the employee as a simple reaction to the worker’s vulnerability and
very few options. As a result, who are given low wages, forced to work
under poor conditions, and are repeatedly abused and exploited. The
focus of the food industry is merely on the benefits of the employer
rather than its employees.
A significant trait of a worker of large corporations such as fast
food company’s and production fields is low wages.  In an interview
with Eric Schlosser, he mentioned his recognition of the strawberry
production system and how tedious of a job it seems to be. He later
found out in an investigation of the food industry that illegal
immigrants from California were being imported into these fields to
pick strawberries under horrible back-breaking hours and paid under
minimum wages.  “Each supervisor is like a little dictator in his or
her section of the plant, largely free to boss, fire, berate, or
reassign workers”.  Along with this behavior, most of corporate
employers are supporters of anti-union, preferably to avoid rebellion
and unwanted attention to treatment of workers. to ultimately put a
hault to the employee’s limit of power. According to Fast Food Nation
by Eric Schlosser, the production supervisor is of close relation to a
dictator, which enforces that the power of the employer blatantly
dominates the workers.
The abuse of immigrant laborers is also a historically known trait of
large corporations.  Workers in a field or factory usually have very
few choices in work hours.  These vulnerable laborers are forced to
work long hours no matter how low the wages, females are taken
advantage of sexually as well as unequally.  According to Fast Food
Nation, the vulnerability of these women who worked in corporate
factories was unimaginable.  They would often sleep with their
employers, seeing it as “a way to gain a secure place in American
society, a green card, a husband – or at the very least transfer to an
easier job at the plant. “  .