Eyes on the Fries
Young People are Coming of Age in the Era of the McJob

by Elana Berkowitz

Katie Salas, a 24 year-old student at City College of San Francisco, has had 20 jobs in the last five years. She has worked in restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, bars, Macy’s and a museum. Katie has been forced to work unpaid hours off the clock, was denied vacation days and lied to about receiving commissions that never showed up in her paycheck. While working at the Cheesecake Factory, the pace was so frenzied that breaks were rare. She and fellow employees would fight over who got to clean the bathrooms just so they could sit in the stall and rest. Though City College is a two-year school, she is in her fifth year because she can only afford to take two classes per semester.

Welcome to the new service economy where hundreds of thousands of young people are spending hours making decaf lattes, folding jeans, grilling burgers or unpacking boxes of books and records for minimum wage. It used to be that these jobs were thought of as a summer fling, a right of passage on the way to making it big in the adult world of employment. But in our current economy, which our president seems to think is doing just fine, seven out of ten new jobs are service sector jobs like cashiers and baristas. (McDonald’s is the largest youth employer in the nation.) Chains like Starbucks and Wal-Mart and Blockbuster are opening stores at the breathless pace of one every day. Are these the kinds of careers that you took out all those college loans for? Didn’t think so.

Young people – along with immigrants, minorities, and the elderly – make up the vast majority of workers in the service economy. Fully half of the workers in restaurants, grocery stores and department stores are under 24. Not only are these jobs low-paying and low-skilled, they also offer precious little by way of health benefits, stable hours, advancement or job security.

Fast food commercials, popular films, and common stereotypes make it seem like service sector jobs are inhabited by carefree, pink-cheeked, upwardly mobile teens just looking for a bit of extra spending money who think their jobs are super duper fun. In fact, most young people in these jobs are in their late teens and twenties. Many are using their earnings to help support their family or are attempting to juggle work with college classes while using 6 bucks an hour to pay for their skyrocketing tuition. And when they graduate they get to compete for jobs with kids whose resumes are padded with cushy and prestigious unpaid internships, instead of summers spent at Subway.

And for those young workers lucky enough to get a job where they get a chance to sit down at a desk every once in a while, they are probably temporary or part-time workers earning 16.5% less than at a regular job. In our new millennium management lingo, we call these folks the “flexible workforce,” and half of them are under the age of 35. At this point, the largest private employer in the nation is Manpower Inc., a temp agency.

The end result is that young workers have poverty rates that are double the nation’s average. While McDonald’s CEO Jack Greenberg makes a healthy $7,331 an hour, young people are toiling away, often for minimum wage, which hasn’t even kept pace with inflation. If it did, the federal minimum wage would be at $8.65 an hour, and if it was pegged to productivity, our lowest paid workers would be netting $16.55 an hour.

So are young workers taking to the streets and organizing en masse? Not exactly. Only 5% of workers under 25 are unionized, and workers under 35 make up only a quarter of union membership.

As UC Berkley professor and author Stuart Tannock points out, young people remain largely unorganized and garner little attention from government or advocacy groups who do not seem to understand the challenges facing the youth workforce. Simultaneously, the industries that employ them successfully spend millions pushing their agendas in Washington – fighting against minimum wage increases, overtime laws, and better health and safety standards. Despite these injustices, it is often difficult to get young people in low-wage service jobs and temporary jobs interested in unionizing. Unlike the heyday of unions, when workers in fields like manufacturing thought of their work and their union membership as a core part of their identity, young workers often do not see themselves primarily as workers but as students or artists or struggling writers and don’t always see the potential relevance of increasingly weak unions.

Still, there are promising recent examples of service sector workers unionizing including Powell’s, an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon and a Whole Foods in Madison, Wisconsin. At Vox Pop Café, a Brooklyn café owned by Sander Hicks, founder of progressive underground book publisher Soft Skull Press, an 18 year-old employee organized the shop. (If you want to find out about labor conditions and union activity at your favorite mega retail chain, or if you just want to do a bit of griping, check out Retail Worker, a website whose motto is “we just handle the cash, we don’t keep any of it.”)

City-wide minimum wage increases have also had some success, most notably in San Francisco, which raised its minimum wage to $8.50 in 2003, spurred in large part by Young Workers United, a group that organizes around the needs of young people in service sector jobs. San Francisco became the third city to institute a local minimum wage law, behind Washington D.C. and Santa Fe. 11 states have minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal minimum; Washington state has the highest at $7.35 an hour. (Some states don’t even have a minimum wage and two states, Kansas and Ohio, have minimum wages set lower than the national wage. Kansas’ is set at $2.65 an hour.)

Discrete local successes deserve to be celebrated, but the action happening on the national level is pretty disappointing. Federal minimum wage legislation has gone nowhere – the rate has remained stagnant for nine years. Earlier this year, Senator Ted Kennedy proposed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $7.25. Senator Rick Santorum countered with a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $6.25 but his bill was packed with handouts for the bosses of the folks who would get the extra buck an hour – including $4.2 billion in tax breaks and a clause that would eliminate the right to overtime pay and a 40-hour work week.

Young people aren’t an army of disposable workers. They are the backbone of the American economy and the future leaders of our nation. And working the fry machine at Burger King isn’t going to help them develop the leadership skills they need to succeed – but organizing a union drive just might.

Learn more by visiting the UC Berkeley Labor Center. Find out more about Young Workers United here.

Host a screening of Eyes on the Fries on your campus. It’s a great new short documentary about the growth of the service sector economy and the young people who work in it and organize around it. It is focused on the successful minimum wage struggle in San Francisco and includes personal stories from students living with McJobs as well as interviews with experts including Fast Food Nation’s Eric Schlosser.