McDonalds Ugly Truth

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The high fat, sugar, salt and calorie content in McDonalds food is one of many causes of obesity. The grease found in french-fries are served in too high quantities, causing higher fat content in the customer's diet, and the soda only adds to the amount of fat. If you add up the calories of the average cheese burger with french-fries and a large coke in the menu it would adds up to 1380, over half of what you should have in one day. This increases the percentage of fat people in the US when we are trying to solve this problem. The growth of McDonalds is the growth of obesity.

Besides health issues, the company also has issues with its workers. The corporation pays minimum wage to their workers, who essentially do assembly line, factory-type work. The production-line system de-skills the work itself: anybody can grill a hamburger, and cleaning or serve a burger to customers needs no training. So there is no need to employ chefs or qualified staff , it is just anybody prepared to work for low wages. According to James, “In the 31,000 McDonalds worldwide, most of the workers get paid minimum wage in spite of the fact that the company is now worth more than a billion dollars”.

There are no workers unions allowed in McDonalds, the workers in catering do badly in terms of pay and conditions. They are at work in the evenings and at weekends, doing long shifts in hot, smelly, noisy environments. It's obvious that all large chain-stores and junk-food giants depend for their fat profits on the labor of young people. “McDonald's is no exception: three-quarters of its workers are under 21” (What’s). To improve this through Trade Union negotiation is very difficult: “there is no union specifically for these workers, and the ones they could join show little interest in the problems of part-timers which is mostly women” (What’s).

A recent survey of workers in burger-restaurants found that 80% said they needed union help over pay and conditions. Another difficulty is that the 'kitchen trade' has a high proportion of workers from ethnic minority groups who with little chance of getting work elsewhere. McDonald's have a policy of preventing unionization by getting rid of pro-union workers. According to James, so far this has succeeded everywhere in the world except Sweden, and in Dublin after a long struggle.

Over the past four decades McDonald’s has been transformed from a local burger shack serving fresh beef patties, into a huge corporation using mass production methods to produce and sell their products. The amount of obesity in America increase or the diet lifestyle that people have will always depends on themselves either they choose to eat McDonalds or not. McDonald’s logo “loving it” fits on how you look at it. In the end, public awareness might be the most important tool.

Works Cited

Friedman, Lauren F. "Here's Why Eating McDonalds Every Day Is A Bad Idea (Even If

You Do Lose Weight)." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 06 Jan. 2014. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

"History of McDonald's Restaurants :: AboutMcDonalds.com." History of McDonald's

Restaurants :: AboutMcDonalds.com. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

James, Randy. "McDonald's Abroad." Time. Time Inc., 28 Oct. 2009. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.

"McDonalds – I Am So Not Lovin' It!" Health Insurance India, Medical Health Insurance,

Mediclaim Policy. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

Robbins, John. "How Bad Is McDonald's Food?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com,

08 Oct. 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

"What's Wrong with McDonald's?" What's Wrong with McDonald's? N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb.

2014.