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Is the Job in Fast-Food Restaurant Exploitative?

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4. Is the job in fast-food restaurant exploitative? It yes, in what sense it is exploitative? Please also take into consideration the implementation of minimum wage when illustrating your argument.
Introduction
Exploitation is a term to describe person that are being mistreated. Karl Marx used it to explain the relationship between the capitalists and workers. It is claim that the value of a product is depended by how much labor has paid on it such as time, energy or ideas. Therefore the price of a product minus the cost and energy to produce a product or other sufficient usages should be equal to what a worker can earn. However, as the workers own nothing but their labor, they could only sell their labor to capitalists who own all …show more content…

In 2007, there are approximately 32,100 fast food restaurant employee, compare with unemployment workers of age group between 20 to 50, which is over 100,000 in 2007. It is obvious that the supply of potential workers is far more than the job opportunities. Since the workers lack of bargaining power, it means capitalists could heavily exploit and extract the surplus value from workers. In order to earn a living or at least subsidies the family, workers have no choice but to accept the offer from capitalists.
Exploitation in Hong Kong fast food restaurant There are two sectors for capitalists to exploit the labors, first is low wage and long working hour , another would be on cutting employee welfare, and these two kinds of exploitations are common in fast food restaurant. It is terrified that the first aspect, low wage and long working hour, is a kind of norm in fast food industry. In before minimum wage launched, the average wage of fast food restaurant workers is extremely low, most of the fast food restaurant offer the workers with less than $20 per hour. Besides pay for a low wage to workers, long working hour and mechanized steps in the fast food industry also reflect exploitation on the workers. As the capitalists treat labor as a product, they want to use this product to gain profit as much and fast as it can. On one hand they reduce the wage of workers, on the other hand the want to increase the rate of getting reward.

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