Making Work Visible

We all love technology, but what will we do when it starts taking people’s jobs? Every time I go into McDonald’s and see someone order at the kiosk instead of the register, I think about how that is one more reason for McDonald’s to add another kiosk instead of hire another person.

Working in fast food is monotonous, fast paced and extremely frustrating. Workers, largely immigrants and people of color, are pushed to the limit with long hours full of nonstop tasks. Many have multiple food service jobs to get by. The fast food restaurant is a web, even a human machine made by the cooperation of all the separate parts. In this piece, I show the monotony of fast food work, visually and verbally and the meager salary fast food workers receive with a canvas made of old pay stubs from two different employers. The order taker’s script is poetic in its predictability. The choreography of the drive thru worker is the unchanging through every shift.

I worry what will happen when fast food chains like Taco Bell, where I worked for three years, develop technology to the point where a fraction of the number of workers are needed to keep a store running; to the point where machines are taking orders and folding burritos. In 2013, there were 3.6 million fast food workers in America. How will we compensate when their jobs are obsolete?