“It was a Meaningless Job”: Exploring Youth Post-Secondary Students’ Employment in the Fast Food Industry

Fast food work is often described as low-skilled, alienating, standardized, and highly routinized. The fast food industry employs a disproportionately large number of youth post-secondary students who work on a temporary basis and do so part-time or during school breaks to earn money toward educational and living expenses. To date, little is known about post-secondary student fast food workers’ perceptions of their employment. Data from interviews with 32 post-secondary student fast food workers were analyzed. The student workers viewed their jobs as unimportant and low-skilled; however, as students, they were not seeking work that provided opportunities for creativity and meaning, rather, they emphasized the temporary nature of their work and described the inherent stigma and lack of prestige associated with long-term employment in the fast food industry. The students were critical of longer-term workers and animosity between student and non-student workers was expressed. These findings suggest that identity management theories, such as Ashforth and Kreiner’s dirty work, may be better suited to understanding students’ participation in fast food work than traditional Marxist frameworks.