Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 11, 1994 TAG: 9405120002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DEXTER WAUGH SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
DATELINE: BERKELEY, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
Regina Martinez, a third-year graduate student, once prepared an entire tray of hamburgers - minus the meat.
``I don't know what was going on in my mind,'' she said. ``I sent it along to the next person to wrap them up. I guess she noticed they felt a little light.''
``I kept forgetting to put ice in the drinks,'' said Julio Cammarota, a first-year graduate student who has finished his stint at a fast-food restaurant.
As part of a research project, Martinez and seven other students, along with anthropologist Carol Stack, have worked in minimum-wage jobs in fast-food burger restaurants since January 1993.
The idea is to get to know the young people who hold these jobs and the culture in which they work.
Although it won't be completed for at least another year, the project already has yielded some gritty, sometimes funny experiences and data for the students in Berkeley's graduate school of education.
``One of our researchers blew up the milkshake machine,'' said Stack, a professor in both education and women's studies.
One student was working when a holdup occurred. Another saw a customer brandish a knife. Fortunately, none of the students has been hurt, but they report the employees work in fear of violence.
Martinez, Cammarota and the other students said they frequently had trouble getting orders right, especially special orders from large groups of people.
Another student, a Chinese-American born in the Midwest who speaks English like the native she is, initially had trouble taking customers' orders, Stack said. One of them, assuming she was an immigrant, yelled at her, ``Why don't you learn English?''
``There does seem to be a lot of hostility to the fact a lot [of workers] don't speak English well,'' Stack said.
Her students found that many workers who were immigrants took a fast-food job largely to improve their English skills.
Stack said research on minority youth usually focuses on teen-age pregnancy, school dropouts, criminal behavior and family breakdown, but rarely if ever on youth at work.
``We don't know anything about poor kids who are working,'' said Stack, who has studied poverty for 20 years.
After a foundation representative asked Stack to do a study on unemployed youth, she responded by suggesting one on working youth.
``He said, `Geez, Carol, that turns my thinking upside down. Convince me.' So we wrote a proposal,'' she said.
The result was $600,000 in research funding from five foundations. Stack is conducting the study at three East Bay outlets of fast-food chains; Katherine Newman, a professor at Columbia University, is collecting data in an East Coast city. For reasons of privacy, the identities of the workers and the restaurants are not being disclosed.
But the study is being done with the restaurants' cooperation, and the workers are made aware that the researchers are students.
An initial survey of 200 employees in the East Bay found that very few of the workers were white. About a third were Asian-American, another third black and another third Latino. More than half were between the ages of 16 and 24. About 64 percent were foreign born. And 43 percent made less than $100 a week.
``Hard work, low wages,'' Cammarota summed up.
Many of the young workers are from families on welfare.
Working students have difficulties matching work and school schedules because restaurants often change an employee's shift from week to week, she said.
There are ``fast-food families,'' in which several members of the same extended family will be working at one restaurant, Stack said.
The turnover is high - more than half of those surveyed worked less than a year - yet the young workers Cammarota interviewed had plans for the future, to go to school or perhaps to own a business.
by CNB