“Taylorizing” Burgers: A Fantasy

Since working in a fast-food restaurant is a common high school job, and since few students have not frequented a fast-food restaurant, students here reflect on “scientific management” with respect to an institution they are familiar with. This activity concludes by drawing on the three previous lessons included in Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond’s labor history curriculum, The Power in Our Hands — Paper Airplane Simulation and Free to Think, Talk, Listen, or Sing, which explored reasons for the changes in workplaces, and Modern Times, which explored the impact of these changes — for a look at the present. It’s important that students recognize that work could be organized differently than it presently is. That realization is a key aspect of not simply accepting our surroundings as natural or inevitable. The knowledge that things could be different is as crucial for understanding history as it is for feeling capable of taking meaningful action.

The Power In Our Hands — Available for Download

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This is one of the 16 lessons available from The Power In Our Hands. Other lessons available for individual download are:

Opening

• Acknowledgments, Notes to the Teacher, and Introduction

Unit I: Basic Understandings

• Organic Goodie Simulation
• Who Makes History?
• What Rights Do We Have?

Unit II: Changes in the Workplace/”Scientific Management”

• Paper Airplane Simulation
• Free to Think, Talk, Listen, or Sing
• Modern Times
• “Taylorizing” Burgers: A Fantasy

Unit III: Defeats, Victories, Challenges

• The Homestead Strike
• Birth of a Rank-and-File Organizer
• Lawrence, 1912: The Singing Strike

Unit IV: Our Own Recent Past

• It’s a Mystery—White Workers Against Black Workers
• Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union: Black and White Unite?
• 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike
• Union Maids

Unit V: Continuing Struggle

• Shutdown!—Confronting Plant Closures
• Labor Songs

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