I Know Fast Food May Taste Manufactured, But...

February 21, 2004

The CEA's Economic Report of the President raises an interesting question over the nature of manufacturing. Summarized here in the New York Times, the report discusses how the definition of manufacturing is fairly broad and inexact. Specifically, the report mentions the fast food industry as an industry which could, depending on interpretation, be classified as manufacturing. Most people would immediately see how ridiculous it is to lump burger-flipping in with auto production. But, as the Times points out, there are some economists who would like to see the fast food industry included in manufacturing. Perhaps because adding a company like McDonalds, which employs over 400,000 people, to the manufacturing sector would provide an instant boost to the number of people employed within that sector. There's no doubt that the manufacturing sector in this country is ailing, and reclassifying fast food as manufacturing would allow the administration to declare a paper "victory" in fixing the problem.

There is, however, an intriguing side-effect to such a reclassification. If the teenagers flipping burgers at McDonalds and its ilk are now considered part of the manufacturing workforce, does that open them up to being unionized? Hundreds of thousands of new "manufacturing" jobs sounds like a big magnet for the AFL-CIO.

And what about child labor laws? It's certainly a stretch to consider fast food a hazardous industry, but technically couldn't making a burger fall under "Meat packing or processing"? This is pretty far-fetched, but so is calling fast food preparation manufacturing.