This is just another example of why several things are massively wrong in our country and the way wealth distribution is at the heart of it all...
First, the employee working while sick most likely had no choice. These jobs are at or near minimum wage across the country and that can be well below the poverty line. People in these jobs may not have any choice but to work through an illness because the loss of a day's pay is a crushing percentage of their already stretched take-home.
Second, the company clearly made a big show of closing its stores and holding food handling safety training for its employees, but what about enforcing workplace standards via corporate auditing and management. Were these done? If yes, why did they fail? If no, why is that? If it is found that the owner of this particular store was cutting corners, does the "we didn't know" defense apply to franchisees as well as to corporate entities...or are corporations only people when they are doling out campaign cash instead of endangering public health?
Last, cheap food - made from low grade ingredients, prepared en masse by underpaid employees and with the nutritional value of cardboard lathered in honey and sprinkled in sugar is killing us all and contributing MASSIVELY to the obesity epidemic in the country and around the world. Our entire food paradigm is in dangerous imbalance with both our daily requirements and our evolutionary ability to digest, process and survive the frankenfood that surrounds us. From antibiotics in the livestock and ground water to growth hormones in the milk and meat to chemical concoctions in the prepared foods there is enough real time experimentation going on in our bodies over the last 40 years to make anyone serious about their health more than a little concerned.
Things like this outbreak come and go and sometimes people stop to notice, but usually it is water under the bridge in a few days. THAT is more concerning to me than the fact that another fast food restaurant poisoned its customers again. Until the OWNERS of these places are forced to pay severe, PERSONAL penalties...and I am not talking about a $100,000 fine, I am talking a significant % of their GROSS receipts for a sustained period AND a huge PERSONAL fine AND a significant penalty for any repeat offenses, then these kinds of corporate malfeasance will continue.
The remedy is in more employee-owned and employee-run restaurants and businesses, where there is no franchise owner who reaps the lion's share of the profits for the lamb's share of the physical work. Business models that force employees to CARE and rewards them for it with much larger shares of the profits. The distribution of wealth in America allows all of this...owners to buy friendly, toothless or non-existent regulators and enforcement of health and welfare standards...minimum wage treadmill jobs to keep people running themselves to death for literally peanuts...insecurity in the middle class to cow them into silence for fear of being thrown into poverty themselves within a pay period...
It doesn't have to be this way, we've just allowed ourselves to be fooled into believing it does. The world is constantly changing and not always for the better, but the acceptance of shit food and shit jobs and shit wage distribution is not something that we should continue to accept while our politicians gorge themselves on hidden benefits and kushy lobbyist gigs when they rotate out of D.C. or the State houses.
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