Diagnostic Draft

Directions:

Students will here revise their class draft from Monday about Eric Schlosser’s perspective on immigrant labor practices in the industrial food system. They will do so by expanding their source text from Schlosser’s PBS video interview to the short passage below from Fast Food Nation.

For this assignment, students should refer back to the Assignment One hand out. They are trying to name and then define the relationship between corporate food companies and corporate food workers. This act of naming is, in fact, a form of argumentation. Students are then also trying to organize claims to support this argument.

Students should aim to draft at least ONE type-written page by expanding their introduction, possibly revising their thesis statement, and writing at least two paragraphs that support their thesis statement. Each paragraph should contain a topic sentence that supports the thesis statement. This topic sentence should also contain the main idea of the paragraph.

Students should incorporate their work on the passage below into the writing they have already begun.

Passage:

Production supervisors tend to be men in their late twenties and early thirties…They earn about $30,000 a year, plus bonuses and benefits…It comes with a fair amount of pressure…The job also brings enormous power. Each supervisor is like a little dictator in his or her section of the plant, largely free to boss, fire, berate, or reassign workers. That sort of power can lead to all sorts of abuses, especially when the hourly workers being supervised are women.  

Many women told me stories about being fondled and grabbed on the production line, and the behavior of the supervisors sets the tone for the other male workers. In February of 1999, a federal jury in Des Moines awarded $2.4 million to a female employee at an IBP slaughterhouse. According to the women’s testimony, coworkers had “screamed obscenities and rubbed their bodies against hers while supervisors laughed.” Seven months later, Monfort agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of fourteen female workers in Texas. As part of the settlement, the company paid the women $900,000 and vowed to establish formal procedures for handling sexual harassment complaints…

The sexual relationships between supervisors and “hourlies” are for the most part consensual. Many female workers optimistically regard sex with their superior as a way to gain a secure place in American society, a green card, a husband – or at the very least transfer to an easier job at the plant.

            From Fast Food Nation (175-176)