Summer camp at Chick-fil-A

Why are parents paying for their kids to learn fast-food work?

The shocking fact that Chick-fil-A runs what they call a “summer camp” has been circulating on just about every social media platform. The camp is really a brief experience where parents pay the giant fast-food corporation in order to have their children visit one of the locations and spend a morning learning a few things. Namely, Chick-fil-A says that kids will get the immense privilege of learning a little about how to serve customers. The company is not shy about advertising exactly what it is they’re up to. On a flier for the “camp” they explain that kids will learn about taking customer orders, bagging those orders, and even learning how to be the corporation’s mascot. All for the low, low price of $35.

One local news segment gives us some disconcerting insights into the phenomenon of the fast-food summer camp. In the brief clip a mom, who is sending her daughter to the Chick-fil-A experience, explains that she and her family go to the chain every week, and therefore her daughter, “wanted her to learn kind of how things work and operate.” Then, when asked what her daughter Chloe is most excited about, this mom says, “Oh, she definitely likes to talk. So it's probably gonna be taking orders.” In the interview the woman also talks about how her niece attended the child-labor learning experience the year before, which added to her daughter’s desire to go spend part of a day working for Chick-fil-A while learning a few of the service industry ropes. And mom was happy to pay for the experience.

In this one example, this one scenario, we see so much of our current dystopia distilled that it’s hard to know where to start. The very idea of a corporation providing a summer camp, in truth a little summer child labor experience that gets kids excited about working for them, is diabolical to begin with. Then the parental willingness to pay is confusing and saddening, but it brings our attention to the way that free summer programming is too often unavailable to families. Of course the parents are largely willing to pay because their kids are interested in and excited by the idea of going to Chick-fil-A and learning the ropes. But why do they agree? Why do they send their children to learn how to take orders and serve customers at a fast-food spot? That’s where the distortions of our culture meet the ways we fail to provide for kids and families.

Summer camps should be freely available to all, and while there are a handful of options the norm is still that families have to pay for programs where their children get to have fun and learn and grow during the summer. This quite obviously isn’t how it should work, and public schools as well as other venues should offer publicly funded summer programming for kids everywhere. Instead our society not only lacks universal summer enrichment, but we find public education as a whole under attack just about everywhere. In some places it’s government-funded vouchers for private schools, while in many more it’s the charter movement and the defunding of public education through other avenues. Part of the reason Americans are willing to let one of the most important and transformative institutions in our country be sabotaged by conservatives and the rich is that we have an outsized and misleading faith in the “free market” and private institutions. After generations, centuries really, of being lied to by big business and capitalists, a whole lot of people believe that private enterprise is inherently better than public goods. Not only is that patently false, but when it comes to the treatment of children businesses have every incentive to abuse our kids and no incentive to be benevolent.

The clearest example of how corporations actually feel about us, and our children, is child labor. We all know how children were used and abused in factories and shipyards and elsewhere in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the super-rich and their companies have been attempting to increase the use of minors in the workplace in recent years. The U.S. Department of Labor reported an 88% increase in overall child labor violations between 2019 and 2023. This increase in violations being discovered is due in part to increased enforcement under the current administration, but it’s also due to a very concerted, capitalist-funded effort to roll back laws protecting kids. At least 61 bills to weaken child labor protections have been introduced across 29 states in the last three years.

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Billionaires and corporations are unhappy with the increase in labor power since the start of the pandemic, where workers have been in a better bargaining position both due to unions and due to the diminished number of workers due to death and disability. Fewer workers means we are each in higher demand. But in this case the bosses reject basic economics and the idea of supply and demand, and have instead pivoted in part to trying to put more children to work. And Chick-fil-A counts themselves among the ranks of businesses breaking the law in their treatment of child workers. In 2023 the company was hit with $187,467 in fines for employing 237 minors as young as 14 in violation of child labor laws. Their supposed Christian values were readily tossed aside in the face of profit motive.

And those small fines didn’t stop them either. The company not only continues to employ, and abuse, children, they also contract with an Alabama poultry plant where four kids were found working on the kill floor on May 1st of this year. Last year, a 16-year-old worker died at the same plant. This is the reality of Chick-fil-A and many companies like them. At the same time as they host a little summer camp they exploit kids and don’t care about their lives. This abusive and sometimes deadly child labor dynamic has no place in our country, neither in the form of dangerous jobs for 14-year-olds or fake “summer camps.”

I find myself surprised to even be needing to make these arguments, as sometimes happens, but the relationships that brands have so successfully cultivated with so many people, layered on top of years of pro-business propaganda, have gotten us to a place where too many parents are willing and even eager to pay a known exploiter and abuser of children to teach their kids how to be fast food workers, and where too many kids are excited to attend. No matter how good the marketing of these companies may be, they aren’t institutions that care about us. No matter how fun their ads are, and their branding is, companies aren’t places of joy or coolness or community. Corporations view us as their little cash cows and are merciless about extracting money from us, and our children. So before us lies the task of helping people realize these truth and of building the public goods to make things like a Chick-fil-A “summer camp” unnecessary and irrelevant.

We need free summer camp and good education for all. We need an economy where parents and kids never feel like child labor is a good option. And we need a society where corporations aren’t placed on pedestals for people to develop parasocial relationships with, but instead where a wide range of wonderful public goods grants us the time and space to figure out what really matters to us, what we really care about. And I guarantee that if we build that reality we’ll learn how relationships with each other, art, learning, and a huge range of interests and pursuits and ways of caring for one another easily take precedence over sending our kids to see how fast food companies make their chicken nuggets, and how they can take customer orders for said nuggets. One day we’ll look back at this world and wonder how we ever let it persist. Our lives will be so comprehensively better that both the first era of child labor, and the current one, will look to us like a second dark age.

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