YOU WOULD THINK THAT EMPLOYEES WOULD do something if they discovered that a customer had died on the premises.
But that’s not necessarily so, according to the Associated Press, which reported that police discovered the body of a trucker in a tractor trailer rig that had sat—with its engine running—
in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant for nine days. Employees swept the parking lot around the truck but ignored the situation for over a week until the stench got so bad that someone finally called the police.
That lack of response doesn’t surprise James Sheehy, a human resources manager in Houston, who spent his summer vacation working undercover at a fast-food restaurant owned by a relative.78 Introduced to coworkers as a management trainee from another franchise location who was being brought in to learn the ropes, Sheehy was initially viewed with some suspicion, but by the third day the group had accepted him as just another employee. Sheehy started out as a maintenance person and gradually rotated through various cooking and cleaning assignments before ending up as a cashier behind the front counter.
Most of Sheehy’s fellow employees were teenagers and college students who were home for the summer and earning additional spending money. Almost half came from upper-income families and the rest from middle-income neighborhoods. More than half were women, and a third were minorities. What Sheehy reports is a whole generation of workers with a frightening new work ethic: contempt for customers, indifference to quality and service, unrealistic expectations about the world of work, and a get-away-withwhat......

Discussion Questions 1. How typical are the attitudes that Sheehy reports?
Does his description of a new work ethic tally with your own experiences?
2. What are the implications for the future of American business of the work ethic Sheehy describes?
3. Some might discount Sheehy’s experiences either as being the product of one particular industry or as simply reflecting the immaturity of young employees.
Would you agree?
4. Is it reasonable to expect workers, especially in a capitalist society, to be more devoted to their jobs, more concerned with quality and customer service, than Sheehy’s coworkers were? What explains employee theft?
5. In what ways does the culture of our capitalist society encourage attitudes like those Sheehy describes?