Faces of a Fast-Food Nation

During the Pandemic, Fast-Food Workers Face Risk and Rudeness.

Margaret Talbot

Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour, an amount that bears only the sketchiest relationship to the cost of living in many parts of the country. Twenty-nine states have set their own, higher minimum wage, somewhere between $8.65 and $13.50. On November 3rd, Florida voters approved raising the state’s baseline to fifteen dollars an hour. (This rate is the goal, and the namesake, of the grassroots movement the Fight for Fifteen; seven other states are phasing in such an increase, and Washington, D.C., has mandated one already.) Fast-food workers – for whom the federal minimum wage is often both floor and ceiling – are among the Americans who have been deemed essential in the pandemic. Especially in places where indoor dining is not permitted, drivethroughs have been providing quick sustenance to everyone from doctors and nurses to Zooming workers weary of cooking. But, for most fast-food employees, wages haven’t budged since covid-19 made going to work a daily risk. Alana Ganoe, a twenty-six-year-old who works at a Bojangles in Winchester, Virginia, says that, in order to earn enough to care for herself and her two young children, she has to clock at least fifty hours a week – many of them at night, because her kindergartner is in school remotely. “I’m not asking for, like, twenty dollars an hour, because I do get a decent pay-check, and my boyfriend is a tremendous help,” she says. “But, if I were to work less, I wouldn’t have the money for the rent, the lights, food.”

Fast-food work is stressful: chronic understaffing, hot grease, time clocks monitoring your breaks, enough unkind customers to sour a whole night. “When they see you in the uniform, it’s like they forget you’re a human being,” Cherta Cogle, who made $8.50 an hour at an A. & W./Long John Silver’s in Charles Town, West Virginia, says. (She recently left for Walmart, where she is filling carts for online orders.) “They forget you have feelings. That’s been sitting on my chest for so long, wanting to say that. It’s just sad. People are rude to them when they’re working, so they want to be the rude customer when it’s their day off.” Cogle says that the pandemic ratcheted up her anxiety: “Sometimes customers have spit spray. I’m trying not to get sick. I always wore my mask, but a lot of people wouldn’t wear them, or they’d have them below their chin.”

In 2019, the New York-based photographer Richard Renaldi started taking pictures of fast-food workers around the country. He was drawn to the project, he says, because these are “people that millions of Americans see every day – but, at the same time, they’re invisible, because a lot of low-wage labor isn’t appreciated and is taken for granted.” Renaldi uses an old-fashioned, large-format view camera, the kind with accordion-pleated bellows. The approach is time-consuming: it takes him about forty-five minutes of setup to get two to four images. “I love the way that, with the view camera, you stop and you see the subject – you see each other,” he says. “It just slows everything down.” The pains-taking process conjures a different effect than what Renaldi calls the “grab-and-go of a lot of photojournalism,” or the casual ubiquity of cell-phone photography. Renaldi’s black-and-white images are formal, exalted, like nineteenth-century studio portraiture. His subjects hold our gaze; they compel us to see the human being in the uniform.