Re: hamburger-making as manuf? [was: progress on wetlands]

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol's right in principle.  But these days, most of the
hamburger-manufacturing is done outside of the fast-food joint (e.g.,
McD's). Only the last stage -- assembly, warming -- is done at the
actual store.

Either way, neither "manufacturing" nor "service production" is an
ethical concept. Nor are "productive" and "unproductive" labor (for
Marx at least).

On 4/18/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Eubulides wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > What do you expect from a kakistocracy that considers flipping
> > hamburgers manufacturing?
>
> I'd never thought of "manufacturing" as an ethical label -- i.e. that
> one judges whether an activity is manufacturing or not by making an
> ethical judgment of the produce manufactured.
>
> This could start a slippery slope leading to the conclusion that working
> in a flour mill is not manufacturing because after all people could
> grind their own wheat at home.
>
> Turning a raw material [e.g. ground meat; sacks of lettuce] into a
> finished and usable product, a hamburger, sounds like manufacturing to
> me. It's another question whether or not it is a humanly useful product
> or a destructive one.
>
> Carrol
>


--
Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence
of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles