In your opinion, what is the worst corporate fast food or family style restaurant? Mine is Red Lobster, what's yours?

[JoseBalow]

15. I have been boycotting Red Lobster for decades

after I learned how horribly they exploited the Miskito people who dive for their lobsters. Not only under-paying for their labor, but completely abandoning them and their families when they die become permanently disable due to their working conditions.

I read several articles about Red Lobster's greed and inhumanity towards these poor indigenous people back in the early 90's and I was horrified. I vowed then to never give Red Lobster a penny of my money, and to spread the information about their practices whenever I got the chance. Like now.

Fuck Red Lobster.

Dying for Lobster

So when Izdepski first visited the Mosquito Coast along the Nicaragua-Honduras border to witness the working conditions under which lobster divers (buzos de langostas) operate, he was horrified. “I had my epiphany,” he tells Mark Jacobson in the Natural Resources Defense Council’s OnEarth (Fall 2004). “I understood that I was a diver, I made my living as a diver, that diving was my life–and that what was going on in La Miskitia was the moral Armageddon of the diving world, a slow-motion underwater genocide.” In 1995 Izdepski co-founded SubOceanSafety, a nonprofit group that seeks to improve working conditions for the Miskito Indians who comb the Caribbean Sea searching for what’s known locally as “red gold.”

Over the past two decades, lobster fishing has exploded into a $50 million industry in Nicaragua and Honduras. The prized crustaceans now account for nearly 10 percent of Nicaragua’s foreign trade. Roughly 90 percent of that harvest ends up in the bellies of American and Canadian consumers. U.S. corporations such as Darden Restaurants, owners of the Red Lobster chain, and Sysco, a wholesale food distributor, are the primary customers.

https://www.utne.com/politics/dyingforlobster/

Since fishing for spiny lobster off the Caribbean coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua became industrialized in the 1980s to meet demand from the United States, the Miskito Indian divers who are the first link in the supply chain have moved farther and farther out to sea as stocks vanish in shallow waters.

They descend to depths of 100 to 120 feet, repeatedly diving and resurfacing, pushed by poverty to ignore all the safety rules. A few die every season; many more are paralyzed by decompression sickness, commonly known as the bends.

During a two-week fishing trip, they make as many as 12 to 16 dives a day — no more than two are recommended at that depth — to scrabble for a catch that earns them about $3 a pound. (On a productive trip, they may catch as much as 100 pounds of lobster, but they must pay expenses that total about 40 percent.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/world/americas/10honduras.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8Ew.RDyg.f1PBQPbutKKr&smid=url-share