In many places it is a law that gloves must be worn with ALL ready-to-eat (RTE) foods, meaning cooked foods but also salad ingredients, cheeses, bread, etc. The problem, as I've mentioned before, is that so long as gloves are on you're legal. What this does (and it's easy to see at most fast food joints where the employees where gloves) is offer a false sense of security to the customer and the employee. If you touch raw chicken, e.g, then a RTE item you've just cross-contaminated--gloves are not going to prevent that. Cough into a glove hand and then pick up bread to make a sandwich--same thing. Wipe your nose, scratch your head--you get the idea.
Single-use disposible gloves, like one sees at Subway, are better because--so long as the staff is instructed to do so--they are put on to make one sandwich then tossed. My problem is with fitted latex or vinyl gloves that are often donned at the beginning of a shift and infrequently changed. Frequent thorough hand-washing is, imo, better. It is very easy to get used to the feel of the gloves and simply go about your shift doing some or all the things (and more) mentioned above.
Jim-- Yes, you're right. Problems with chicken happen when it is undercooked (decidedly not proper food handling) but far more occurrences of salmonella and campylobacter poisoning occur because of cross-contamination: using a cutting board for RTE food on which raw chicken was previously placed without adequate cleaning of the board, handling raw chicken then RTE food without proper handwashing, and the like.
Just a little salmonella tidbit I got today in an e: "Quarterly Progress Report on Salmonella Testing of Elected Raw Meat and Poultry Products: Preliminary Results, April-June 2006"
Table 1 says the contamination rate is: whole chickens 11.8%; hogs 1.1%; Cows/bulls 0.0%; Steers/Heifers 0.0%; ground beef 0.6%; ground chicken 80.0%, ground turkey 20.9%; whole turkey 11.4%.