Fast Food Diaries Part 3: The Real Gold Behind the Golden Arches

    For the past 3 months, I’ve worked at McDonald’s. I’ve woken up at 3 a.m. 3 days a week to take orders and make parfaits, coming home so tired I’d dream about working cash registers. It’s a tedious job, the sort that requires more presence of body than presence of mind, but there was one thing that made those slow, stagnant hours a little less terrible: the people.
  
   Over the past 3 months, I’ve been privileged to meet an amazing group of people, folks who work longer and fight harder than anyone I have ever known. I’ve listened to life stories, discussed politics, looked at baby pictures, and laughed at countless jokes. There were a lot of things I hated about my McJob, but I’m extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to work alongside these people and learn the lessons they had to teach me. Before I worked at McDonald’s, I didn’t know what hard work looked like, but I have witnessed sheer, dogged diligence week in and week out for months now, and it has taught me what it means to work for a living.

    I’ve been going to McDonald’s since I was a little girl, but the past 3 months have introduced me to a different side of the golden arches, the side where real people work real hard for a company that barely pays them enough to support their families. I’ve always known that fast food companies get rich off cheap food and cheap labor, but it took living it to see just how staunch the paradox is.

    Fast food is one of the lowest paid of all occupations, with a median salary of $18,564 per year from 2009 to 2011, compared to the U.S. average of $42,110. The average hourly pay of a McDonald’s employee is about $7.73 an hour, according to self-reported salary cite GlassDoor.com, which is significantly less than the $8.90 median pay per hour of all fast food workers.
  
   In contrast, the previous CEO of McDonald’s, John Skinner, earned $8.75 million in 2013, or about $9,247 an hour.^1 In other words, it would take the average McDonald’s employee about a million hours of labor, or more than a hundred years on the clock, to earn what Skinner makes in a year, and the gap is only widening.
  
   According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the pay gap between McDonald’s workers and their CEO’s has doubled in the past 10 years. Twenty years ago, the CEO earned 230 times the salary of a full-time worker paid the federal minimum wage, today, that gap has ballooned to 580 times the average full-time salary.
  
   While the rest of the economy suffered from the recession of 2008, the fast food industry profited. McDonald’s reported higher sales in 2008 than in 2006 or 2007. While the U.S. employment rate dropped 1.3 percent from 2009 to 2011, fast-food employment jumped 7.3 percent, but it’s the shareholders, not the workers, who are benefiting from this growth. In 2011, McDonald’s spent $6 billion on share repurchases and dividends, enough to increase the salary of every McDonald’s restaurant worker by $14,286.
  
   Did you read that right? McDonald’s has the power to increase the salary of every one of its restaurant employees by $14,000, and yet it chooses not to. Instead, McDonald’s spends thousands of dollars on lobbying against minimum wage increases at the state and local level. McDonald’s is not a small business. It has the power and the capital to improve the lives of its employees, and yet the McResource phone hotline advises employees to apply for food stamps.

    It took 3 months of working 2 minimum wage jobs to show me what it really means to work, but it also makes me wonder, why do some have to work so hard to support themselves, while others barely work at all?  Why does it take the average McDonald’s employee 4 months of working overtime to earn what the CEO makes in an hour? Why does McDonald’s have operating locations in approximately 118 nations around the world, and yet the average hourly pay of a McDonald’s employee is less than $8 an hour? Why did McDonald’s open nearly 600 new stores during the recession of 2008, and yet the McResource website advises employees to “quit complaining," because "stress levels increase by 15 percent after 10 minutes of complaining."^2 Why, in the self-proclaimed “land of opportunity,” are so many smart, hardworking people making less than $20,000 a year? How is this even possible? How can anyone in this ridiculously wealthy nation work 40+ hours a week and still struggle to feed their family? We live in an age of convenience, where fast, cheap food is considered an unalienable right, but it’s time to consider the real price of that Big Mac. It’s easy to forget, but there are real people behind those golden arches and real stories behind those smiles, and they deserve better than this.

Footnotes

1. Analysis is based on John Skinner and not the current McDonald’s CEO, Donald Thompson, because full data on Thompson’s salary has not been made publicly available. 

2. Amidst public criticism, McDonald’s shut down the McResource website in December, 2013.

 Sources

Berman, Jillian (10 December 2013). "It takes a McDonald's worker 4 months to earn what the CEO gets in an hour." The Huffington Post. Retrieved 26 June 2014.  

Kim, Susanna (21 November 2013). "McDonald's defends telling employees to 'Quit Complaining' to reduce stress." ABC News. Retrieved 26 June 2014.

Neuman, Scott (26 December 2013). "McDonald's shuts down website that told workers to avoid fast food." NPR. Retrieved 26 June 2014.

Patton, Leslie (11 December 2012). "McDonald's $8.25 man and $8.75 million CEO shows pay gap." Bloomberg. Retrieved 26 June 2014.  

Taylor, Marisa (25 October 2013). "McDonald's advises employee to apply for food stamps." america.aljazeera.com. Al Jazeera America, LLC. Retrieved 26 June 2014.