The Truth About McDonald's Jobs

Trump attacks Harris's McDonald's job, but there's a much bigger story here

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McDonald’s jobs have become a running issue in the presidential race, but while media like The Daily Beast (above) have focused on the dispute over whether Vice Pres. Kamala Harris ever worked there, the bigger issue is everyone else who does. (Screenshot / The Daily Beast.)

It does not matter whether Vice Pres. Kamala Harris worked at a McDonald’s during college. But she says she did and hasn’t offered proof — like most normal people who didn’t hoard their college-job pay stubs — so obviously former Pres. Donald Trump has accused her of lying about it.

Of course, Trump’s McDonald’s consumption is legendary. As are his lies about the consequences for his belt line. So maybe if Trump is demanding documents about Harris’s McDonald’s past, while concealing medical records about the McDonald’s he’s lugging around in his Trumpian intestines, we should call this non-scandal girtherism?

Either way, it’s about as substantive as a story as a Big Mac is as a meal.

The real story here should be that, as The Daily Beast noted, Trump has said he prefers fast-food joints to individually owned restaurants for sanitary reasons. Wait, what? Trump crapped on Mom and Pop family restaurants in favor of bloodless corporate behemoths? Obvi!

In 2016, Trump said McDonald’s and Wendy’s could get slaughtered by one bad burger. That’s why he prefers them.

“I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe some place that you have no idea where the food is coming from.”

That’s right, our very stable genius thinks that restaurants owned by local business moguls and franchised from a corporate overlord, employing people who do not give a shit about the place and want out as soon as possible are more hygienic than restaurants that are a family’s bread and butter and legacy.

But even that shouldn’t be the big McDonald’s story here. Because it turns out that Harris’s McDonald’s job isn’t the only one that Republicans don’t believe in.

Earlier this year, right-wing media was brimming with stories about how California’s new fast-food minimum wage of $20 an hour would destroy jobs and restaurants. As I wrote in March (the week before the new wage kicked in), it was bullshit.

Franchise owners were reportedly cutting hours and letting workers go even before the new wage kicked in, for some reason choosing not to reap the revenue those workers would have generated prior to the wage hike. And much of the reporting conflated correlation with causation, connecting layoffs to the wage by dint of when the layoffs were happening, rather than why.

“​​California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise,” the Wall Street Journal headlined. “As,” not “Because.”

In July, the Wall Street Journal editorial board took a victory lap, citing an AP report that franchise owners were cutting hours.

Those reduced hours, it turns out, were entirely anecdotal. As the AP story noted, but the WSJ forgot to mention, there hasn’t been time to generate enough data to infer anything about the wage hike’s long-term impact.

But the story also included some of the short-term data that was available. However many hours were anecdotally being reported as cut, the AP notes, 8,000 new fast-food jobs were created in the first two months of the new minimum wage. Also not mentioned by the WSJ.

When new June data came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) — who signed the new wage into law — took a victory lap of his own. In a press release last week, Newsom touted the state’s highest-ever level of fast food jobs, thanks to the addition of 11,000 jobs under the new wage.

Here are the BLS numbers Newsom’s citing (note the bigness of July 2024):

California Republicans then pushed back on Newsom’s pushback, dinging him for using numbers that weren’t seasonally adjusted — which doesn’t seem like a felony offense in a state that barely has seasons, but still, okay, fair.

“Newsom can pick cherries and skew numbers all he wants but the data itself shows he’s being dishonest and his policies are disastrous for our economy” Senate Republican Leader Brian W. Jones said in the statement.

And the Republicans are right, Newsom’s numbers aren’t seasonally adjusted. On the other hand, the difference between January and June last year isn’t far off from the same seasonal gap this year.

But let’s consider the numbers that the Republicans themselves point to in their release. Sure enough, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows us a decline starting in January, three months before the new wage kicked in:

As the state’s Senate Republicans note, Newsom is only citing data after the April 1 wage hike. “This disingenuous approach ignores the likelihood that employers may have preemptively reduced staffing in anticipation of the increase,” the release says.

But Newsom signed the law in September 2023, after which employment rates climbed for several months, even though employers knew the rate hike was coming. There’s nothing about January that correlates with the law.

And even in the chart favored by Republicans, there’s a sharp rebound in July hiring. The GOP release called it “modest gains in the typical summer hiring surge of July,” citing the same seasonal factors that they said disqualified Newsom’s data.

Either way you slice and flip it, even the Republican data don’t show the economic meltdown that was predicted. Prices have gone up for lots of reasons having nothing to do with wage hikes. Layoffs have occurred for reasons having lots to do with automation.

But the McDonald’socalypse has not happened. The only thing melting down is a thin simulacrum of cheese atop a thin patty of salt and meat byproducts.

And organized labor reportedly is hearing that high wages mean less turnover in those non-destroyed jobs. So franchise owners are saving on training and recruiting.

The economy has survived. The industry has survived. And higher wages are being earned by some three quarters of a million people. Seasonally adjusted.

TCB

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