Harris & McDonald’s, I’m Lovin’ It

When I was fighting (I’ve come to hate that over-used word, but in this case it really was a hell of a fight) to get the Edgewater Hotel built in Madison, one thing I touted was the jobs it would create in an economy still recovering from the 2008 crash.

In response I was accused of supporting “temporary” jobs in the construction industry and “dead end” jobs in the hotel business. Apparently, everybody was supposed to get a bachelors degree, then a masters, then a PhD, then tenure on the typical progression of the American ladder of success.

The critics, some of whom had progressed along that very ladder and should have been smarter, seemed oblivious to the fact that construction workers make entire careers out of temporary projects or that there’s no such thing as a dead end job.

This occurs to me now as we hear Kamala Harris tout her experience working at McDonald’s. If that was a dead end job then we should all have dead ends that arrive on Air Force Two and perhaps one plane higher.

I also started out at McDonald’s, a job I landed a month or so after my sixteenth birthday. My ultimate dead end job was Mayor of Madison where I fought for more of those dead end jobs in the hotel industry. Actually, McDonald’s claims that over 12% of Americans have worked there at one time or another.

McDonald’s was a super efficient organization. They didn’t tolerate standing around. When there was nothing else to do you “bevelled.” Bevelling involved taking a rag and some light abrasive (it was like Comet) and polishing the stainless steel — and a McDonald’s has a lot of stainless steel. But that was only one example. They were always trying to figure out how to do things better. There was a process for everything and when somebody — often a crew member right there on 76th and Oklahoma — figured out a better way they quickly adopted it.

And at a McDonald’s everybody learns the basics of employment: show up on time, be polite to customers, work well with your colleagues, listen to instructions, offer constructive feedback — all those soft skills that serve us well when we move on. And I did move on to all kinds of jobs as I worked my way through my last two years of high school and then college. I washed dishes in a rehab hospital, was a stock boy at Gimbels (I preferred “stock man” which made me sound more mature and also implied that I was wrestlin’ and brandin’ doggies and not wrestling racks of dresses and slacks), worked in the Law Library at the UW as well as various other limited term gigs.

Harris is touting her McDonald’s days now as a way of proving her middle class bona fides, especially vis a vis Donald Trump, whose entry level experience involved getting gifted a million dollar stake by his father. It’s a smart strategy. I and one-in-eight Americans can relate.

But I’d like to see her run with that a little bit. Talk about hard work, personal responsibility, initiative, merit, productivity and topics on that theme. Because too much of Harris’ party sees McDonald’s and similar employers as the enemy, a bastion of exploitive dead end jobs instead of an entry level training ground for success. That snobbishness that I saw in the Edgewater fight is all too common among NPR liberals.

It’s good to know Harris worked at McDonald’s. Now it would be even better to hear about what she gained from the experience.