Have 1 in 8 Americans really worked at McDonald’s?
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Have 1 in 8 Americans really worked at McDonald’s?
On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, one of the most valuable credentials you can have on your resume: Being a former McDonald’s employee.
Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump headed to the golden arches, where he served up fries at the drive-through to his supporters. “I’m looking for a job and I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did,” said Trump, who has a well-known affinity for the fast-food chain.
He claimed, without evidence, that Vice President Kamala Harris never worked there. “I’ve now worked [at McDonald’s] for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump said.
Harris reaffirmed that she worked at McDonald’s when recently asked by the media.
The vice president and her campaign have repeatedly touted her middle-class roots and her experience with the fast-food giant. During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris said she worked at McDonald’s, while advertisements for her 2024 campaign highlight her past stint there as well.
McDonald’s doesn’t appear to have proof that she worked there, but seems to think she did. In an internal message to employees, they cited their “1 in 8” advertising campaign, which claims that 1 in 8 Americans have worked for the restaurant at one point.
“Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had,” the message states.
We reached out to McDonald’s to find out how it arrived at this number, but did not receive a response by publication time.
Brian Callaci, chief economist at the Open Markets Institute, did some back-of-napkin calculations for us to figure out how the math could work out.
Let’s say there are about 13,500 locations, with 50 crew per location. That means 700,000 people currently work at McDonald’s now. There are more than 337 million people living in the U.S. That’s about 0.2% of the U.S. population, Callaci said.
Now let’s assume that 0.2% of the U.S. population worked at McDonald’s every year since 1960, and each employee only stayed one year. That would mean 12.5% of the population, or 1 in 8 people, would have worked at McDonald’s at some point, he explained.
Callaci added the caveat that you have to make some “pretty big assumptions” using this particular calculation.
To make it work, he explained this would mean McDonald’s has been as big as it is, relative to the U.S. economy, since 1960. It would also mean that the turnover rate averages 100% every year, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics says workers in the food services industry have a median tenure of two years.
But as you go further back in time, the proportion of McDonald’s crew members relative to the population drops off (again, if we’re assuming there are 50 workers per location). For example, in 1986, there were 7,000 U.S. McDonald’s locations, per The New York Times, and more than 240 million people living in the U.S.
In our hypothetical, that means about 0.15% of the population worked at McDonald’s that year.
We also know that the percentage of former McDonald’s workers in the U.S. hasn’t always been 1 in 8. In 1988, McDonald’s said 7% of the U.S. workforce held a job there. That’s about 1 out of every 14 workers. And keep in mind that the labor force is the number of people who are working or are actively looking for work, and it’s smaller than the actual U.S. population. That indicates the percentage of former employees relative to the total population was even smaller than 7%.
Regardless of their methodology, McDonald’s is sending a message with that 1 in 8 campaign. And it seems to be: “Everyone has worked at McDonald’s as a teenager, but no one stays: they go on to better things,” Callaci said.
Callaci said he thinks McDonald’s is using that message to justify its low wages. The average hourly pay at McDonald’s across the country is about $13 an hour, according to ZipRecruiter. (Although in California, the minimum wage for most fast-food workers recently rose to at least $20 an hour.)
When McDonald’s first started, the fast food-giant did target teenagers so they could avoid employing skilled workers who were often unionized, Callaci said.
For decades, they’ve used the message that these jobs are meant to be temporary and are not meant to support families, since teenagers are in these roles, Callaci said.
But it’s not just kids who are working these jobs anymore, he pointed out. Sixty percent of fast-food workers are over the age of 20, and 20% are over the age of 35, reported the Center for American Progress.
Although the company has a history of low pay, some employees felt accomplished working there.
Working at McDonald’s used to be a “badge of pride,” said Lisa Napoli, author of the book “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.” (Full disclosure: Napoli used to be a reporter and host at “Marketplace.”)
Napoli said she’s not surprised many people say they’ve worked there.
“For people of a certain generation, the training and discipline of working at a fast food joint was seen as an excellent way to make some cash while studying before moving on to the next thing. This was before service work was marginalized, especially as our class divide grows ever larger,” Napoli said.
While it’s marginalized, political leaders see the value in stating their working-class bonafides.
If you’re a presidential candidate, bringing up that you worked a service job at a restaurant like McDonald’s shows the voting population that you understand what it’s like to do the hard work that makes the world, not just the country, run, Napoli said.
“The world is engined by people who are doing extremely difficult work. Thankless work,” Napoli said.
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