McDonald's employees in Illinois won $15 minimum wage; now demand unions
By John F. Di Leo –
Speaking in Los Angeles recently, former Vice President Joe Biden – desperate to actually earn the top spot in the polls that he currently enjoys from name recognition and the vacuity of his opponents – tried to polish up his bonafides with Big Labor, throwing out this bit of red meat to the shop stewards:
“There is only one way you can fight back power,” Joe Biden shouted to his crowd. “That is with more power, and that’s union power… we should unionize McDonald’s!”
Never mind the fact that the era of serious labor abuse – sweatshops, dangerous work conditions, child labor, etc. – arguably making a strong case for the necessity of unions, was a century ago.
This candidate – who has never seemed to think for himself, so he’s likely parroting the beliefs of political consultants equally rooted in the past – believes that victory lies in tying himself, and the economy, to the apron strings of big labor.
This would be easily dismissed if it were just a political miscalculation. Democrats win primaries by appealing to the unions; thus it has been for generations. The only political question is how many votes this primary strategy loses them in the general election that follows.
But this brief snapshot of the Biden campaign – his desire to “unionize McDonald’s” – holds a more important lesson than just a mere reminder of the radical nature of Democratic primary contests.
What is a fast food employer?
Being typically locked in the mentality of the unionizers of the 19th century, Joe Biden acts as if McDonald’s and their competitors are giant corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees, all working in a big sweatshop with golden arches on top.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The modern restaurant chain is a corporate headquarters that owns or leases a number of restaurants, and directly employs people at that corporate headquarters, but that’s usually about it. Most of them work with the vast majority of “their” restaurants on a franchise arrangement, wherein a small businessman contracts for the right to a location (hopefully cleared from competition from the same brand for some reasonable geographical circle).
Some of these franchises are individually owned, some are owned by consortiums of investors, and some are managed by larger businesses that operate five, ten or twenty locations as a group.
The corporate headquarters sees its job as recruiting these franchisees and managing their relationships, developing product offerings and handling both national and regional advertising.
And every one of these franchises is an opportunity for an entrepreneurially-minded worker to build his own business with a proven product and lots of help.
Joe Biden sees McDonald’s – and other similar chains – as a wicked, abusive behemoth to be brought to heel… but an honest view reveals a network of opportunities, big and small, a ready selection of launching pads for skyrocketing careers, as each employee finds his own path.
What is a fast food job?
Well, there are lots of jobs at McDonald’s… as there are at all fast food restaurants.
- There’s the person who works at the register or the window, taking orders and entering them for the staff.
- There’s the person on the assembly line, operating the machinery with pre-made ingredients.
- There’s the person who manages the ordering of ingredients from corporate, and the person who unloads them from trucks and reloads the refrigerators and machines.
- There’s the person with the mop, constantly washing the floor, washing the tables, washing the equipment, washing the bathrooms, to keep the place up to code.
- There are assistant managers, managers and owners, doing the books and the scheduling, hiring the groundskeepers and window washing services for the outside.
- And then there are all the people at corporate and regional headquarters – from buyers to logistics managers, from food chemists in the research arm to accountants and lawyers managing the franchises… there are marketing wizards who manage the commercials, contests, movie merchandising tie-ins, and so many more, too many to list here.
Fast food has indeed become, in just half a century, one of the great career aggregators in the business world… and a key difference between the Left and Right, more often than not, can be seen as the difference between people who see the fast food industry as a dead end, and those who see it as a launching point.
If you take a job at the counter, and expect to eventually earn enough at that same job to support a family, then yes, you will be disappointed, because it can’t be done. That job simply isn’t worth a full time salary; it doesn’t merit that kind of pay. If you’re paid enough to buy a house and feed a family of four, and send your kids to college, just from working a drive-through window, then the restaurant is overpaying its staff and is going to be bankrupt long before you ever retire.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s a dead-end job; it just means it’s an entry-level job, like a broad doorway with an array of great options ahead, once you walk through it.
There are tens of thousands of success stories in that industry… people who started at a McDonald’s (or Wendy’s, or Arby’s, or Chick-fil-A, or Burger King… the same is true of all of them), and then somehow made the most of the experience.
They might have moved up in the restaurant itself – working up to be assistant manager, then manager, then maybe a district manager with responsibility for multiple locations.
They might have taken advantage of the chain’s school funding programs, and earned degrees in teaching or accounting or marketing or the sciences, so the fast food job helped them transfer into another career entirely.
They might have capitalized on the experience to go to the corporate headquarters, or to a related industry – the advertising, the manufacturing of kids’ meal toys, the growing or transportation of food, the development of the packaging.
Or they might have done something else entirely, just using this gig as a first or second rung on their career ladders, building a resume while attending high school or college, demonstrating that they could develop a record of ability and dependability, ready for a different job elsewhere.
All these are fine; all are valid uses of the fast food job.
Those first jobs are never about the paycheck. They’re about getting experience, developing working skills, preparing to move up to the next rung on their own personal ladders.
Unionizing these jobs, mandating that they provide economically unsustainable levels of pay and benefits, would be fatal to these opportunities. It reduces the number of employees they can hire, denying countless future potential employees of a career path that has been so successful for so many.
The first job, that entry-level job at a fast food window, is most analogous to the early years of grammar school. It's your high school and college that prepares you for life, not 1st through 5th grade. But can we get to high school or college without grammar school? Of course not. Those first school years are entry ticket to the more substantial years of schooling, and barring children from those introductory years effectively bars them from any path to success in life.
Despite their false marketing, these Democratic Party candidates' current war on entry level jobs – from fast food places to any other "minimum wage" type positions – is really a war on the jobholders, a barrier to entry that can only keep ever more people dependent on government aid, by denying them their own personal paths to prosperity in a free economy.
There is just one question we need to ask ourselves:
When Joe Biden and his fellow candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination speak up about this issue – calling for a doubling of the minimum wage, or for the unionization of jobs that ought to be stepping stones in people’s lives, not permanent foundations – what is really going on in their heads?
Are these presidential candidates just pandering, fully aware of how destructive such policies would be if implemented, and only pushing the issues to pick up needed interest groups?
Or are they serious, so oblivious to the reality of the economy that they believe their own buzzwords, completely unaware of how dangerous their positions would be?
It is difficult to tell, but one thing is certain: the Democrat presidential candidates are united in support of policies that hurt the working man and woman of America; they are locked into policies that cause unemployment to rise, and cause standards of living to drop.
The more power we give this bunch over the US economy, the more likely it is that we’ll all be stuck ordering from the value menu, for life.
Copyright 2019 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance and transportation manager. His columns have been found in Illinois Review for over ten years now.
Don’t miss an article! Use the free tool in the margin above, to sign up for Illinois Review’s free email notification service, so you always know when Illinois Review publishes fresh content!
