The American public is talking about “McJobs” again.
First, Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies, including former president Bill Clinton, touted the candidate’s experience working at McDonald’s on the campaign trail and at the Democratic National Convention. Then the campaign launched an ad that cites her time working at the fast food chain as a marker of her middle-class upbringing — and as a major point of contrast between her life and the privileged upbringing of Donald Trump.
The conversation about McDonald’s workers has prompted a discussion about the struggles of minimum wage earners. While Harris worked in fast food to earn “spending money” during one college summer, she observed that some of her colleagues “were raising families on that paycheck.” As President, she has pledged, helping people in the same position today by bringing down the costs of everyday expenses would be a “top priority.”
Harris’ acknowledgment that fast food wages are often not enough to sustain a living is a stark contrast to the way Clinton and other Democrats once argued that such jobs were the key to getting people out of poverty.
In his second term, Clinton made “welfare to work” a central component of his overhaul of the American social safety net. “Welfare,” Clinton said, would be “a second chance, not a way of life,” and welfare recipients would have to work to keep their benefits.
The American public was largely supportive of change, believing a job at Wendy’s or McDonald’s should be the first step on the path out of poverty, and that the government’s role should be to get them into one. Harris’ very different position indicates how Americans have rethought poverty, wages, and fast food jobs over the last two decades.
As a presidential candidate in 1976, Ronald Reagan began popularizing tales of a woman in Chicago who used a string of fake names and addresses to collect tens of thousands of dollars in benefits while hard working middle-class Americans underwrote her life.
Similar stories of “welfare queens” would become a staple of newspaper columns and TV news. They stoked fury, in part because of their racial element. Although rarely articulated as such, these stories were an invitation for white, suburban voters to think of welfare recipients as lazy, Black, urban freeloaders taking advantage of working people like themselves.
Some thoughtful observers could see that the oft-cited stories were either not representative or totally false. As the anthropologist Katherine Newman noted, welfare beneficiaries typically worked full time, but as mothers and caretakers, not wage earners.