Harris' rhetoric about a job at McDonald's shows Democrats have rethought their 1990s emphasis on fast food jobs as a way out of poverty.
An employee hands a bag to a customer at the drive-thru of a McDonald's restaurant in Los Angeles on April 1, 2024., touted the candidate’s experience working at McDonald’s on the campaign trail and at the Democratic National Convention. Then the campaign launched anthat 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.
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. 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.
With their benefits about to dry up, most welfare recipients had to look for jobs near their homes, only to find the options were limited. But there was one industry that was prevalent and hiring in inner cities across the U.S.: fast food.
In 2000, Burger King CEO Dennis Malamatinas wrote a letter to the Clinton White House as part of a report on the welfare to work program. He boasted that Burger King had hired more than 17,000 welfare recipients at company-owned stores — a development the fast food executive called “a terrific bottom-line story.” Welfare recipients, he added, were far more likely to stay on the job than their peers, substantially reducing the costs of training new employees.
Years later, the president successfully pressured Congress to raise the federal minimum wage by $0.90 per hour — a modest gain for people living on the edge. In speeches, he enthused about the millions of people who had been forced into jobs and echoed claims that welfare recipients stayed at their jobs longer than other employees — once more, without stopping to consider why that might be the case. in favor of the sort of broad-based government assistance that Clinton gutted.
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