The "My First" ads, which feature a global cast of former McDonald's employees from countries such as Japan, Germany and Australia, are "about expanding awareness of the opportunities McDonald's offers with lifetime skills that serve people throughout their career, whether they are at McDonald's or somewhere else," company spokeswoman Lisa Howard said.
As manufacturing jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, McDonald's and other fast-food chains were criticized by some labor groups and social critics for not offering enough well-paying job opportunities in the country's growing service sector. They've also criticized the fast-food industry for lobbying against increases in the minimum wage.
"Jobs like those at McDonald's don't help the economy and don't help working families save for retirement and put their kids through college," said Jill Cashen, a spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has tried to unionize fast-food workers.
Precise numbers on the size of the fast-food work force are hard to come by. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 1.5 million people work as food preparation workers, a category that includes fast food. But the best-seller "Fast Food Nation," published in 2001, estimates that 3.5 million people work in the U.S. fast food industry, most of them younger than 20. The book, highly critical of the fast-food industry, said there's a turnover rate of about 300 percent to 400 percent a year.
"Whether you're working at McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, there's really no sex appeal to that kind of job," said Joseph Anthony, CEO of Vital Marketing Group, a New York-based youth-marketing com- pany.
But the new ads, he said, "can make kids feel better about working at McDonald's. It's something to share with their friend: 'Hey, so-and-so worked at McDonald's, and look at him.' "
Anthropologist Katherine Newman spent several years following 200 workers at "Burger Barn" (her euphemism for an unnamed national fast-food chain) in New York's Harlem.
In her book, "No Shame in My Game," she found that the employees took pride in holding a job, that managers encouraged them to study and that the work provided much-needed structure in their lives.
In a follow-up study, soon to be published, Newman interviewed the same workers eight years later and found that about a quarter of them had moved on to stable, often unionized jobs that pay solid wages. About half were working in slightly more skilled positions in retail or hospitals, but hadn't significantly increased their earnings. And a quarter still struggled in entry-level jobs.
"The 'Burger Barn' jobs didn't pay well, and everyone knew it," said Newman, now a professor at Princeton University. "Yet it's very valuable experience. There's no question that being in the labor market is better than not being in the labor market."
They point to people such as McCollum, whose first job after emigrating from Panama in 1996 was at a Sacramento-area McDonald's where she said she earned $4.25 an hour. Three years later, she was promoted to assistant manager with an $11-an-hour paycheck.
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