McDonald’s has at least one fan left: movie star, author and former McDonald’s employee James Franco.
Franco, having heard about the struggling fast-food giant’s turnaround plan, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post supporting the company’s strategy, despite the potential effects on its workers and their pay.
“I want the strategy to work. All I know is that when I needed McDonald’s, McDonald’s was there for me. When no one else was,” Franco writes.
A lot has changed in the 20 years since Franco worked at McDonald’s as a young actor in Los Angeles. Most fast-food workers today are not teenagers waiting for their big break in Hollywood – many are parents looking to make ends meet.
As unemployment soared after the 2008 financial crisis, an increasing number of older workers turned to low-wage jobs and forced to work for minimum wage and little or no benefits.
In 2013, the average age of a fast-food worker was 29, according to the National Employment Law Project.
The current average hourly wage of McDonald’s US workers is $9.01, according to the company. McDonald’s hopes to increase that to $9.90. If the employees work full time and earn $9.90 an hour, they would still only make $396 a week. That’s just a little over $20,000 a year, which is right at the poverty threshold for a US family of three.
On the same day that the Washington Post ran Franco’s defense of McDonald’s, the New York Times published an op-ed by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is looking to increase wages for the state’s fast-food workers.
“Many assume that fast-food workers are mostly teenagers who want to earn extra spending money. On the contrary, 73% are women, 70% are over the age 20, and more than two-thirds are raising a child and are the primary wage earners in their family,” Cuomo wrote.
Hundreds of them have joined the Fight for $15 movement, have walked out of their jobs on multiple occasions and even risked arrest in an effort to increase awareness of their poverty-level wages. They want McDonald’s to consider their views as it revamps its strategy.
Franco does seem aware of this. “McDonald’s leaders have vowed to reverse the downturn by recommitting to ‘hot, fresh food’ by selling off certain outlets to independent owners – which would reduce the number of corporate-covered employees with a newly raised minimum wage – and by cutting $300m in costs,” he writes. “How this cost cut will affect jobs remains unclear.”
He also humorously lifts the lid on hygiene standards in the restaurant where he worked. “I hate to whistleblow, but everyone ate straight from the fry hopper.” And he admits that since reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser “it’s hard for me to trust the grade of the meat”.
And he muses over whether those not paying much for their food deserve good service: “When you’re paying a dollar for a burger, is it the end of the world if I accidentally forgot to take the mustard off the order?”
But to Franco, the key thing is that McDonald’s helped him follow his acting dream. “All the waiter jobs were taken by more experienced actor/waiters,” but at McDonald’s: “When I was hungry for work, they fed the need.”
Franco’s experience as an 18-year-old aspiring actor trying to survive on McDonald’s pay is not the norm. For him, this was a temporary job, something to tide him over until his big break, which came in the form of a Superbowl commercial – for fast food rival Pizza Hut.
“From that point on, I could support myself through acting,” he notes.
