ON THE JOB: The latest ad campaign from McDonald's aims to persuade you that the fast-food megalith needs you. And not just to munch its burgers. It needs you to work its tills and staff its fryers, too. After surviving the unfriendly fire of the nutrition lobby, the company faces yet another tough challenge - training Eoin Butler. Now there's a pickle.
WHEN PEOPLE HEAR I'm going to work in McDonald's, they react with a mixture of bafflement and horror. And who can blame them? In the popular imagination at least, the fast-food multinational has been blamed for everything from rising obesity rates to Third World exploitation to Morgan Spurlock's diminished sex drive. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has taken potshots at the company. It defines a "McJob" as an "unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects", while, bizarrely, McDonald's itself runs television ads that depict its employees being ridiculed by their peers. As career moves go, then, the Golden Arches is rarely considered a golden ticket.
Recently, however, McDonald's has launched a concerted campaign to challenge what it says are the outdated stereotypes that exist about the industry. The Change The Script television ads aim to challenge the misconceptions that exist about fast-food employees. (Prominent among these is "the mistaken belief that foreign nationals working in McDonald's cannot speak English".) The "Do You Want a Career With That?" slogan, meanwhile, highlights the opportunities for advancement that exist within an organisation that, for the past four years, has been ranked among the Top 50 Irish Companies to Work For.
So should we be sceptical about this PR offensive? Or is it time we overcame our prejudices and started looking at McDonald's with fresh eyes? To find out, I asked the company if I could train in as an employee in one of their branches to find out what the experience was like. They agreed and put me to work in one of their busiest Irish outlets, on the Kylemore Road in west Dublin.
In the interests of disclosure, I should mention that this isn't the first time I've been fitted for a McDonald's uniform. As a J1 student in the US some years ago, I failed to secure employment in the (unionised) construction industry, and dithered over my next move until my funds ran out. Finally, I swallowed my pride and accepted a job at McDonald's. When I told my friends what I had done, they were aghast. They pulled out the phone book, drew up a list of potential alternative employers and instructed me to start making calls. I never turned up for my first shift at McDonald's and instead spent the summer working as an air conditioner repairman. This time around, though, I'm going to give it a fair shot. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship . . . or then again, maybe not.
On my first day, I burst through the front doors half an hour late. To my surprise, I'm greeted, not by a cheesed-off supervisor, but by a delegation of smiling McDignitaries. Those vague assurances I received about being treated the same as any other new recruit here are already starting to look unlikely. James Perry, the operations manager of McDonald's Ireland, introduces me to Tan Qing Jian, the manager of this restaurant. Tan has been with McDonald's for 11 years, working his way up through the ranks to his current position. It was McDonald's who selected the Kylemore Road as the venue for my induction. It becomes apparent that this branch is a showcase for a lot of what the company wants to communicate about its brand.
The restaurant is clean and spacious. Outside, a line of cars queue for service at the Drive-Thru hatch. Inside, businessmen check their e-mails in the gleaming McCafe, while children loll about contentedly in the play area. The staff turnover here is only 35 per cent per annum, compared to about 50 per cent nationwide. (Five years ago, that figure was at 65 per cent, but the influx of Eastern European migrants helped bring the rate down.)
Perry and operations consultant Amy Coen list some of the benefits available to staff, among them access to free English lessons. It's like one long infomercial and I have very weak sales resistance. But I can't help wondering why, if the staff can speak English, as the company claims they can, English lessons should be deemed necessary?
Next up is an orientation session with my supervisor Clodagh. She outlines what is expected of employees and I ask her a few questions. Specifically, how much am I going to get paid? The short answer, I'm afraid, is "not very much". The panel accompanying this article provides an illustration of what I can expect to come home with per week. But note that those figures only apply once I've been trained-in to my new job. For my first week as a McDonald's employee, I'll be working for only 20 hours. Plus I'm expected to pay a €30 deposit for my uniform. This means that I'll come home with enough to pay my rent and not a whole lot more. This much-vaunted career of mine, you'd have to say, is not getting off to the most auspicious start.
After fire, hygiene and safety training (basically, don't stick your head in the fryer and 101 other handy workplace tips), I'm finally ready to get my fast-food groove on. Clodagh informs me that I'll be starting on something called the "BOP line".
Sounds interesting, I tell her.
"Just a little McJargon for you!" she winks. "It stands for Bridge Operating Platform."
The BOP line, in my imagination, has now morphed from something resembling the stage at Radio City Music Hall to something resembling the deck of the Starship Enterprise. It still sounds exciting, though.
The reality, alas, is somewhat more prosaic. What I'm actually tasked with is making Big Macs. Veteran burger whizz Carmel (who has worked here 20 years) and Margaret (a relative newcomer, with only 17 years' service) kindly agree to show me the ropes. The hothouse atmosphere of the fast-food assembly line is not for the faint-hearted. From my left, a never-ending succession of burger buns are slung in front of me. The club and heel buns have to be squirted with 10ml of sauce, sprinkled with 3.5g of dehydrated onion particles and garnished with 15g of lettuce and a slice of cheese. Everything has to be done at speed and there are even guidelines for how far apart the two pickle slices should be placed. ("So the customer gets a taste of pickle in every bite," Carmel explains.)
Next, two piping-hot burger patties are slotted into place and the sesame seed crown bun perched on top. When that's done, I have to seal up the box and drop it down a chute to the till operator and from there, ultimately, into the hands of the customer. For some reason, though, the different chutes aren't even labelled on my end, so I have to keep peeking to check that I don't accidentally drop the Big Macs in with the Chicken McNuggets or the Quarter Pounders on top of the Fillet-O-Fish. The Big Macs are prepared six at a time, so I'm juggling 12 burger patties and 18 separate bun components at once. To make matters even more confusing, some customers throw in curveball requests for no onions or no pickles. It's all torturously complicated for the hapless newbie.
After lunch, I'm switched to drinks duty in the Drive-Thru, which is much more my speed. Basically, an order flashes up on a television screen and all I have to do is have a Medium Sprite or Large Coke or Small Fanta, ready by the time the car comes around to the hatch. Compared to the BOP line, it's is a walk in the park. I chat to my fellow Drive-Thru attendants, two very nice Chinese girls called Nancy and Kika. Like most staff I speak to, they profess to be reasonably satisfied with their jobs. The camaraderie among the staff here certainly seems genuine enough. But with managers and executives keeping an eye on me, I doubt that what I'm getting here is the warts-and-all entry-level fast-food experience.
When my shift is over, I sit down again with James Perry and Amy Coen to talk some more about the training and educational opportunities open to McDonald's employees. Nearly 70 per cent of McDonald's employees in Ireland are foreign nationals and James is keen to stress how proud the company is of its multicultural workforce. A press release issued to publicise the Change the Script campaign goes even further, expressing a hope that the public will be inspired by the diversity on display in McDonald's to embrace the wide variety of cultures in Ireland.
"In general," it states "[non-Irish workers] are highly qualified, with the majority finishing some form of third-level education in their home countries. They come to McDonald's in the first instance as they are aware of the brand from their home countries - they stay because of the training they receive, the fact that they are looked after and the career opportunities that arise for many of them."
Of course, another explanation for why foreign migrants make up such a high proportion of McDonald's employees might be that they are by and large the only people willing to do what remains essentially an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects. The 70 per cent statistic is much more likely a symptom of global inequality, than it is some philosophical commitment on the part of McDonald's to diversity in the workplace. Certainly, it seems disingenuous in the extreme to claim that foreign university graduates are attracted to the fast-food industry for the training they'll receive - training in areas such as food hygiene and team building. I'm not blaming McDonald's for all the inequities of global capitalism here, but simply pointing out the gobsmacking cynicism of its latest ad campaign.
Four years ago Morgan Spurlock's McDonald's-baiting documentary Supersize Me was a surprise hit at the box office. The success of the film, in retrospect, was pretty baffling; in that it merely demonstrated what any reasonably intelligent person should have known to begin with - th - that is, that eating nothing but fast food for 40 days will make you fat. But it led to a slew of bad publicity and, in response, McDonald's launched a new range of healthier options to much fanfare. The McSalads still feature prominently in McDonald's branding and marketing. But it's interesting to note that while the Kylemore Road handles anything up to 3,000 transactions per day, staff say that this rarely includes any more than 10 or 15 salads.
Operations manager James Perry mentions something very interesting in one of our early conversations. He tells me that the company is not having any problems meeting recruitment targets at present. So why the expensive recruitment campaign, I ask? It's not a recruitment campaign, he explains. It's a PR exercise. (This is subsequently confirmed by a call to the company's press office.) The ad campaign, Perry explains, is not aimed at potential McDonald's employees. It is aimed at potential McDonald's customers.
My first day as a burger boy in McDonald's Kylemore has come to an end and I'm grateful to the staff all for the hospitality they have shown me. I'm not convinced that a career in McDonald's is right for me. But, by the same token, I doubt they've been too impressed by my unshaven appearance and lousy timekeeping. It is by mutual consent then, amicably reached, that we agree to discontinue my employment. Now does anyone need their air conditioning fixed?
New McDonald's employees in the Greater Dublin area are paid the rate of:
Under-18: €7.06 per hour
Over-18: €8.82 per hour
Full-time employees usually work (but are not guaranteed) 36 to 37 hours per week. Therefore, as a new adult employee, my weekly budget is likely to be:
€8.82 x 37 = €326.34 a week
Tax = Nil
Net weekly income = €326.34
Less rent - €90.00*
Less transport - €10.00
Total = €226.34
After 12 months in the job, employees receive a performance rating that determines their hourly pay increase:
35c - Outstanding
25c - Excellent
20c - Good
0c - Unsatisfactory
*Average weekly rent for a single room in Dublin West, as per Daft.ie