McProfit: $8.25 a hour vs CEO’s $8.75m a year
He stashes his toiletries in a Kenneth Cole bag — a gift from his mother, who works the counter at Macy’s — and hops on an El train. His destination: another McDonald’s.
Johnson isn’t one of Chicago’s many homeless people who seek shelter in fast-food joints. He’s a McDonald’s employee, at both restaurants — one in the Loop, the other about a mile away in the shadow of Holy Name Cathedral.
He needs the makeshift baths because hygiene and appearance are part of his annual compensation reviews. But even with frequent scrubbings, he said before a recent shift, it’s hard to remove the essence of the greasy food he works around.
“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.
Johnson, 44, needs the two pay cheques to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he has worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and still only makes $8.25 an hour, the minimum wage in Illinois.
This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the US average during the recovery that began in June 2009. The jobs created by companies including Burger King Worldwide and Yum Brands, which owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC brands, are among the lowest-paid in the United States.
The pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executives is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionisation efforts that erupted recently this week on the streets of Chicago and New York.
Older workers like Johnson are staffing fast-food restaurants more often, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. In 2010, 16-to-19-year-olds made up 17% of food preparation and serving workers, down from almost a quarter in 2000, as older, underemployed Americans took those jobs.
“The sheer number of adults in the industry has just exploded” because fast-food restaurants “not only survived but thrived during the economic recession,” said Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labour Research Centre at the University of California at Berkeley.
Johnson would need about a million hours of work — or more than a century on the clock — to earn the $8.75m that McDonald’s paid then-CEO Jim Skinner last year. Johnson’s work flipping burgers and hoisting boxes of french fries, like millions of other jobs in low-wage industries, helps explain why income inequality grew after the 2007-09 recession ended.
The recovery from the last downturn has been the most uneven in recent history. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1% of the United States saw their earnings increase 5.5% last year, according to census estimates. Earnings fell 1.7% for the 97 million households in the bottom 80% — those who made less than $101,583.
The widening chasm is most pronounced in the restaurant and retail businesses. The total number of people employed in the US at Walmart Stores, and McDonald’s and Yum Brands restaurants exceeds the entire 2.7 million population of Chicago. Net income at those three companies has jumped by at least 22% from four years ago.
Shareholders, not employees, have reaped the rewards. McDonald’s, for example, spent $6 billion on share repurchases and dividends last year, the equivalent of $14,286 per restaurant worker employed by the company. At the same time, restaurant companies have formed an industry-wide effort to freeze the minimum wage, whose purchasing power is 20% less than in 1968, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that advocates for low and middle-income workers.
Johnson begins most days the same way: picking cigarette butts out of the shower drain of a shared bathroom, using a tissue so he doesn’t touch them. While there’s a “No Smoking” sign posted inside the hotel where he lives, that doesn’t stop the other occupants who share the showers, sinks and toilets.
His rent at the hotel in Chicago’s Uptown neighbourhood is $320 a month. Johnson usually can’t cover it all at once, so he’s allowed to pay $160 every two weeks, or even $80 a week, for his first-floor room. He’s late on November rent and owes about $100 — some of it a late-payment fee, he said. Since falling behind, he’s put off buying a Dell laptop for $99 that he found online.
“Forget about that computer,” Johnson said. For now, he’ll keep going to a local Apple store when he wants to update his Facebook page in his efforts to find someone nice to date and to stay in touch with his father.
A pay stub of Johnson’s shows that he earned $8,518.80 through September 9 this year at the store that gives him most of his hours. He was able to work only 52 hours during that two-week pay period because the restaurant was being remodelled, he said. A statement of earnings from his other McDonald’s job shows that he worked fewer than 12 hours over two weeks, earning $95.45 before taxes.
Even with the unemployment rate dropping last month to 7.7%, minimum-wage earners have less power to demand higher pay because so many adults are willing to take low-wage positions, said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Centre for the Study of Work, Labour and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
At the restaurant where he gets most of his hours, he cooks hamburgers and fries. In the summers, he said, it’s “super hot” and he usually sweats at the steaming grill, part of the reason for his between-shift washings.
That store is less than a mile from where his mother raised him, in the Cabrini-Green public housing project, most of which has since been demolished. McDonald’s new CEO, Don Thompson, who took the post in July, spent part of his childhood a few blocks from the project.
That’s where the trajectories of their lives parted. Johnson graduated from Lincoln Park High School in 1987. He then spent six months at the Computer Learning Centre in Chicago to earn a certificate in computer operations. He paid off his student-loan debt just a couple of years ago. He couldn’t find a job in that field, so he settled for one at a KFC in Evanston, a suburb on Chicago’s northern border.
Johnson started at McDonald’s in 1992, two years after Thompson, who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1984. Thompson worked at what was then Northrop before joining McDonald’s.
“Don came from extremely humble beginnings and with hard work and with the values of his grandmother” he made his way up the ranks at McDonald’s, said Heidi Barker, a company spokeswoman, noting that three McDonald’s CEOs started as store employees. Thompson declined to be interviewed for this story.
While Johnson has benefited from small pay raises and some minimum-wage increases — the rate was boosted from $8 in 2010 in Illinois — he said he’s often knocked down to the lowest level when a McDonald’s franchise changes ownership. He has been bounced to different stores in Chicago (he’s worked at six in all), which also results in pay being cut to minimum wage, he said.
“Every time they transfer you to a different store, they lower your pay,” he said. “You have to climb back up.”
