What Kamala Harris' rhetoric about Mcdonald's reveals about Democrats' shifting views on poverty

Spencer Platt // Getty Images The American public is talking about “McJobs” again. First, Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies, including former president Bill Clinton, touted the candidate’s experience working at McDonald’s on the campaign trail and at the Democratic National Convention. Then the campaign launched an ad that 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. The conversation about McDonald’s workers has prompted a discussion about the struggles of minimum-wage earners, Economic Hardship Reporting Project and TIME explain. While Harris worked in fast food to earn “spending money” during one college summer, she observed that some of her colleagues “were raising families on that paycheck.” As president, she has pledged that helping people in the same position today by bringing down the costs of everyday expenses would be a “top priority.” Harris’ acknowledgment that fast-food wages are often not enough to sustain a living is a stark contrast to the way Clinton and other Democrats once argued that such jobs were the key to getting people out of poverty. 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. The American public was largely supportive of change, believing a job at Wendy’s or McDonald’s should be the first step on the path out of poverty, and that the government’s role should be to get them into one. Harris’ very different position indicates how Americans have rethought poverty, wages, and fast-food jobs over the last two decades. As a presidential candidate in 1976, Ronald Reagan began popularizing tales of a woman in Chicago who used a string of fake names and addresses to collect tens of thousands of dollars in benefits while hard-working middle-class Americans underwrote her life. Similar stories of “welfare queens” would become a staple of newspaper columns and TV news. They stoked fury, in part because of their racial element. Although rarely articulated as such, these stories were an invitation for white, suburban voters to think of welfare recipients as lazy, Black, urban freeloaders taking advantage of working people like themselves. 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. American voters, however, largely didn’t see it that way. An overwhelming bipartisan consensus developed that the only work that counted was the kind that paid wages. During his 1992 campaign, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” And in 1996, after vetoing two previous versions, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, popularly known as “Welfare Reform,” to align policy with the public misperceptions around welfare. Under the new law, people could only receive money for five years of their lives, and after two years, most would be required to get a job. Cutting off benefits was the easy part. Getting welfare recipients into the jobs they now required was another matter. One complication was the geography of American employment. Middle-class Americans had flocked to the suburbs for two generations, and by the 1990s, even major corporations were relocating their headquarters to the outskirts. As a result, two-thirds of new jobs were in the suburbs, while three-quarters of welfare recipients lived in inner cities or rural areas. Exacerbating the problem, public transportation linkages were typically weak–often thanks to policies that kept inner-city residents out of the suburbs by design–and only 6% of welfare recipients owned a car. 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. As historian Chin Jou has chronicled, fast-food restaurants were popular with the Small Business Administration–which was charged with providing loans to small business owners, often in underserved neighborhoods–because they utilized a franchise model, in which independent business people opened restaurants with recognized brand names. From the 1970s onward, the SBA committed billions of dollars to fast-food franchises, many of them operating in inner-city neighborhoods, allowing the industry to grow and hire in those areas as few industries could. Even as these job opportunities emerged, however, the pay was so low, fast-food franchisees often struggled to recruit employees. For poor youths in inner-city neighborhoods, taking a job in fast food was like trading one kind of poverty for another–one that came with a litany of rules about what to wear and how to speak. Yet, after Clinton’s 1997 overhaul, welfare recipients had few–if any–other options. The urban poor’s loss became the fast-food industry’s gain, as the policy opened a new pool of labor in areas where they had been lacking workers. But fast-food companies did more than benefit from Welfare Reform. From the beginning, one fast-food company even played an instrumental role in shaping how the government carried out the policy. In 1997, Burger King joined Sprint, UPS, United Airlines, and Monsanto to form the Welfare to Work Partnership to advise state and federal agencies on how best to hire welfare recipients or, in their words, move them “from lives of dependence to independence.” 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. As to why the new hires might be more willing to stay on the job longer, Malamatinas didn’t speculate. Burger King executives also touted that the company hired welfare recipients–who were disproportionately Black–out of its “commitment to diversity and opportunity.” And adding them to the payroll came with other, more material benefits. While welfare recipients faced the stick of a threatened loss of benefits, Congress offered employers like Burger King and its franchisees a carrot: subsidies worth up to $8,500 for each welfare recipient they hired. To justify the subsidies, companies spoke of the difficult work involved with training welfare recipients to become contributing members of society. “I have learned that many welfare recipients need training beyond the nuances of ‘having it your way,'” one Burger King franchisee said in the same report, citing the brand’s signature slogan. Training new hires in “life skills” was “the most critical aspect of the welfare-to-work program,” he said. Media personalities and politicians had spoken of welfare recipients with so much pity and scorn for so many years, employers could safely claim that hiring them was a public service deserving of taxpayer compensation. In Clinton’s vision, a job was the locus of assistance, the door through which all other help would pass. But while Welfare Reform introduced the job requirement, few of the benefits he envisioned ever materialized. In his first term, Clinton tried to pass legislation that would have required low-wage employers to cover healthcare costs. The measure failed. 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. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, however, public support has turned in favor of the sort of broad-based government assistance that Clinton gutted. When Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan passed, complete with more cash relief than any single piece of legislation since the New Deal, even Republicans in Congress mostly stayed quiet. Taking up the helm of the Democratic Party, Harris has spoken of the “opportunity economy” in which the government helps every working person to join the middle class. It’s a vision of the nation in which everyone–even fast-food workers–can afford to buy a house. She’s threading the needle between the Democratic Party’s Clinton-era past of laying the onus of escaping poverty on the poor themselves and its current impulse to provide more direct forms of assistance. In that way, it’s a nod to the past without reckoning with the role Democrats played in driving people into the fast-food workforce without regard for whether doing so would actually better their lives. Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and TIME. This story was produced by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and TIME, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.