Would you like to Super-Size that recovery?

Full disclosure: I am a McDonald’s shareholder.

About a month ago, on April 19, McDonald’s held its first-ever nationwide hiring day. They planned to hire 50,000 people on that one day, but they were so pleased with the turnout that they wound up hiring 62,000 instead. At first glance, this sounds fantastic. 62,000 people is a population roughly equal to the number of people on Chevron’s entire payroll. It’s an army, in a very nearly literal sense. Not counting contractors, it’s a collection of people larger than the number of US troops left in Iraq.

This is great news for the economy, right? Even if McDonald’s is not exactly a prestigious employer, honest work is honest work, and surely this is a sign that the economy of the past few years is getting back on its feet.

Well… not exactly.

First, consider the sheer number of applicants for those 62,000 positions. McDonald’s is not releasing specific numbers, but they admit that over a million people applied. A million Americans applied to work for McDonald’s, and McDonald’s got to cherry-pick the top 6% for their liking. Florida had over 100,000 applications for 4,337 positions – one location here in Tampa reported getting over 2,200 applications for just five jobs. This doesn’t mean that it was easier to get into Princeton, Brown, or Yale than to McDonald’s, as some comments suggested, only that they had a larger pool of applicants competing for each position; because McDonald’s was hiring mostly for low-skill sorts of jobs, there are vastly more people qualified to do them.

Still, a million Americans tried to get jobs at McDonald’s, and 940,000 of them didn’t make the cut.

Second, while McDonald’s is (again) not releasing specifics, many of those 62,000 positions are part-time. Most of those shiny new McJobs will reduce the official unemployment numbers, but how many of them will make it out of underemployment? The latest U6 numbers – the number of unemployed plus the number of people who would like more work but can’t get it – hovers near 17%. A back-calculation for the Great Depression suggests U6 numbers of 37.6%, so 17% isn’t exactly apocalyptic, but these are unpleasant times indeed.

Now consider this: in April, the United States economy added 244,000 private-sector jobs. Unemployment went up, because there of various cutbacks in government employees, but we added 244,000 private-sector jobs. The stock market rallied and pundits called it a clear sign that America was getting back to work. Take a look at that number, though, and then take a look back at the 62,000 jobs we’ve just discussed.

One in four of the new jobs in our “economic recovery” is literally at McDonalds.

Would you like fries with that?

Comments under temporary moderation

Hi all,

As tiny as this little corner of the Internet is, I’ve been getting a couple hundred spam messages a day lately. Until it blows over I’ve turned on some moderation features on the website. If you’ve replied to me before, you should have no trouble posting, but if this is your first time, expect it to sit in the moderation queue for a little bit while I catch up.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

The Man and His Wisdom

When I was seven years old, I learned from Clint Eastwood never to put ketchup on a hot dog. It was sound advice, and I’ve never regretted listening to him.

So, on this fundamental, childhood level, invoking little things that changed my life, there’s something fantastic about walking through a bookstore and seeing a book titled Wisdom with the man himself on the cover. I love it. It’s one part photobook, one part essay collection, and I really do think it deserves its title. Neither Morgan Freeman nor Patrick Stewart appears, which does disappoint me a little bit (Stewart may be just a few years on the young end of the project’s scope), but overall I very much enjoyed my time with it, and I’ll be buying a copy soon. The book’s website has a great trailer, which sums up the book better than I could.

Part of Mr. Eastwood’s entry, particularly, caught my attention, so I copied it down to share with you here:

Take your profession seriously; don’t take yourself seriously. Don’t take yourself seriously in the process, because you really only matter to a certain degree in the whole circus out there. If you take yourself seriously you’re not going to be able to move forward and use your best artistic instincts. You’re going to be hampered by always wanting to look in the mirror and see if you have enough tuna oil in your hair or something like that.

I don’t think anyone would regret listening to that, either.

Notes from the Void #3

This post seems to have turned up a small technical glitch in the website. I’ve fixed it now, but it may have shown up twice somehow.

Usually I prefer to let people explore the Brain Food links unguided and draw their own conclusions, but I think Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America over at The Atlantic is worth a particular mention. One in eight Californians is presently unemployed, nearly one in ten Americans, and things don’t seem to be in much rush to get better. I’m not sure if the long-term effects will be as bad as Peck projects, but the possibilities are definitely sobering.

It makes me a little bit grateful to say that I have a job to complain about. I have a few responsibilities there that will no doubt distract me over this long weekend, but I’ve finished dinner now and a few other chores, so I’m going to settle in for a weekend of writing now. The alarm clock is set for 7:30 AM tomorrow morning. At some point I will have to leave the apartment to do laundry and get some sunshine, but aside from that, after I finish this post I plan to reboot my laptop, open up First and Last and Always, and start writing.

Before I go, I found for you an upload of P!nk’s very awesome Grammy performance, and you can click through to a preview of my upcoming story.

Notes From the Void #1

So… this is my first Notes from the Void, the name for the posts I discussed last week. I’ve decided against making it a strictly-weekly feature; to keep them from overwhelming the site by sheer numbers, I’ll only post them on weeks where I don’t add other content (reviews, fiction, illustrations, etc).

It’s very fashionable right now to donate money to Haiti, but please be careful where you donate; anywhere money flows, there will be unethical people trying to take a cut, and even legitimate organizations can be astoundingly poorly managed. Charity Navigator seems to be a good place to check things out first; they don’t have the resources to check every charity, but they rate most of the big players. Personally, my Haiti-bound donation went to Doctors Without Borders.

On a lighter note, I’ve been spending a lot of time wandering RedBubble lately. My friend Caitlin introduced me to it back in August, when I bought a print of her “Tokyo” project, and I keep coming back, usually just to explore. They have a great talent pool, and their print quality is fantastic if you feel the urge to buy something. One of my favorite recent finds is JenniferB. Really, I think the best way for me to introduce her is to shut up and let two of her poems speak for themselves:

1. I Want To Fuck You With Words
2. To be continued…

Some of her writing is a bit morbidly uncomfortable, but I think it’s still worth reading.

In site-related news, I’ve commissioned Ten-Chan to illustrate one of the Elves stories I finished back at the end of 2008. She says she should be finished soon, and I’ll post it appropriately as soon as I can.