What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Did Kamala Harris Really Work at McDonald’s?
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has long said she worked at McDonald’s while she was in college. While not the centerpiece of her “Elect Me” campaign, she has repeated variations of the phrase “I used to work in fast food” enough times that it has become part of her public biography. Harris made the claim about McDonald’s in her Democratic National Committee acceptance speech, on her own Twitter , during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April (where she also said she likes barbecue sauce on her chicken nuggets) and elsewhere. .
Following the Democratic National Committee’s appearance, there was a quiet uproar over the veracity of Harris’ McDonald’s claim, with some accusing her of inventing part-time work. It started with Harris not including her supposed tenure at McDonald’s on her post-college job application and ended with Donald Trump repeatedly calling Harris a liar because she never worked at McDonald’s.
Bottom line: Did Kamala Harris work at McDonald’s?
Verdict: Not confirmed.
We just don’t know. People who say Harris is lying about her fast food career are wrong, and people who say she definitely worked at McDonald’s are wrong too. At least for now – since we don’t have conclusive evidence for either, it’s an open question. (People who say, “I guess we’ll see” or “who even cares?” are right.)
Evidence that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s
The only evidence that Kamala Harris ever worked at McDonald’s is that she and her campaign claim she did. Harris first said she worked at McDonald’s during a speech at a labor rally in Las Vegas in 2019. Her campaign confirmed that she worked at McDonald’s in Alameda, California, during college summers in the mid-1980s.
Evidence that Kamala Harris did not work at McDonald’s
The only evidence that Harris didn’t work at McDonald’s is that people say she can’t prove she did. They can’t really substantiate this because it’s impossible to prove otherwise, but here are their claims: Harris didn’t mention McDonald’s in her 2019 memoir , “The Truths We Hold, ” and didn’t include it in her 1987 application for a job as a clerk at Alameda County District Attorney’s Office or any other resume. Neither did anyone say, “I worked with her at McDonald’s.”
The problem with proving you worked at McDonald’s
McDonald’s jobs are traditionally easy to get and easy to leave. This is the kind of position where young people don’t require any skills and stay for a couple of months or a couple of shifts and then move on to other things. It’s just not a position that leaves behind much evidence.
McDonald’s says one in eight Americans has worked at a fast food restaurant at least once, but the fast food chain operates under a franchise model, so there is no central database of employees to check. It seems unlikely that the owner of a McDonald’s franchise in Alameda would keep records of the employment of part-time employees since the mid-1980s. That was a long time ago, and California law requires companies to keep employment records for four years, not 40.
However, Trump’s claim that Harris is employed is false. Recently at a Moms for Freedom convention, he said, “After careful research, which took about 20 minutes, it turned out that she never worked there.”
The rest of the “Harris lies” allegations are equally unconvincing. It is true that she did not include McDonald’s in her application for a clerk position in the Alameda District Attorney’s Office, but this was likely done to make room for her work at the Federal Trade Commission, the US Senate and two California law firms. The fact that no one posted a photo of her in a polyester uniform and said, “I remember working with her on the fryer” could be because she didn’t work at McDonald’s very long, or she wasn’t a very memorable partner. . worker, or indeed some other reason. It’s simply impossible to say.
Why does it even matter whether Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s?
When I was in college, I worked at a sandwich shop, at WaWa, a telemarketing firm, at a record-your-own-song kiosk on the Atlantic City boardwalk, at a Domino’s pizzeria, and probably a few other places I’ve forgotten. If my life depended on it, I wouldn’t be able to prove that I worked in any of these places. I also don’t think I’ve included them on any resumes I’ve ever submitted.
If I were writing a simple, public biography, I might include a detail or two about the difficulties of delivering pizza, or tell the story of how I quit my job as a telemarketer in a boiler room and my then-boss said, “You’ll never amount to anything” (by the way, he was absolutely right) even if I couldn’t prove that any of it happened. “Who would even lie about that?” I could ask.
I believe Harris is publicly talking about her old job, which she may or may not have held, because saying “I worked at McDonald’s” is an easy way to reinforce the “we’re normal people just like you” vibe ” in the Harris/Walz campaign. This is politics, and the Harris campaign has apparently determined that some portion of voters are more likely to vote for someone if they previously cooked French fries. Just like her opponent apparently decided that “she didn’t put McDonald’s on her resume!” will make people less likely to vote for her.
I realize that the reason I tend to believe Harris (or think, “Who cares anyway?”) is probably because I like her. If I hadn’t, I might have thought this was another example of Harris Kamala’s boundless lies. Because ultimately, whether you believe Harris is lying has more to do with who you are and what you believe than whether a 19-year-old college student worked a summer job for Mickey D.