McDonald's hires 62,000 people across the United States in one massive National Hiring Day!This is great news right? A sign that the US economy is moving off the bottom and is finally showing signs of improvement? Finally an indication that the Obama administration has gotten America moving back in the right direction? That QE 2 has really been a roaring success?
Not so fast (food)!
Consider that in Florida 1 in every 188 residents applied for a job at McDonald's on National Hiring Day, with a job offer rate of about 4 in every 100 applicants or 4%. This pales next to the success rate for freshman applicants at Harvard that typically runs at about 7%. When McDonald's can be more selective than Harvard, we may still have an extremely large problem on the employment front.
So what does this mean?
While 62,000 new hires is an impressive number, McDonald's received over 1,000,000 applications for what are typically low-paying, minimum wage food service jobs. Of these hires only 1,000 were for management positions. While some small percentage of non-management hires may move beyond this level in the future, most likely will not.
Bottom line: The US economy is not going to enter any real phase of recovery on the back of service jobs that pay in the neighborhood of $15,000 a year.
In the video below a McDonald's spokesman can spin these jobs any way that he wants, but the reality is that these jobs, while critically important for the people getting them, are not the solution for economic growth and a strong US economy moving forward!
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