As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump has brought a politician’s performative penchant to play at work for a day in a menial job to a new low.
He pretended Oct. 20 to work at a closed McDonald’s restaurant where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers. At least when Mitt Romney played this game while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, he worked alongside real workers in active facilities with real customers.
While the 15 minutes-at-work program undertaken by Trump provides great photo opportunities, it doesn’t provide much information about work.
Trump might learn a lot more about the problems facing low-paid workers from reading “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor” (W. J. Wilson, 1996) or “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (Barbara Ehrenreich, 2001). In them, the complete set of difficulties of a low-paid person’s life are laid out in detail. The lack of jobs in the inner city; the difficulty of getting transportation to a distant job in time for the start of a shift; the theft of one’s time through unpaid overtime; the difficulty of finding affordable accommodation (and that insurmountable barrier of accumulating two month’s rent in advance). It is this context of life’s difficulties that is so debilitating before one even does a hard day’s work.
Of course, one day on the job does not give time for the meaninglessness of much of that work to sink in – one is still in a learning mode. As a college student working in an industrial bakery in the 1960s, I lasted only a couple of weeks on a doughnut assembly line where I transferred by well-scrubbed hand six doughnuts coming down one line into a box coming down a second line: grab, lift, place, grab, lift, place; repeat. I could not get to sleep until I started up the line (grab, lift, place, grab, lift, place; repeat) in my dreams. That is the reality of many assembly line jobs.
I had a choice. I could quit, and did. Many people do not. Trump’s action mocks them.
Let’s have fewer photo opportunities and more discussion of meaningful policies for the social safety net.
Martin G. Evans is a writer in Cambridge whose contributions on managerial and political issues have appeared in The Boston Globe, Cambridge Chronicle, MetroWest Daily News, Providence Journal, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail of Toronto, National Post of Toronto and the former Toronto Financial Post. He has taught at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, London Business School, George Mason University, Rutgers University and the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Was it Harris who started down this false highway. Touting her working class background and the seven minutes she spent at the fry machine at McDonalds. It would have been more honest to face up to her complicity in a genocide. Of course, Trump offers nothing more.