Talk:McJob

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This article has been cited as a source by a media organization. See the 2005 press source article for details. The citation is in: Walter E. Williams (Nov. 30, 2005). "Putting down 'dead-end jobs' is insult to honest work". Deseret Morning News.

Contents 1 400,000 employees 2 Edit war 3 Dec. 4th/5th paragraph 4 Etymology (Need a fact check)

[edit] 400,000 employees

Okay Here's the problem as I see it with the 400,000 number:

1. That 400,000 refers to every employee in the company, including behind the counter people and everybody else. it's not just thoese 1000 people and robots doing everything that isn't behind the service counter. The number means absoulty nothing as it is... it would need to say since mcdonalds has 300,000 Behind the counter employees or whatever.

2. It'd help to have this be the employee's above a certain age that work behind the counter(if that satstic is possible). There's a ton of teenagers who are just working part time jobs.

Well, if you take the number of employees of any sort (400,000), and the number of restaurants (over 31,000, according to a caption on McDonald's Corporation), and then look at the statement that "over 1,000 of the men and women who now own McDonald's franchises started life in the working world behind the counter serving customers" ...then:

31000/400000 = 0.0775 or approx 7.75% of all current jobs at McDonalds are held by Franchise owners (assuming 1 owner per resteraunt)

and

of that 7.75%, only (1000/31000 = ~0.0323) 3.23% of those franchise owners started working at McDonalds serving customers. This leads to the statement that: only 0.25% (1000/400000) of all McDonalds Employees are franchise owners who started work as a McD's server.

That is a terrifically small amount of employees moving on to become franchise owners. Granted, as you say, many McJob workers are only there for only part time jobs, but we are looking at the validity of the original statement.

When the CEO's rebuttal to the statement that a job at McDonalds is "a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector" is to bring up a quarter percent of his entire employee work force, obviously that rebuttal must be placed into question. That's the purpose of the sentence in question. Certainly, you're welcome to improve upon it if you wish, but outright deleting it is no solution, and only lends undue weight to an otherwise weak statement of defence.

Out of curiosity, what was your reason for deleting the other large portion of the article? It was not nessisarily npov, only an attempt by an earlier author to explain a potentially confusing sentence. Also, could you please sign your entries? It makes these pages easier to read. Thx. Arcuras 19:44, Oct 14, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, thanks you've made that part of the entry clear. I might make that point a bit more clear, considering it had me confused at the start about why the heck do how many people advance to mangement have to do with people over there in product development.

I'm still a wee bit confused about citing sources on wikipedia. Is simply Saying "has been questioned as being invalid", a valid source? From what I've seen on other article people can have hissy fits about that, they what an actual critic or source and don't like the word some commentors or some critics or has been called into questioned without mentioning who called it in.

Which is the reason I deleted all the other info... it just seemed way way too broad theories without sources.

203.112.19.195 20:09, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The best course of action would be the cite the person who questioned Cantalupo's contention (with a proper reference, and a quote making it clear why they think McD's 400,000 employeees invalidates his claim). It's not right for an encyclopedia to say "Cantalupo's contention has been questioned" without saying who by. —Stormie 04:16, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

p.s. have a read of Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words for some more about citing sources - the root of it is that people have a tendency to insert their own POV into articles, and then try to make it look NPOV by putting a "Some say.." or "Many believe.." or suchlike in front of it. There are some exceptions listed there, like "when the holders of the opinion are too diverse or numerous to qualify", but a good rule of thumb is: if there's an edit war over a "Some say.." sentence, we need to know who says it. —Stormie 04:22, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Edit war

Can we please discuss the line "working more to highlight the exception rather than the rule" first before removing it? There hasn't been any good reason given yet, so we shouldn't continue on with this edit war when we should be discussing it. -- [[User:LGagnon|LGagnon]] 19:26, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

LGagnon, you are right. Reithy 08:53, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Some research when story is unprotected and Chucky banned.[1]

Reithy 00:05, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dec. 4th/5th paragraph

I'm replacing the paragraph that was the cause of the recent sockpuppet war for the following reasons:

1. The question of it's removal was addressed previously without resolution. ("it just seemed way way too broad theories without sources" - User:203.112.19.195 see above)
2. The sentences in question, while flawed, helps to explain the previous statement in the same paragraph
   • That being said, it does need some attention and editing... but that is no reason to outright delete it (over and over and over again)
3. The user who is being accused of the reverts is currently requested for arbitration for repetitive violations against the 3 revert rule on numerous topics. As such, it should require some other known user to agree in this specific case to lend weight to the deletion decision.

Any suggestions on how to improve the selection? Arcuras 19:12, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

I think the paragraph is fine. I don't see any POV problems or inaccuracies. We should add a citation, which would be extremely easy. The New York Times Magazine (I think) had a very good piece on college-educated families who had to move back to entry-level jobs due to outsourcing.. these were MBA's mopping the floors at McDonald's. My other suggestion would be to add balancing points, such as the high availability of "McJobs". Chuck should know by now that it's always preferable to add balance, instead of his usual method of simply deleting parts of an article which offend him. Rhobite 20:13, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology (Need a fact check)

I changed the article to reflect the fact that Douglas Coupland did not coin the term in 1991, but merely popularized it. According to this CNN article, [2], and various other online sources, the OED lists the first known publication of the term McJob with this meaning as being in the Washington Post in 1986. However, since I do not have access to the OED online, I cannot verify this fact. Can anyone with access to the OED fact check this please? Kevyn 09:31, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)