McJobs

Dear readers,

I was puzzled today by a CNN program about jobs. Mc Donalds, the famous fast food chain, is trying to change the perception of job opportunities within the company. The term McJob has indeed been used worldwide to mock the products of the company and describe an unattractive, boring and poorly paid job. A job that we would call in French purely alimentary, no pun intended.

To defend its point, the company spokesman presented a statistic showing that a majority (60%, if my memory is reliable) of the higher managers at Mc Donalds are coming from behind the counter. Which is pretty good... as an absolute value. Indeed, this is in no way a measure of the attractivity of a job at Mc Donalds. It is only a measure of the origin of its management.

A better index would have been the percentage of basic employees who actually manage to get a higher position. A good index would have been a ranking of this percentage against other companies in the same sector or against average companies in general.

But I suspect such a scientifically correct measure would have been a very poor one in terms of PR. I have difficulties indeed to believe that Mc Donalds would have fared well with such figures...