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While she was at Howard University, Vice President Kamala Harris worked at McDonalds to earn spending money, and now that she’s the Democratic nominee for president, the rightwing blogosphere is attempting to push the absurd conspiracy theory that she lied about it.
They apparently realize it’s not great that Donald Trump—infamously gifted enormous sums of money from his father coming out of college—is being juxtaposed with VP Harris making french fries and working the cash register, and they’re freaking out about it.
And they should be freaking out about it. While Trump was born with a silver foot in his mouth (thank you, Ann Richards), Vice President Harris has had to actually, you know, work in a job familiar to working class families who are struggling to make ends meet.
Here’s the heart of their claim: because VP Harris didn’t put McDonalds on resumés and job applications after college, this must mean she’s lying. They’re now demanding proof that the Vice President worked at the Golden Arches almost 40 years ago.
Okay, lemme explain why this is ridiculous.
During my junior and senior years in high school, I worked at Papa John’s Pizza, and in case you’re wondering, yes, it definitely sucked. I took orders, dealt with angry customers, made pizzas, folded boxes, and spent a lot of time simply cleansing the store of dough dust and marinara.
I earned $5.15 an hour the entire time I was there—about 18 months—and despite two excellent job reviews (perfect scores, thankyouverymuch), I was denied a pay raise on both occasions because our regional manager was a greedy little man who cared more about his margins than his employees.
But the thing is… despite this being less than 20 years ago, with a corporation that very much still exists, I have zero proof that I worked at Papa John’s. None. Zilch.
I have no name tags, no uniform shirts or hats, no pay stubs or copies of my W-2 or employee documents. I have no pictures of myself in a Papa John’s polo and khaki shorts. I have no way of contacting my former colleagues and boss because I’ve forgotten their last names. Because, you know, 20 years and all.
The location itself was shuttered by Papa John’s many years ago, probably somewhere around the end of the Bush Administration.
I never put my time there on any resumé or applications, including for the few odd jobs I worked between high school graduation and joining the Army.
All I have to prove that I worked this shitty minimum-wage job as a young lass are the promise of an affidavit from my grandmother, the permanent muscle memory earned from folding many thousands of pizza boxes, and a lingering resentment toward late stage capitalism.
In the eyes of the rightwing blogosphere, I never worked at Papa John’s, and to be fair, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I’d love to forget that I ever worked there, so, maybe, in my particular case, their bad faith could be obliquely read as a blessing.
This is a pretty common experience for minimum-wage laborers from working class families who have the opportunity to get a college degree and enter the salaried ranks, long separated from keeping corporations afloat for dollars an hour.
So, if I, twenty years down the road, can offer no tangible proof that I worked at a fast food joint, it’s not one bit surprising that the sitting Vice President hasn’t offered up a McDonalds cap wore almost 40 years ago.
It’s also not one bit surprising that so many in rightwing media don’t understand this common experience of those who came from working class families and hunched over an oil vat for hours at low pay to make ends meet.
These are the same people who claim raising the minimum wage and mandating universal health care and requiring paid family leave for working class families will somehow irreparably harm our economy.
They are detached from the struggles of workers, led by an egregiously entitled and effete Nepo-Baby-in-Chief, and to compensate, they’ve decided to show their asses by attempting to erase the experiences of a progressive politician who understands, firsthand, what workers experience.
And they’ll do this while sitting in fast food drive-throughs and being served by the same folks whose livelihoods they spend every waking moment of their privileged lives trying to make harder.
Same as it ever was.
By the way: Papa John’s Pizza sucks. Get your pies elsewhere.
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