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My suspicion is that Harris did work ad McDs, but it was in high school in Montreal. Her campaign doesn't really want to draw attention to her childhood outside the US, so they are being evasive.
I dunno if it quite adds up -- not sure what her family income was like once she moved to California, but I know somebody who attended Westmount High with her in Montreal.
This was (and still is) if not the richest postal code in Canada, definitely top 3 -- her parents didn't not own a home because (as her campaign is trying to imply) they couldn't afford to, they didn't own a home because they were rootless university professors and moved around a lot.
This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.
I see no reason to think that she would have had a job at all in this period -- maybe her economic fortunes took a turn for the worse once she moved out, but I kind of doubt this too -- I didn't go to college until the early 90s, but it definitely would not have been possible to pay a significant percentage of one's schooling costs on a part-time McDonalds paycheque then; I'd think that the 80s were even worse?
A lot of the problem with college loans reflects a growth in school costs, rather than decreasing incomes: see here for breakdowns. Demos estimates tuition for Howard University at the time of her graduation as "Tuition Then: $3,045 ($6,668 today)", aka 2016 dollars, in contrast to $23,419 in its 2016 tuition -- maybe hard to cover if you had a lot of other expenses, but at least something you could seriously dent.
Into the mid-00s, you could still do something comparable with community colleges, but these days they're pretty pricey for a full 2-year degree, and they won't get you to a 4-year.
Though in turn, a lot of the drive against students working is that the sticker-shock prices are only really getting paid by a handful of (often international) students, ameliorated by some amount of federal student aid or in-state discounts. Burnishing your college resume with extracurriculars can be much more renumerative in scholarships than slinging fries, and these programs and school workloads increasingly are incompatible with doing both.
((eg, I'm just a mentor for some FIRST programs, and they end up 25-hour jobs at times.))
That's about the same as mine in the 90s (more like 4k/a as I recall) -- thing is, McDonalds paid even less than it did now, especially (I would think) in California.
Plenty of people (including me) had part-time (or more often, summer) jobs that were relatively menial and got by without student loans that way -- but these jobs were not pulling $5/hr shifts at McDonalds.
Minimum wage in California seems to have been $3.65 in the 80s -- if one were trying to pay for tuition (and were remotely hireable; ie. a law student) I'd think that one would find a better job?
At least in the current day, service sector work has the benefit of being relatively flexible with scheduling, and that can sometimes attract people who'd otherwise be unable to work stuff out. But especially in the 80s, yeah, it definitely wasn't the cash-maximizing option.
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"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).
It was in my circles too -- but the point is that my parents actually are upper-middle class rather than literal-communist university professors, and I feel like the attitudes might be somewhat different there?
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It definitely still is in Canada. I've mentioned this before here but a major part of the reason the affluent Toronto parents I talk to frequently are swinging against the federal Liberals is because none of their kids can get the typical high school jobs (fast food, grocery store, cashier, waiting tables, etc) that they expect them to get anymore.
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I could still ping any of my co-workers at fast food joints and get them to corroborate that I was there, and if I ran from office they would come out of the proverbial woodwork (both good and bad on that front, perhaps). I think the fact they can't find one person who remembers working with her pretty damning.
Snopes tried their best to prove this true and still failed.
I don't think it happened.
To be fair, I would also ignore any media organ asking for comment from me on something long ago. In 2022 one reached out about an old college roommate who was running for office, and I sent the email straight to the trash.
I don't think McDonald's headquarters would respond about a private employment matter, and I'm not even sure it would have employment records from almost half a century ago.
Wouldn't the Harris campaign (who were contacted by Snopes) be highly motivated to provide some evidence for this if it were true? They couldn't find one childhood friend who said 'yeah we worked at Mickey D's together'? This has (at least for the next couple of days until the next cycle) blown up to be front and center in the presidential race.
I agree that the Harris campaign would have more motivation than anyone else. I just think this is assuming malice when incompetence is more than sufficient. Campaigns are extremely crazy internally (it's really hard to convey just how crazy they get unless you've been on one), with unclear lines of responsibility and a giant workload that you'll never get fully through. Even if they have Harris' lifetime tax records on hand (they should if they're available, but they might not be), there's no particular reason to think some intern or junior staffer would have an easy line to pass them on to Snopes. And even if they did, the expected benefit of convincing a Snopes reader that Harris worked at McDonald's might be outweighed by other considerations (giving away unrelated information that could provide avenues of attack, or just in setting a precedent).
Even the IRS doesn't keep more than a decade or so of records on hand ... but apparently the Social Security Administration does? With Form SSA-7050-F4, a $144 request for "Detailed Earnings Information" should provide a record which "Includes periods of employment or self-employment and the names or addresses of employers."
I don't see how the timing would have worked out, though. Harris mentioned working at McDonalds while campaigning in 2019, but I can't find mention of Trump calling this a lie until she brought it up at the end of this August, by which time it would have already been too late for the SSA to provide evidence. ("Please allow SSA 120 days to process", after which point you may call to "leave an inquiry" about why it still hasn't been processed, after which point I guess you just get to enjoy the sloth scene from Zootopia more.)
Huh. Didn't know that. If I were vetting candidates to be VP, I would almost require that they submit their detailed earnings report and their tax returns, so it would surprise me if she didn't have it from 2019.
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Have you worked in a big campaign? I think it would be fun and enlightening if you shared your experiences on the thread!
All I know comes from West Wing and I have a feeling that the reality is way more regarded than the typical mass media depiction.
I recall talking to someone in the industry in some social event like a decade ago and being told that real life is much closer to Veep than to West Wing, except that Veep depicted everyone as far more competent than the real-life versions. I imagine they were being facetious, but I chose to take it at face value and believe it unironically, and the older I get, the more I think that was correct.
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Democratic Senate campaign, prominent at the time but losing, and I was lowest level paid staffer. Also a mayoral campaign for a major city but minor candidate.
It is indeed very regarded, but my personal experiences were dominated by 1) having a giant crush on the press secretary I worked under, 2) pretending to be the candidate to call major donors' offices, and then transferring to him if his secretary said they were available, repeat. Also, going to a strip club where every stripper was 50+ after a major victory. At one point we had a freakout over baking soda being sent in the mail (accompanied by an abortion letter).
The only real insight I have is that any conspiracy theory requiring that Democratic candidates and staffers be hyper competent ideologues is wildly off-base.
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Fair enough.
The New York Times has now seemed to find a friend that got told second hand by Harris's deceased mother that Harris was working there.
“Donald Trump claims, without evidence” is essentially the same statement Trump has made about Kamala’s fast food job.
It’s Harris that has made the positive claim and Trump says there’s no evidence.
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Am I missing something? That doesn't seem like very compelling evidence.
It's not really. The New York Times' investigative branch can only find hearsay and Snopes can't find anything. I am trying to steelman the argument that Harris was telling the truth and this is all I can come up with.
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Nothing's impossible, although she claimed to have worked at McD's in college, not high school.
I'll say with 95% certainty that she made shit up. Even if she didn't have photos or paystubs,
the Harris campaign could have at least provided approximate dates and the exact location where she worked. I could easily do that from my own menial jobs 20+ years ago. I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing for politicians and mob bosses to have a bad memory.Edit: They did provide this info! Though none of her co-workers have come forward, it's a long time ago. On the other hand, it wasn't on her resume from 1987 nor in her memoir. I'm downgrading my probability of "made shit up" to 80%.
In the mean time, Ackman retweeted this funny dunk today:
"51 former intelligence officials say Kamala worked at @McDonalds"
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Yeah, 'worked at McDonald's but can't directly confirm it because nobody cares about early fast food jobs so why would I save records of it" is definitely a story I'm willing to believe. I don't know that Canada is necessary for that story, but it would be an added wrinkle if so.
I have a lot of sympathy because I have a pretty similar story. When I was in high school I worked at {local pizza joint} that was sold to new owners and rebranded a couple years after I left. I put it on my first resume and the background check company my first employer used couldn't verify through whatever their normal means are that I worked there. I ended up having to reach out through several layers of friends to get the original owner of the place to write a letter confirming I worked there. It would have been way easier and more convenient to just leave it off. If someone wanted me to prove I worked there again today I'm not sure I could do it. Maybe a dozen people had contemporaneous knowledge and the only ones I'm still in regular contact with are my family.
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Maybe social media has kept people more in touch in my generation, but I can reach out to no less than four people that are direct connections on Facebook who I worked with at McDonald’s circa 2002 when I was in high school.
I just played a round of golf with one of them about a month ago.
And I’m not even much of an extrovert, much less a politician.
I worked at a grocery store a couple of summers after you mention. I don't remember anybodies name who worked there, I have no paychecks, it's unlikely I have my tax records, there are no photos of me working there, and probably the only reason the supermarket would be able to have records of me is it's part of a giant corporate chain, not a franchisee.
Throw things back another 20 years and throw in the fact it's a franchisee, I have zero doubt Kamala could've worked there a few shifts every week and she has no real records.
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I think I can find people from about half the shitty menial jobs I worked. Entirely plausible to me that she worked at McDonald’s and doesn’t have any evidence because it was the 80’s.
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I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.
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