Bad call on sitting out the election, Ronald McDonald. Had you thrown a propeller beanie into the ring, the spotlight on restaurant workers might have been even more intense this campaign cycle.
First we had the candidates of both major parties suck up to the roughly 4 million Americans who work for tips, most of them in restaurants. In what’s presumed to be a first, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris vowed in quick succession to halt the federal taxation of gratuities as income. The pledges were about as sound as promises to reunite the Beatles, but restaurant employment enjoyed an intense 15 minutes of notoriety.
Then came the debate over who really knew how to salt a fry.
Harris mentioned off-handedly that she’d worked in a McDonald’s during her higher education. No she didn’t, countered Trump, though the contention was apparently based on Spidey sense alone. He hasn’t offered a sesame seed of proof that the former California attorney general is lying.
Regardless, the former president and Big Mac fanatic figured voters would believe him if he bagged a few fry orders himself. It’s not clear how the scooping and salting would out Harris, but it made sense to the man vying to be America’s fast-food customer in chief.
In any case, he invested 30 minutes in proving that he could work a fry station with the best of ‘em. Never mind that the restaurant and drive-thru were closed to all but a few carefully selected and screened volunteers who ate for free.
It’s sillier than the talk about Arnold Palmer’s, um, putter. But there is a serious side to candidates knowing how restaurants work, as we saw late last week in Massachusetts.
The restaurant industry has been lobbying hard there to preserve the state’s tip credit. Then, in an astonishing surprise to many, Gov. Maura Healey came out in favor of preserving the payroll break for restaurant employers. She flat-out urged voters via a radio broadcast to defeat an initiative on next month’s ballot that would kill the credit.
Healey, a Democrat whose policies usually don’t veer from union preferences, said she was convinced in part by her conversations with restaurateurs in the state.
But she also acknowledged her own experiences under the server compensation model that union groups like One Fair Wage so desperately want to alter, starting with the elimination of the tip credit.
Healey recalled making good money as a server from the time she was 13—and presumably too young legally to wait on tables—until she turned 24. Her firsthand experience no doubt influenced what stance she took on a fairly hot political issue in the Bay State this election cycle.
Having someone with personal exposure to the business doesn’t always pull them into the industry’s camp. The trade wasn’t exactly ga-ga over the Barack Obama administration. They didn’t find the Democrat to always be an ally, even though he’d spent time in his youth as a scoop man for Baskin-Robbins.
Nor has the industry been in complete agreement with President Biden, who was exposed to the business during his first marriage long ago. His father-in-law ran a diner at the time a car crash turned Biden into a widower.
Still, with so many issues affecting the restaurant business today, it can’t hurt to have someone with intimate knowledge of the field in the decision-making seat.
Plus, in the instances of Harris versus Trump, the loser will have a career to fall back upon.