RULE 15

Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.

They weren’t embarrassed over making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about the contestants on American Idol all weekend.

Your grandparents understood that there is dignity in work because it means independence. The reality is that you’re not independent until you are paying for your food, rent, clothes, car, gas, insurance, and tuition. And the only way you will be able to do that is to get a job, even a job that might involve getting dirty or smelling like kitchen grease. A job is not degrading. Being a drone or a deadbeat is degrading.

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You live in a country with extraordinary opportunity and income mobility; if you start at the bottom, that doesn’t mean you will stay there. The important thing to do is to actually start, rather than crank up the stereo in your bedroom and lie back while your classmates are asking customers if they want to supersize that.

If you manage to get on the first rung of the work world and to do a good job, you won’t stay there for very long. The vast majority of people who were in the lowest 20 percent of earners moved into higher levels in later years. A famous 1995 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that nearly three-quarters of people in the bottom fifth of earners in 1975 were in a higher quintile by 1991. That sort of mobility was mirrored by a 2000 study by the Economic Policy Institute, which found that almost 60 percent of people in the lowest quintile in 1969 had moved into a higher quintile by 1996.78

How? They worked themselves up. They learned the skills, attitudes, and habits that helped them climb the economic ladder. A lot of people got their start by flipping burgers.

A survey of fast-food workers found that the burger-flipping jobs had instilled basic employability skills—precisely the skills that employers complain young people entering the job market so often lack. The workers learn the importance of being on time, taking responsibility for mistakes, getting along with others, taking directions, being well-groomed, and coming to work regularly. Ninety-four percent of workers said they had learned teamwork; 89 percent said they had learned to deal with customers; 69 percent got a better idea of how a business worked.79

Ben Wildavsky writes:

A surprising number of burger flippers advance through the ranks and enjoy the benefits that go with managerial responsibility in a demanding business. More important, most employees who pass through McDonald’s gain the kinds of skills that help them get better jobs. Far from sticking its workers in an inescapable rut, McDonald’s functions as a de facto job training program by teaching the basics of how to work.80

In her book No Shame in My Game, Harvard professor Katherine Newman describes the crucial and positive influence that such jobs had on the lives and attitudes of the working poor in Harlem. She found that teenagers who worked at fast-food restaurants formed tightly knit groups of like-minded individuals who clung tenaciously to their sense of dignity. Newman quotes one four-year veteran of a restaurant she calls “Burger Barn” defending her commitment to her job, even in the face of the ridicule of her peers. “There’s a lot more to it than flipping burgers,” she says. “It’s a real system of business. That’s where I go to see a big corporation at play. Cashiers. The store, how it’s run. Production of food, crew workers, service. Things of that nature.”81

Says Newman: “Older managers help kids understand they have crossed over a dignity line that separates them from ones not working.”

While it has become fashionable to deride burger flipping as a dead-end job, Herbert Northup of the Wharton School of Business notes:

It is perhaps ironic that many of the most insistent advocates of job training programs in this country are the same academics, journalists, and government administrators who condemn fast food jobs as, at best, meaningless dead ends and thus fail to see that the object of their contempt has in effect become one of the most massive, cost-efficient and racially equitable job training programs in our nation’s history.82