This can be generalized to the food industry as a whole, possibly: circumstantial evidence but there's a meme divided between “front of the house” and “back in the kitchen” and it shows the front as vaping and drinking stylish coffee drinks while the kitchen smokes cigarettes and pounds Monsters/et. al.
Anyway, this is my reasoning:
- Especially on the lower end of the spectrum, people can handle being social just enough to do a job like McD's, where malicious noncompliance is not necessarily disciplined, and where nonmalicious noncompliance is common anyway on all levels. But still, they will be shunted into the kitchen, perhaps in a supervisory role.
- There used to be more of a stigma associated with McD's employment, like there was something wrong with you if you worked there (at best, if you were a student, it was just a curious time of your life working for the Empire, say, and reflected no more on your moral character than would going to a weird amusement park). Even now, and again because of the atmosphere surrounding noncompliance, here, it is possible and common for McD's employees (incl./esp. managers) to be distracted and even surprisingly foolish about many things.
- But so now imagine you have an employee on the schizophrenia spectrum who has delusions about paranormal abilities, or who thinks they have to “take a stand” by working hard, etc. They can see the stigma of the job but they think they can see through it, and they motivate themselves to do their job at a level that would be commendable at any job, which then is even more (seemingly) commendable here (because of the warped incentive/disincentive structure of the McD's system).
- I thought it was “just” the franchise I was working for before, but the first (of the two) McD's that I've worked for, portrayed kitchen supervision as a horrible task. This portrayal is even more pronounced at the one I work at right now. There's also an FB Reel or TikTok vid (I don't recall exactly) implicitly referencing an entirely other branch of McD's where this trope of “the horrible kitchen” is showcased, the manager character using “promotion to kitchen manager” as a threat.
- On the corporate level, we have things like the ice-cream machine fraud that the FBI looked into, or just the general atrocities of the business (factory farming, destruction of rainforests for farmland, etc.).
- Imagine again being a schizophrenic/adjacent employee, who because you work hard have been “put in charge of the kitchen” often, but the other crew don't help much, they usually stand around talking or on their cellphones, the managers don't intelligently train or give direction to the crew (they're on their phones too, haha!), etc. But you will still get disparaged or mocked when things “go wrong” in the kitchen (which will be almost always).
- Perhaps your location has a poor track record of fire safety, with the floor routinely slathered in piles (PILES!) and patinas of oil and grease, cardboard boxes blocking the main back door out, etc. This will be stressful just like that, but if you're on the spectrum and part of that means having an extremely overactive and vivid imagination, you're gonna be having visions of burning alive because of the stupidity of your job site, time and again. (Yeah, there's that weird fog thing they can do, ANSEL or w/e it's called, but what if you don't know where the control for that is? among other things…)
- Inconsistent provision of breaks: “you're willing to work the overnight shift, so…” you get your breaks at some off time compared to all (really, all!) the other employees, or they make it sound like you might not get a break, but you still have to overclock your body and brain because you still have to overcompensate for the whole kitchen, or when you go on break you have to worry about coming back and everything being thrown off because the manager who covered your break doesn't f&^king care and was on their phone for half that half-hour instead of stocking and cleaning the things you didn't have time to stock and clean.
- They just let racists and other political troglodytes tear down the kitchen's morale (this happens at the one I work at, this deranged, shriveled old woman is constantly, hypocritically screeching about other employees, esp. those of other ethnicities, not trying hard enough, or stealing food, or w/e while she herself is poorly coordinated, slow, and thieving too).
- Trying to tie it all together: so, McD's can get actively delusional/decompensating schizophrenia-spectrum sufferers to work hard, to work smart, to agree to things like unstable work environments, eviscerated sleep schedules, etc., because these people, per their active delusions, might think that they are being tested, or “this is the darkness before the light,” or whatever other such BS that appeals to them “in the heat of the moment.” There will be other employees foolish enough to believe in paranormal powers, too, and you (the schizophrenic) can be the target of that foolishness, because they might attribute those powers to you, to “explain” why you are such a proficient worker. You will be confused enough to wonder if it's true, this creates the kind of social validation that delusions typically lack, but so it will reinforce your willingness to “work hard/smart” and all, even though you can see that other people hardly work at all and still get all their hours (your hours will probably be contingent on your ridiculous performance, of course).
- And you will have the crimes/atrocities of the corporation weighing on your mind: “This is the kind of company I work for,” if you were not under the spell of grandiose delusions about how doing a good job here and now is the pebble in the river that changes the river's course, you would see that this is morally insane, but under the spell, you think you're holding that f&$king pebble, that this industry all is the f^%king river, etc.
- You ask for help with getting insurance through work, so you can get your medication. Granted, if you were on your meds, your sleep schedule would have to be pretty exact, and they can't have that, esp. not from you! So for whatever reason, they don't help you get insurance through work; they directly, explicitly say that they will not help you get insurance through work. Do they know what they're doing?
I realize almost all of this is both industry-, company-, and even personally-specific, and anecdotal evidence is not quite the best. But so for what it's worth, it seems to me that this corporation knows that they have created a kitchen work culture in which it is hard to excel, hard to even get by without physical and mental health compromises, which low-level schizophrenics (like myself) can be plausibly manipulated or even outright tricked into “believing in,” so that then we are taken advantage of as much as the criminal mindset of the local management team desires, and in fact working in this environment is then as detrimental to our prognosis as use of hard drugs would be. (Note that sometimes there will be crew and managers who actually encourage drug use, to “make the job tolerable,” so that if you don't do drugs they get mad at you (for not buying from them, for example), but when you do use them, they can hold it over your head.)
Or am I reading too much into my own work experience at McD's? Again, only two locations myself, though I've read reports (among other things) about many, many others. And since I'm on the schizophrenia problem, I have problems with complex delusions spontaneously forming, so maybe this all is just a persecution complex I've developed 🤷
If this has broader antiwork significance, I would argue that it's because of the role McD's has played in the development of American corporate culture. But that's a topic I unfortunately haven't studied very much, so I'm not sure how far I could push that kind of logic…