Would you like to work for a company where the 401K matching on 5% of salary is as much as 11%? Where you can become a manager earning $62,000 plus bonus and company car with no college degree, no Union, no trade—nothing but hard work.

Of course, you’ll have to put up with snickers and even scorn if you mention your job in public.

All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.

“While an average McDonald’s grosses $2.2 million a year, seasoned managers who motivate employees and keep customers coming back can add more than $200,000 to that total.“Restaurant managers are in the most important position in our company,” says Richard Floersch, McDonald’s chief human resources officer.”

Moreover, with corporate culture being recognized as the moving force behind corporate performance, why is it that articles about changing culture in major corporations employing mostly skilled, well-paid workers, such as IBM, are met with serious discussion, while changing it in major corporations with mostly minimum wage earners, such as McDonalds, is marked down as hype?

Why was a cultural change at IBM seen as key to the company’s survival, but instilling pride in the workers at McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC is viewed as hype, “Raising spirits is cheaper than raising salaries.”

Why do we expect young people to take pride in their first ‘real’ job, or care about the customer, when they were laughed at for the same attitudes/actions in their minimum wage job?

Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they are honest, hardworking, raise families and even pay taxes, which is more than you can say for their wealthier counterparts?

In the same vein, why is the four-year grad, with a degree paid for by mom and dad, considered a better candidate than the one who took longer working ‘non-professional’ jobs to pay for the same degree from the same school?

Maybe companies need to wake up. No matter what their family’s economic status, I haven’t seen the same high sense of entitlement in kids who spent their summers working in average and minimum wage jobs as I have in the ones who worked frequently overpaid jobs for their parents or didn’t work at all.

How far can you really rise when you start on the counter? Ask Karen King, President of McDonald’s USA East Division.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink what we, the people, look down on and what earns respect.

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Image credit: sxc.hu