Annual turnover: 1.5 billion
Head of HR: Lynn Phillips
From a standing start in 1974 when it opened its first UK outlet, McDonalds has grown into a network of 1,250 restaurants (to use the companys favoured word). They are still at it, opening around 90 more branches a year. Few high streets in the country are to be found without the famous golden arches and red fascias. In the UK, as in much of the rest of the world, the McDonalds growth story has been remarkable.
And yet as an employer, the firm faces a huge PR challenge. As the developed world has shifted more and more manufacturing and production work to the developing world, service-sector jobs in the first world have come to represent the face of modern employment for the majority of the workforce. The most miserable kind of service-sector job is sometimes disparagingly referred to as burger flipping. The label McJob has been used to describe the worst sort of here today, gone tomorrow job opportunity.
Which is strange, because McDonalds doesnt really offer McJobs. They are not on the menu. Around 60% of McDonalds management staff started out at the firm as hourly-paid employees, either as students or school-leavers. McDonalds came 43rd out of The Times list of the top 100 graduate recruiters, beating many other famous retail names. IiP status, achieved several years ago, has just been re-awarded after a positive assessment.
And at the end of last year the Industrial Society produced a report on training and development which singled out McDonalds as an exemplary developer of people. Which is all a long way from the tales of pressurised, sweated labour, desperately cooking up hamburgers for a grasping, ungrateful public.
We are one of the biggest employers of young people in the UK, acknowledges the firms head of HR, Lynn Phillips.
For a lot of people it will be their first job. They may not all want a career at McDonalds, but we have a big responsibility developing peoples confidence, getting them to understand the importance of teamwork and punctuality, and recognising and rewarding their work, she says.
In contrast to other parts of the catering sector, McDonalds retention rates are quite respectable (a lot better, indeed, than in the US). The firm was already paying above the national minimum wage when it was introduced, and has raised its pay rates again since.
But McDonalds, long the target of trade union recruitment drives, has never encouraged trade unionism among its workforce. Its never been relevant to us, not something weve spent a great deal of time thinking about, Phillips says. We survey our employees a lot, and we have seen an increase in their levels of satisfaction. We believe in offering training, building a sense of teamwork. Our customer service depends on having highly trained staff.
Working for McDonalds is clearly not quite the nightmarish prospect some of the anti-McDonalds propaganda would have you believe. Customers wouldnt keep going back 2.5 million people served every day in the UK alone if that were the case. But as one of the pre-eminent symbols of globalisation, McDonalds is always going to find itself in the firing-line of anti-globalisation and environmental protesters.
The graduate career path is perhaps the most surprising part of all this. And in an ironic or unintentional way this confirms the accuracy of a popular (if rather sour) joke from the days of the last recession: Question: What do you say to a graduate with a job? Answer: Big Mac and fries, please.
