The word was not invented by the brand's opponents, but by a sociologist. On 24 August 1986, Amitai Etzioni published in the Washington Post an opinion piece entitled “The Fast-Food Factories: McJobs Are Bad for Kids”. This is the first attestation recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary.
The novelist Douglas Coupland popularised it in Generation X (1991), with a biting definition: “a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.”
A documented irony: McDonald's had itself registered “McJOBS” as a trademark in 1984, to designate a job-training programme for people with disabilities.
2003: entry into the dictionary, and the “slap”
In June 2003, the eleventh edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary included the word, with this definition: “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement”. The Oxford English Dictionary had already done so in March 2001: “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”.
McDonald's CEO, Jim Cantalupo, then sent an open letter to the publisher, published in Nation's Restaurant News. In it he described the definition as:
“a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women who work hard in the restaurant industry”Jim Cantalupo, CEO of McDonald's, November 2003 — originally in English
He considered it “an inaccurate description of restaurant employment” and pointed out that “more than 1,000 of the men and women who own and operate McDonald's restaurants today started their careers by serving customers behind the counter”.
Merriam-Webster did not give way. The publisher “stands by the accuracy and appropriateness of its definition”, pointing out that “for more than seventeen years, ‘McJob’ has been used as we define it, in a wide range of publications”. Its spokesman, Arthur Bicknell, summed up lexicographic doctrine: “Words get into the dictionary because they are widely and commonly used in a broad range of carefully edited sources.” The Associated Press headline read: “Merriam-Webster to McDonald's: ‘McJob’ is here to stay.” The company mentioned legal action on trademark grounds, but never brought it.
2007: the British petition
Four years later, the British subsidiary took up the fight, this time against the Oxford English Dictionary. It considered the definition “out of date and inaccurate”. McDonald's UK had already responded through advertising, with a slogan turning the word around: “McProspects — more than half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob.”
A public petition was launched. The executive in charge of human resources, David Fairhurst, told Time he wanted a definition that “reflects a job that is stimulating, rewarding… and offers skills that last a lifetime”.
The OED's reply came down to one statement of principle: the dictionary “simply records words according to their common usage”, and “it is not its role to redefine the meaning of those words according to the preferences of interest groups”. In November 2007, the campaign closed with nearly 105,000 signatures, passed to the OED for consideration.
The outcome
No definition was changed. The Merriam-Webster entry is today strictly identical to that of 2003, and the “McJob” entry still appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The episode is of interest to the case file for a precise reason: it sets a company against third parties over whom it has no contractual hold. Whereas the franchise agreement allows the head of a network to set fees, rents and standards, and trademark law sometimes allows it to force the removal of a competing trade sign, a dictionary cannot be compelled: it records usage. That is the limit of a network's power — and it is a clear one.
Behind the word, a legal question
The lexical debate covers a legal debate which, for its part, remains unresolved: in a franchised network, who is the employer?
Employees are legally employed by the franchisee, an independent company. But it is the network that prescribes procedures, work rates and standards. In the United States, the question of whether McDonald's Corporation should be regarded as a joint employer of its franchisees' employees was raised before the National Labor Relations Board in 2014; the applicable test has changed several times since, without settling.
What is at stake is the price of labour. When an employer — or a set of employers linked by the same network — has a power to set wages that competition does not discipline, economists speak of monopsony. The US Treasury report of March 2022 explicitly cites franchising among the mechanisms that feed this power. That, and not a quarrel over dictionaries, is what the word has come to denote.