It’s a Greasy Job, but Millions Do It

On balmy days thick with sweat and the smell of simmering onions, Jose Castanon stares into the grill and swears he can see a vision of his own restaurant.

It’s always a small joint in the Mexican town of Zacatecas, where his family can see where he grew up--away from Los Angeles, away from the gangs. He even has a name for it: Lupitas, for his wife.

“It’s like a mirage,” he said.

But inevitably, human voices draw him back to Tommy’s outdoor shack on Beverly Boulevard, where Castanon, 42, started working in 1978 for $2.75 an hour. They ask for chili burgers.

“All my life, I’ve wanted to own my own business,” he said. “But you have to pay bills and the family gets sick, and so on. . . .”

Castanon flips burgers for a living. It may not be the dream of plush offices and power lunches that many high school graduates see over the horizon, but for more than a million immigrants, teen-agers, and even a few laid-off executives, it’s a job. America in the ‘90s, after all, is a nation where more people are taught to fry Quarter Pounders each year than are trained by the Army.

That bit of trivia comes from Jane Hulbert, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s. She provided two more statistics that may hit closer to home for the nation’s estimated 2.3 million 1994 graduates: One in 12 Americans obtains his or her first job at the Golden Arches and one in eight works there at some point in life.

Burger flippers. They’re a little-respected fraternity in a land where “Ya want fries with that?” serves as something of a low-wage epitaph--where they’re perpetually invoked by national politicians in search of a whipping boy or cast as cartoon buffoons.

During the 1988 presidential primaries, Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), now House Majority Leader, touched on a key economic theme when he declared: “We can’t just clean each other’s clothes and flip hamburgers for each other.” Not to be left out, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis later warned of “an America where all we do is flip each other’s hamburgers and take in each other’s dry cleaning for $3.35 an hour.”

(The dry cleaning is another story.)

The job’s place in the pantheon of ridicule was solidified when Beavis and Butt-head, America’s favorite cartoon losers, took jobs working the night shift at Burger World.

But “that’s where the jobs are right now,” said Douglas Christopher, a Los Angeles investment analyst who tracks the burger market for Crowell, Weedon & Co. “People are being laid off right and left. We are laying off the affluent, skilled work force and replacing it with an unskilled, service-oriented work force.”

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All this talk gets Ray Macias a little animated. Macias, who works at his neighborhood McDonald’s, graduated Thursday from Hollywood High School and plans to study architecture at Los Angeles Valley College. Despite his current employment, “I know I’ll come out (of college) as a professional,” he said.

Macias, 17, was working the grill at the McDonald’s near Hollywood and Vine the day of the Northridge earthquake, flipping burgers in a frenzy for six hours without a break. The drive-through hosted a steady stream of cars flowing out onto Vine, waiting to be served at one of the few area restaurants that remained open Jan. 17.

“People make cracks all the time,” he said. “I hear it at school.” He imitated a nasal, Southern accent and said: “Ya want fries with this?

“I don’t think people know what the pressure is. If you’re an executive, sitting back in your office, kicking your feet back, what’s that? McDonald’s is not easy.”

The world looks a little different from the other side of the drive-through window. From his perch behind the McDonald’s microphone, Macias has seen the relatively tranquil neighborhood disturbed by gun-toting youths swirling through the parking lot.

And then there are the customers, some of whom are a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Georgina Lopez, 20, will never forget the finicky patron who changed his order seven times in the drive-through, arriving at the counter only to change his order again. After several permutations of burgers and fries, shakes and McNuggets, the computer finally surrendered.

“I had to call the manager over,” said Lopez, who works with Macias. “It took forever.”

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In contrast to most popular images, the job requires “a high degree of mental focus,” Macias said. This means making the burgers well no matter how nasty the customers get, and adding spice to tasks that can be monotonous.

“I like making a competition out of it,” he said. “I tell my co-workers ‘You’re too slow’ or ‘You took too long for that.’ ”

Recently, Macias and crew fought to see who could sell the most fajitas--an experimental product that has yet to catch on with more tradition-bound customers. He relished lacing his sales pitch with unscripted adjectives like delicious and mouthwatering .

Corporate statistics show that McDonald’s employs more than half a million people, followed by Burger King, with 210,000 workers, and Wendy’s, with 120,000. Combined, local favorites Tommy’s, Carl’s Jr. and In-N-Out Burgers employ more than 20,000 people in California.

Wages range from the $4.25-an-hour entry pay at McDonald’s to the $7.50 garnered hourly by Castanon, who has worked 16 years to get there.

With a steady influx of immigrants from Central America and Mexico, California’s fast-food restaurants employ a predominantly Latino work force, industry experts said.

William Trimble, a manager at the ‘50s-style burger joint Johnny Rockets in Encino, said immigrants are willing to perform many tasks looked down upon by others who “are allergic to hard work.”

Trimble knows. In the past eight years, he has virtually traversed the Yellow Pages listing under “Restaurants,” moving from McDonald’s and El Pollo Loco to slower-paced national chains such as Tony Roma’s and Baker’s Square.

“There’s so many people who want a shortcut to the top,” Trimble said. “They have too much ego and not enough pride.”

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Cecilia Hernandez, 33, stands at the helm of the Fatburger at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. Her black uniform prominently displays a huge button with the words “Unhappy Guest” written in bold letters and a red line running through it.

“I have to be over here,” she said, pointing to the freezers, “and over here,” she added, dashing over to the grill, “and here,” she concluded at the computerized register, finding these words blinking at the bottom of the screen: “It’s up! Come and get it!”

“When I get home, I go to sleep at 8:30,” said Hernandez, who emigrated 13 years ago from El Salvador. “One day, I’m going to get real, real tired. But not yet.”

It hurts when her daughter wants to go to the movies on Saturday and Hernandez has to work, she said, and even worse are the regular bills her $7.25-an-hour wage strain to pay.

“I have learned to say to Pacific Bell, ‘Give me credit,’ “she said.

Lopez, who is paying her way through college at McDonald’s, said many of her immigrant co-workers are reluctant to leave their jobs in search of education.

“If they find a job, they stick to it,” she said. “They’re afraid. Sometimes they tell me they wish they could go to school. They tell me I’m lucky my mother is here helping me.”

Two years from now, Lopez is expecting to get her degree from Valley College; she hopes to become an elementary school teacher. Meanwhile, she said, she’d just as soon leave the burgers at work.

“If I go to a restaurant, I don’t order hamburgers. My brothers are always begging me to bring them home. I just tell them, ‘I’ve had enough.’ ”