Editor’s letter

This week’s Last Word is about a group of McDonald’s workers in Bradford, Pa., who walked off the job en masse. The article, by Greg Jaffe, is the kind of immersive story that The Washington Post does very well; recently, we ran another piece in the same vein, about a family stuck in a FEMA trailer camp. In these stories, reporters embed themselves with their subjects and peel back layers of personal history, often interleaved with intense suffering. There are a few themes that tend to run through them. One is that the subjects almost invariably work just as hard—no, harder—than people higher on the economic ladder. Another is how the destruction of social bonds and links to family creates a vicious cycle that drives the subjects ever deeper into impoverishment and alienation. Stories that on the surface are about poverty or polarization turn out to be about disconnection and loneliness.

The people Jaffe writes about call themselves the McRejects, and the core of the story is the strong bond between them. One was kicked out by her parents at 17; another, by contrast, is still stuck living with his parents in his childhood bedroom. Somehow, the McRejects are able to stick together, avoiding ensnarement in that cycle of disconnection. But they are forced to do this with very little help. Despite decades of rhetoric about the dignity of work and the importance of family, there is still little aid for the working poor, and the demands of many means-tested government programs force wrenching choices about whether to work or get help. This is obviously not a place to propose solutions, but they are out there, and the only way to find them is to be willing to look directly at the struggles of people like the McRejects, with both a clear eye and an open heart.