Don't mock the Mac

Why shouldn't McDonald's award A-levels? Whether or not you support its products, this is a company that is good at what it does.

Yet McDonald's has been the butt of every pocket cartoonist in the land since the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) announced this week that it had authorised McDonalds, Network Rail and Flybe to award qualifications to staff.

McDonalds will train staff in customer services, marketing, hygiene and human resources, awarding them with qualifications equivalent to GCSEs or A-levels. Employees at Network Rail will be able to access training in track engineering equivalent to a PhD.

Daily Telegraph readers were particularly scathing in the newspaper's letters page but that says more about Telegraph readers than it does about McDonalds.

Perhaps I should come clean at this point and declare my sometime consulting role at McDonald's as a member of its European Stakeholder Group. Does this mean I refrain from criticising the company? Far from it.

There are a lot of things I don't like about McDonalds. Mostly it's the little plastic toys and the horrid clown. Then there's the product - the burgers and the salty chips. But how many of us can say we have never succumbed at times of stress?

But if you take away the product(that's what you do with a McDonald's hamburger isn't it?) there is a lot of good stuff lurking within the McEmpire. The staff training would put to shame a lot of the so-called academic offerings in schools.

You might learn how to bake a cake in domestic science lessons at school, but at McDonald's you learn about nutrition, not just about making hamburgers. It's true that McDonald's has not yet learned how to switch on the world's children to healthy eating. But neither has Jamie Oliver.

Then again Jamie Oliver is not responsible for this alarming map. I'm not sure McDonald's could be absolved in the same way. As the Daddy of fast food merchants it should not be surprised to find itself in the dock on obesity.

But it is on the case. Unfortunately McDonald's, like the tobacco, soft drinks and confectionery companies, is in the addiction business. Almost all of us eat too much sugar and companies like McDonald's have created attractive and efficient delivery systems. Now as their markets become more socially aware they face a conflict between their business aims - selling lots of hamburgers - and promoting a healthy society.

It's going to be a long road but we need to be realistic. McDonald's is not going to go away. But it can reform itself and I think it is reforming, although in some areas more slowly than others. In its employing approach I believe it has more than reformed. Much of its training, pay and conditions are first class in its sector.

Its social awareness is exemplary. McDonalds hasn't turned its back on the poor as some more elitist businesses have done. It is down town, lighting up parts of cities that have been deserted by other businesses. It is working with communities, serving cheap but well cooked food to people who don't earn much and giving jobs to people who might struggle otherwise to find work. But these aren't any old jobs, they are jobs that have prospects, where people can rise up within the company.

David Fairhurst, McDonald's UK head of HR (his full job title would take you longer than it does to eat a burger) has challenged the term McJob as a pejorative, and rightly so. He wants it's definition as an unstimulating job with few prospects removing from the dictionary.

A McJob is a real job and a McA-level will be a real A-level as worthy as anything in History or Geography and probably a little more useful. So don't mock the mac. It's trying hard and deserves our support. It has mine.