A Bloomberg article today tells of Tyree Johnson, a Chicago man who works at two different McDonald’s to (barely) keep a roof over his head.

He even catches hell from one of his managers for smelling of the other McDonald’s when he shows up for his second shift!

“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S. average during the recovery that began in June 2009.
The jobs created by companies including Burger King Worldwide Inc. and Yum (YUM)! Brands Inc., which owns the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC brands, are among the lowest-paid in the U.S.—except in the C suite.

The pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executive officers is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York.

Tyree Johnson would have to work for over a hundred years—or put in about a million hours of minimum wage work—to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s paid former CEO Jim Skinner last year.

Breathtaking, innit?