#CulturePH - The Person Who Hands You Your Fries Might Just Have the Best Job Story You'll Hear All Week
Think about the last time you walked into a Jollibee. You probably had a mission — Chickenjoy, maybe a Yum Burger, definitely a side of gravy. You ordered, you waited, you ate. And the person who greeted you at the lobby, who checked on your table, who made the whole experience feel a little warmer than a typical fast food run? You probably didn't think twice about them.
That's about to change — at least if you're in Taguig City.
The Jollibee Group just signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Taguig City Government to expand its inclusive employment program for senior citizens and persons with disabilities. Under the partnership, 16 company-owned stores in the city — spanning Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwich, and Burger King — will hire both senior citizens and PWDs as customer relations staff. That means lobby roles: order presenters, drink drawers, table managers, the people who make a crowded fast food store feel like someone actually cares that you're there.
It's a small headline that deserves a second look.
We've gotten used to thinking about employment as a problem for one particular demographic — fresh graduates, career-shifters, the newly displaced. But there's an entire workforce we collectively undercount: older adults who still want to work, and people with disabilities who are perfectly capable of meaningful, visible roles but rarely given the chance to fill them. The Jollibee Group has been quietly chipping away at that gap since 2019. They're now past the 1,000-person mark in terms of senior citizens and PWDs who've been brought on through this program. The Taguig expansion is the latest chapter.
What's worth sitting with isn't just the number — it's the kind of job. These aren't back-office, hidden-from-view positions. These are front-of-house roles, the ones with the most human contact, the most visibility, the most daily interaction. That's a deliberate choice, and it says something. It signals that the company believes these workers aren't just employable — they're the face of the brand. That's a different statement than tucking someone into a stockroom and calling it inclusion.
Ruth Angeles, the Jollibee Group's Chief HR Officer, put it in a way that sticks: "Work can give people more than income. It can give confidence, friendship, and a renewed sense of purpose."
Anyone who's ever had a grandparent retire and then slowly seem to fade — not from illness, but from the quiet loss of structure and connection that work provides — knows exactly what she means. The problem isn't always about money. Sometimes it's about having somewhere to be, a reason to get dressed, people who expect you at 8am. That kind of belonging is genuinely hard to replicate outside of a workplace.
And for PWDs, it's layered with something else entirely: the persistent, exhausting experience of being underestimated. Being told, in a thousand explicit and implicit ways, that you're not quite the right fit. A program that puts someone with a disability at the front of a store, greeting customers, managing the room — that does something to the narrative, both for the person doing the job and for every customer who interacts with them.
The mechanics of the partnership are worth noting too, because they signal real commitment rather than a photo-op agreement. Taguig's Public Employment Services Office handles initial interviews and applicant profiling. The City Health Office manages medical clearances. The Office for Senior Citizens Affairs and the Persons with Disability Affairs Office handle dissemination, support, and ongoing monitoring. The Jollibee Group covers interviews, training, orientation, and even opens payroll bank accounts for new hires — free of charge. That's not a memorandum gathering dust in a filing cabinet. That's infrastructure.
It also means the program has a feedback loop. People don't just get hired and then disappear into the system. There's an office watching, debriefing, evaluating. That kind of accountability tends to be what separates initiatives that last from ones that quietly wind down after the press release.
Here's the thought worth carrying out of this: the way a company staffs its stores is actually a values statement. Every hiring decision is a small declaration about who belongs, who's capable, who deserves to be seen. Most of us eat at Jollibee at least once a month — probably more, let's be honest. That means we're regularly inside spaces where these hiring decisions play out in real time.
The next time you see a lolo or lola in that red-and-yellow uniform, or someone navigating their role with a visible disability, doing it well, doing it with dignity — that's not an accident. Someone decided that person belonged there. And in a country where ageism and ableism are so normalized we've stopped noticing them, that decision is worth more than we usually give it credit for.
Maybe the best thing inclusion can do is make itself so ordinary that we eventually stop calling it inclusion at all. We're not there yet. But Taguig, 16 stores at a time, is a decent start.
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