COLUMN ONE : Economics at Clinton’s Hangout : At McDonald’s, where the President-elect loads up on fast food, workers balance daily struggles with long-term hopes. Their lives add humanity to the abstract issues of the economic conference.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  While President-elect Bill Clinton’s economic forum drew worldwide attention this week, a different sort of tale was unfolding nearby at McDonald’s, where the daily grind offered a counterpoint to the lectures on jobs and prosperity.

At this Clinton hangout, and in a multitude of other fast-food places like it around the country, a corps of low-skill, uninsured employees quietly goes about the mundane business of survival each day: reporting to work, dishing out fast food--and clinging to a precarious perch at the bottom of the income ladder.

Not that anyone voiced complaints during a recent mid-morning visit. It’s a cruel job market out there, and the workers know it: “We turn down a lot of people who want to work at McDonald’s,” observed Keith Abrams, 21, a cashier who aspires to be a nurse one day.

Customers, of course, are welcome, and few more welcome than Clinton, who likes to drop in for coffee, water and easy conversation after his morning jogging rounds. The President-elect has described the ubiquitous fast-food franchise as his window on the world of ordinary Americans and their concerns.

But McDonald’s also is a window on the enormous challenges that shadow the U.S. economy: the proliferation of low-wage jobs, the chasm between rich and poor, the lack of skills among many workers, the new obstacles to upward mobility.

Certainly, the workers don’t lend themselves to easy generalizations or stereotypes. Some seem stuck at the minimum wage, living symbols of the problems that preoccupied more than 300 guests at the economic summit a dozen blocks away. Other employees belie the stereotypes of dead-end jobs and are plotting their own course toward a more affluent life.

Yet even they couldn’t make it without the help and generosity of relatives, who typically provide lodging or baby-sitting services.

Walk into this two-story McDonald’s and you might be served by Abrams, a polite college dropout who is planning to go back to school next year. Or, your meal might be prepared by Carle Daniel, a single mother, 31, struggling to raise two young daughters on a minimum-wage paycheck.

How does she manage? “I got a helper,” Daniel confides, pointing toward the heavens. “He’s been helping me so far.”

In fact, she has other helpers. Daniel and the kids live with her grandmother, which greatly cuts down living expenses. Government food stamps help with the grocery bills. And Medicaid--the health care program for the poor--helps cover doctors’ visits.

Daniel has bounced around the job market. For a while, she toiled in a factory making ironing boards in St. Louis, where she grew up. Then there was the job at a Brown shoe factory. But sooner or later, she always got a pink slip.

“If you don’t have much seniority, eventually you’ll be the first one sent home,” she said. Six months ago, Daniel, mother of one daughter and pregnant with another, packed her bags and headed south to Little Rock for a new chance.

She is caught up in some very large trends. During one of the conference’s first presentations, Robert M. Solow, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lamented the “sad drift toward inequality” between the incomes of rich and poor.

Clinton cited the need to raise skill levels as a key to the broader problems of raising incomes and national productivity, challenges he suggested won’t be simple. “We are in this--all of us--together,” he said at one point. “And let’s not kid ourselves, these are hard questions.”

At McDonald’s, certain things seemed quite clear, at least to some employees who were keenly aware of the link between education and living standards. This group looked at their fast-food jobs as stepping stones. Unlike some of their co-workers, they tried to squirrel away a little savings and had plans for the future.

Lynn Brown, for example, has paid her dues at the restaurant for more than three years, slowly working her way up from the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour to $4.75. Working about 35 hours a week, she earns about $165--more than the typical McDonald’s employee. Now she plans to move from home, 62 miles away to Arkadelphia, and study psychology at a state college. Her goal is to set up a private practice, counseling families.

“Whatever I want to do, I’m going to do,” declares Brown, 20, whose eyes light up when she smiles. “I won’t let nothing stop me.”

People like Brown stand out in an atmosphere that often is characterized by a high turnover of employees who can drift in and out of jobs with an alarming nonchalance. “Sometimes they last two days and quit,” Brown said. “Sometimes a week and quit. Sometimes two months and quit.”

Working behind the counter didn’t offer Brown all she wants in life, but then again, she didn’t expect it to: “It helped me move forward,” she said.

For those who don’t stick around, similar opportunities await outside the front door, where the geometric architecture of the fast-food industry dominates the urban landscape. A Bojangles chicken outlet looms to the left; across the street, Rally’s drive-through solicits customers with a promise of 99-cent burgers. Another hamburger joint is under construction nearby.

By itself, the proliferation of such low-level services is not the real jobs problem, although poverty experts often bemoan the phenomenon and often advocate a higher minimum wage or tax breaks to help the working poor survive.

The concern voiced over and over at Clinton’s economic conference is that living standards overall have been improving more slowly than they used to, as wages have stagnated in many industries. While low-wage service jobs have multiplied, lucrative manufacturing jobs--once available for the unskilled--have been disappearing.

Experts agree that the answer, both for individuals and for society, is education. The global economy is less forgiving than ever toward those who lack know-how. But for those who possess it--individuals and companies both--the rewards can be great.

That might sound a bit abstract to Keith Abrams, a soft-spoken, polite worker who lives in a neighborhood where a lot of other young men hang out on the street and have no jobs. But he understands it on a gut level, describing his time in the fast-food industry as a way station on the road to better things: “I want to do more than just work at McDonald’s.”

Abrams lives with his mother, a teacher, who provides him health insurance. He plans to go back to school, in pursuit of a nursing degree. “I want to buy a house one day,” he says, “but I’m just taking it step by step, one day at a time.”

The future is a tougher proposition for some of his co-workers. Carle Daniel, raising two kids, can’t easily go back to school to learn skills that help her earn more. She still has dreams, though, dreams that reach beyond getting a job in the air conditioner factory where her friend works for $7 an hour.

They are about music, about playing the piano. Once, she even took lessons, but they didn’t lead anywhere because she didn’t have a piano of her own. “It didn’t make sense to go home without anything to practice on,” she says.

Asked what she dreams of for her daughters, Daniel--a straightforward woman who got off welfare to work at McDonald’s a couple of months back--seems momentarily stumped. Then she recalls how her 8-year-old loves to watch dancers on television. She breaks into a smile, and somewhere deep in her imagination, a wish seems to crystallize.

“When there’s a will, there’s a way,” she declares, absorbed in the moment’s reverie, as piped-in music plays softly and diners nibble in the background. “Maybe I’ll get her on ‘Star Search’ one day.”