McDonald’s is not a firm known for exhibiting a duty of care to its staff, its patrons or the communities in which it operates. But the latest scandal to hit the fast food giant really does take the biscuit – robbing staff of their wages while they work.
McDonald’s already pays its workers the lowest wage permitted by law – forcing full time staff to rely on government programs to pay their rent, feed their families and obtain healthcare. And now we find that even this pittance of a wage is being watered down by managers, at the behest of the corporation.
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Workers across America are now suing McDonalds for wage theft.
“These suits have been filed to stop this widespread wage theft,” said Joseph Sellers, one of the attorneys for the workers, in a conference call. “They highlight a broad array of unlawful pay practices, which together reflect ways in which McDonald’s has withheld pay from its low-paid workers in order to enrich the corporation and its shareholders.”
As John Swaine writes for The Guardian:
The lawsuits allege that thousands of McDonald’s workers have their pay pushed below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, through a variety of practices. Some are not paid for all the time they work, some have wages docked in order to pay for their uniforms and some are made to wait for hours until busy periods before they are allowed to clock in, the complaints allege.
But this is just the latest occasion that some of the nation’s poorest working people have been forced to the courts to gain to uphold the most basic principles of employment.
McDonald’s was recently forced to pay out a six figure settlement to 291 employees who were threatened with deportation if they refused to work 25 hour shifts in a former franchise. The workers were kept in their boss’s basement between shifts, and had ‘rent’ docked from their wages for their own imprisonment.
While screwing the wages of its minimum wage workers below the poverty line – McDonald’s made a $5.5bnprofit last year, and paid it’s CEO Don Thompson $13.7m.
The corporation’s flagrant disregard for the millions of people slaving away each day to create its profits is truly staggering. But that millions more of us continue to hand over our cash to such an unethical company, for food barely worthy of the description, that is even worse.
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