All eyes were on McDonald’s workers on Thursday as they walked out on their jobs and went on strike in 13 cities nationwide. Top Chef star Padma Lakshmi showed her support at a rally earlier this week. Democratic presidential candidates Julián Castro, Bill de Blasio, and Jay Inslee joined workers on the picket line today. Others, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Kirsten Gillibrand, wrote tweets and op-eds in solidarity. Bernie Sanders even hosted a video town hall with striking workers in Dallas, where McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting took place this morning.
Labor advocacy group Fight for $15 has been gearing up this “week of action” strategic blitz for a while now, with all planned action coming to a head today in McDonald’s workers’ fight for a $15 hourly wage and the right to unionize. And the push has been successful: Even fast-food novices have likely noticed that it’s been a turbulent few days for McDonald’s. Amid pressure from workers’ rights activists, the fast-food giant has faced an onslaught of negative press surrounding new allegations of sexual harassment and a failure to protect employees from workplace violence, all leading up to today’s nationwide strike, timed to coincide with McDonald’s shareholder meeting.
“It’s time corporations listen to workers,” Teresa Cervantes, a Chicago McDonald’s worker on strike, said at a rally. “We need to stop workplace violence and sexual harassment. We want dignity, respect, $15 an hour, and a union.”
Ire towards McDonald’s, which has been building for years, is apparently at an all-time high at this very moment. But how did we get here?
25 new complaints of sexual harassment
For the third time in three years, multiple McDonald’s workers have filed complaints accusing the company of fostering a culture of widespread sexual harassment.
The latest round of charges — which include 20 claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, three civil lawsuits, and two additional lawsuits tied to previous complaints — alleges that McDonald’s workers as young as 16 years old have repeatedly sought assistance from management after experiencing groping, propositions for sex, lewd comments, and other misconduct on the job, only to have their complaints downplayed, ignored, or even mocked, according to a statement released by Fight for $15. On Tuesday, the organization filed the charges with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund.
The allegations, a handful of which are provided in a statement, are appalling. In one, a supervisor cut a woman’s hours after she complained that a coworker had exposed himself to her and attempted to assault her in a walk-in cooler. In another, an area manager became hostile when a financially vulnerable worker turned down his promises of cash and a raise in exchange for sex, ultimately driving the woman to quit following repeated complaints to McDonald’s corporate offices that led nowhere. The New York Times, in a recent report, details the harassment that a 16-year-old employee allegedly experienced at the hands of a supervisor, whose advances she rebuffed; management’s retaliation eventually led to the unemployment of both the teenager and her mother, who also worked at the restaurant.
“For three years, we’ve been speaking out, filing charges and even going on strike to get McDonald’s to confront its sexual harassment problem,” said Tanya Harrell, a McDonald’s worker whose coworker allegedly attempted to rape her in a bathroom stall, in a statement. “But these new charges show that nothing has changed.”
Jameila has been a victim of sexual harassment while working at McDonald's in Sanford. It's time for the company to listen and address the sexual harassment happening to workers in their stores. Stand with Jamelia #Fightfor15 #MeToo pic.twitter.com/JS72OEmBjT
— Fight for 15 Florida (@FightFor15FL) May 23, 2019
The service industry is notoriously brimming with toxic behavior and sexual misconduct. A report by the National Women’s Law Center, which houses the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, found that the largest share of sexual harassment charges filed by women with the EEOC between 2012 and 2016 came from the food-service industry. A 2016 survey among women in non-managerial fast-food jobs found that “40 percent had experienced unwanted sexual behavior at work, including sexual remarks and unwanted touching, while 2 percent said they had been sexually assaulted or raped on the job,” as Bryce Covert wrote for Eater last year.
McDonald’s president and CEO Steve Easterbrook, in a letter to Padma Lakshmi preceding her participation in a demonstration outside McDonald’s Chicago headquarters on Tuesday, wrote that McDonald’s began working with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) last year to revamp the company’s sexual misconduct and harassment policy. According to the letter, McDonald’s has “encouraged” individual franchisees to adopt the corporate policy, and has also rolled out new training and will be launching a hotline for complaints. “I am proud of the progress we have made to date,” Easterbrook concludes.
Lakshmi’s response at the Tuesday rally: “It’s a start, but McDonald’s needs to do way more.”
721 reported incidents of workplace violence
Workers at a McDonald’s on Chicago’s South Side filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Monday, alleging that McDonald’s has done nothing to implement safety measures to protect employees from frequent occurrences of workplace violence, ranging from customers throwing objects to threatening staff and other diners with firearms.
The complaint coincides with the release of a new report on Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project that details McDonald’s failure to keep its restaurant employees safe from workplace violence. According to the report, between 2016 and 2019, there have been 721 incidents of McDonald’s workplace violence (most involving guns) covered by the media — and that represents “only a fraction” of all incidents. In Chicago, where the OSHA complaint was filed, on average more than 21 calls per day are made to emergency services from McDonald’s stores in the city.
“The company doesn’t really care,” Martina Ortega, one of the workers who filed the complaint, told Bloomberg. According to the complaint, one manager’s response to a violent incident was to tell employees to defend themselves by throwing hot oil or hot coffee at an attacker.
“I get scared basically every time I hear customers yelling,” Ortega told Bloomberg. “I think about starting to run because I don’t want to get punched or shot.” She said she now keeps her car keys on her at all times when working at McDonald’s, in case she has to flee the building without time to grab her purse.
As workers picketed, shareholders congregated in Dallas
All of this came to a head today, as workers protested during the breakfast and lunch rush, in 13 cities from Los Angeles to Detroit to St. Louis, Missouri. Meanwhile, McDonald’s executives and investors gathered in Dallas for their annual meeting, rather than the company’s home base of Chicago (per CNN, activists speculated that the departure from the usual location was a deliberate move to avoid confrontation; a McDonald’s representative said during the meeting that being in Dallas presented an opportunity to connect with on-the-ground team members and management).
During the 35-minute meeting, McDonald’s acknowledgement of the sexual harassment complaints was brief. Audience member Alexa Kaczmarski, on behalf of the activist shareholder group Corporate Accountability, mentioned the harassment charges while presenting a proposal to let shareholders act by written consent (that proposal failed to pass). Then it was quickly on to the next audience question, about antibiotics.
One proposal that was passed with 94 percent of the shareholder vote: an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, which McDonald’s Board of Directors endorsed in a proxy statement. With this proposal passed, CEO Steve Easterbrook has been approved for a 2018 payout of $2,456,730, bringing his total compensation last year to $15,876,116. (Other named executives have been approved for payouts of smaller, but still sizable, amounts.)
In my view, if McDonald’s has enough money to buy back $22 billion of its own stock, it damn well has enough money to pay all of its workers at least $15 an hour.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 23, 2019
Meanwhile, workers demonstrating outside the hotel in Dallas and in other cities across the U.S. raised their signs for compensation on a much different scale: $15 an hour. Fight for $15 has been pushing for a $15 minimum wage and unionization for years, periodically organizing rallies and strikes for fast-food employees and other low-wage workers since 2012.
But as Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell points out, the company’s past actions don’t leave much room for optimism that a direct appeal will result in the change that activists wants: “McDonald’s workers have had more success changing state laws than getting the company to take action.” The company has long argued that its franchise model, which relies on a store network that’s 90 to 95 percent franchises, absolves McDonald’s of responsibility and liability for working conditions at its 14,000-plus, independently owned and operated restaurants across the U.S. That means, the company has argued, McDonald’s can’t be held accountable for the alleged sexual harassment, labor violations, and other misconduct that takes place at any of its franchises. Workers, clearly, disagree.