McDonald’s workers are to gatecrash the burger company’s annual shareholders’ meeting later this month with “the biggest-ever protest” demanding an end to “poverty wages” paid to many of its 420,000 staff.
As the company announced plans to turn around its ailing business, Fight for $15, a union-backed protest group, set out plans for a day of protest at the company’s Chicago headquarters.
“Fed up with pay that drives them to rely on public assistance to support their families [costing taxpayers more than US$1 billion a year] and angry over the company’s recent publicity stunt disguised as a wage increase, McDonald’s workers will insist that the fast-food giant include in its turnaround plan a serious investment in the cooks and cashiers who make its billions in profits possible,” Fight for 15 said in a statement on Monday.
Photo: AFP
The fast food workers, who organized protests in cities across the US last month calling for a US$15 an hour minimum wage, said they “would not be coming alone” to McDonald’s annual shareholders’ meeting on May 21, but would be “armed with 1 million signatures from everyday Americans calling on McDonald’s to pay workers $15 an hour and respect their freedom to join together in a union.”
Adriana Alvarez, who was one of 101 McDonald’s workers arrested during a protest at the McDonald’s shareholders’ meeting last year, said: “We may not have a seat in the room, but we’re sure that McDonald’s will hear us when we say that its turnaround needs to include investment in and respect for its employees.”
Alvarez, who has worked at McDonald’s for five years, said she is paid so little that she needs food stamps and Medicaid to care for her three-year-old son, Manny.
“I can’t pay my bills and support my son off the poverty wages that I make even after five years working at McDonald’s, that is why I am here fighting for US$15 an hour and union rights,” she said in a video message released on Monday as McDonald’s new chief executive announced his plan to turn around the company, which is rapidly losing customers.
Alvarez said she and her colleagues had decided to gatecrash McDonald’s annual shareholders’ meeting at its headquarters on the outskirts of Chicago because “that’s where they decided what to do with their money.”
“We’ve worked hard and we’ve walked a long path to get here,” she said.
“Now it’s time for McDonald’s to make the right choice, to do the right thing for their workers,” she added.
As part of his plans to revitalize the company, president and chief executive Steve Easterbrook said on Monday that he is aiming to turn McDonald’s into a “modern, progressive burger company.”
Easterbrook did not directly address the wages McDonald’s pays to its workers in his own video address on Monday, but he did say that McDonald’s needed to be more “progressive” and address the company’s “social values.”
Within weeks of taking over as chief executive last month, Easterbrook announced plans to increase its US staff’s hourly minimum wage to US$9.90 from US$9.01.
The Fight for $15 movement dismissed that as not enough.
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