I'm Not Lovin' It

[Content Note: Worker exploitation.]

McDonald's employees in New York, Michigan, and California have filed class-action lawsuits alleging that their employer has engaged in wage theft:

The suits allege that McDonald's has forced employees to work off the clock, not paid them overtime and struck hours off their time cards.

The suits were announced in a conference call led by the workers' lawyers and organizers of the union-backed campaign to raise fast food wages across the country.

"We've uncovered several unlawful schemes, but they all share a common purpose -- to drive labor costs down by stealing wages from McDonald's workers," said Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, an attorney who represents California workers.

Workers in California claim that McDonald's and its franchisees did not pay them for all of the hours they worked, and did not give them timely breaks.

The employees in Michigan allege that they would start getting paid only when customers walked into the restaurants, even if they showed up to work hours earlier.

New York McDonald's workers, who filed their case in federal court, claim the fast food chain did not reimburse them for the cost of cleaning uniforms. They say it drives some workers' real wages below the minimum wage, which is a violation of federal labor law.

These claims violate the federal Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which sets minimum wage, overtime pay, record-keeping and other standards for workers across the country.

...Since 1985, the Labor Department has found that McDonald's and its franchises have had to pay back wages more than 300 times for FSLA violations.

If your lived experience is anything like mine, you have heard Bootstraps Bullshitters say fully one billion times some variation on "those lazy bums should get off their butts and get a job at McDonald's" given any opportunity to comment on people who are unemployed, poor, on welfare, on disability, or in any other circumstance that people who will never have to work at McDonald's view as a contemptible refusal to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop being moochers blah blah fart.

McDonald's is always, always, the go-to job for this sort of rhetoric. "Well, if it were me, I'd LOWER MYSELF to work at McDonald's before I'd ACCEPT HANDOUTS FROM THE GOVERNMENT," bellow undilutedly privileged dipshits as they buy shiny new Cadillac ELRs with their seven-figure bonuses made possible by a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Anyway.

That fairy tale is some rancid garbage even without knowing what it's like to be employed at McDonald's—but it's extra vile on a sesame seed bun when people invoke McDonald's even despite the fact that working there full-time is no guarantee that you'll get paid for full-time work, which is to say nothing about the fact that they don't even pay a livable wage in the first place.

Sure. Go work on McDonald's, American Dreamers. Good luck with all that.