On Wednesday, McDonald’s announced that it would raise wages to at least $1 over the local legal minimum wage and offer new benefits to employees at its corporate-owned stores.
The move on wages affects some 90,000 employees at 1,500 outlets in the United States that McDonald’s owns and operates.
It does not, however, “affect the 750,000 employees who work for the more than 3,100 franchisees that operate roughly 12,500 McDonald’s restaurants around the country,” according to the New York Times.
In response to the company’s action, AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka issued the following statement:
Make no mistake, McDonald’s didn’t wake up one day and just decide to raise wages for its workers. This decision – just like Walmart, Target and the momentum of major retailers that preceded it – is the direct result of a powerful, collective movement. McDonald’s workers and their courage to go on strike in the Fight for 15 campaign is an inspiration in the effort to raise wages across the country. And this movement will not be pacified by meager raises, but empowered.
One can be fairly certain that, regardless how high (or how low) McDonald’s raised its wages, the union boss’ pithy response would likely be the same, since the labor movement’s so-called Fight for $15 campaign is, in reality, nothing more than a well-planned union organizing campaign wrapped in a “living wage” campaign.
In fact, according to Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fast Food Forward, the $15 per hour campaign was really just an arbitrary amount that a group of workers meeting with union organizers came up with.
The workers settled on that $15 figure—as Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fast Food Forward, tells it—two months before, in a space in downtown Brooklyn made available by a teachers union. Ten dollars an hour was the first suggested demand, but the group of about 80 workers eventually determined that that figure wouldn’t free them from dependence on public assistance. The next number thrown out was $20, but “the majority [of the group] didn’t think $20 was achievable,” Fells says, leaving $15 as the eventual winner.
The group didn’t refer to any statistics or living wage calculators. “It wasn’t some [New York Times] Upshot or 538 analysis,” says Fells, who’s “on loan” from the Service Employees International Union, a group backing the fast food push… [Emphasis added.]
An arbitrary amount derived from a group of workers being used by the SEIU to unionize and rake in billions from low-wage workers.
Related:
- Some Super-Sized Union Dues: The SEIU stands to rake in billions by unionizing fast-food workers
- Critics see McDonald’s pay hike as “McRaise”
