We have an urgent opportunity for you to help student workers and our friends at the National Guestworker Alliance push McDonald’s to take responsibility for exploiting its workers.
Earlier this month, student guestworkers brought in on visas to work at McDonald’s in Pennsylvania went on strike to blow the whistle on retaliation and labor abuse. The students alleged they had to work up to 25-hour shifts while earning less than the minimum wage, and faced threats of deportation if they spoke up.
The students are taking their protest all the way to the fast food giant’s headquarters. Will you back up these brave whistleblowers with calls to the company?
Call on McDonald’s to demand the company take responsibility for abuse and unjust conditions at all of its restaurants. Use the talking points below when you make the calls.
After the strike made headlines across the country, McDonald’s executives felt enough heat to distance themselves from the franchise owner. But as the students told McDonald’s in a statement: “a change of management at three stores will not protect the guestworkers and U.S. workers at McDonald’s 14,000 other stores in the U.S.”
McDonald’s is just the latest example of corporation manipulating our weak immigration and labor laws to exploit vulnerable workers. The details of the horrific abuse are shocking. The students paid $3,000 to $4,000 for their ‘cultural-exchange’ visas but were shocked to come to the U.S. to work at McDonalds.
But the ‘job’ is worse than what we know or imagine at the fast food chain – the students claim they earned sub-minimum wages, and were stuck paying rent to their boss to share a basement with up to seven other workers, and having to walk along a highway to get to work, narrowly escaping being hit by cars. Explained one worker “We are living in [a] basement…cramped together, with no divisions, in bunkbeds which are meant for children.”
Please take a minute to get involved. McDonald’s would like to deflect criticism and sweep the matter under the rug. Your calls are needed to help keep the pressure on the company to formally accept responsibility and protect both guestworkers and U.S. workers at its 14,000 stores across the country.
To learn more about the students fight, visit the National Guestworker Alliance’s website.
Tell McDonald’s to Take Responsibility for Labor Abuse
Call on McDonald’s to demand the company take responsibility for abuse and unjust conditions at all of its restaurants.
Call McDonalds executives at this number: 1- 800-244-6227
And say:
Earlier this month, I learned about the McDonald’s student guestworkers in Pennsylvania who paid $3,000 apiece for a cultural exchange but instead were used as an exploitable sub-minimum wage workforce by one of your franchisees.
If McDonald’s wants to restore its reputation as a good corporate citizen, then I call on you to meet with the student guestworkers to discuss their demands and come to an agreement to end retaliation and abuse for all of McDonald’s guestworkers.
