McDonald's,
other fast-food workers, protest ahead of annual meeting
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[May 21, 2015]
By Mary Wisniewski
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Thousands of
McDonald's workers seeking a minimum wage of $15 per hour swarmed the
fast-food giant's headquarters for the first of two days of protests to
coincide with the fast-food chain's annual meeting on Thursday.
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Protests by low-wage fast-food and retail workers have helped fuel
a national debate about pay levels. Companies such as McDonald's
Corp <MCD.N> and Wal-Mart Stores Inc <WMT.N> are raising starting
pay and cities like Seattle and Chicago are boosting their minimum
wages over time.
Tyree Johnson, 47, of Chicago joined thousands of others for noisy
but peaceful protests outside McDonald's headquarters in the Chicago
suburb of Oak Brook on Wednesday.
"They keep telling me they value me but they don't give me more
money," said Johnson, who has worked in McDonald's restaurants since
1992 and says he lives in a men's hotel because he can't afford an
apartment on his wage of $8.55 per hour.
"We respect their right to peacefully protest," McDonald's
spokeswoman Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem said. She said the world's
largest restaurant chain regularly looks at the wage issue.
Steve Easterbrook, McDonald's new chief executive, last month
announced that starting pay at company-operated restaurants would be
set at $1 above the locally mandated minimum wage, beginning on July
1. By the end of 2016, McDonald's expects the average hourly pay
rate to be above $10 per hour.
Those increases only apply to some 90,000 workers at the roughly
1,500 U.S. restaurants McDonald's operates. They do not affect
around 660,000 other restaurant workers employed by U.S. McDonald's
franchisees.
Some workers were quick to criticize the announcement, saying it was
too little to make a real difference and affected too few workers.
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The decision also angered some McDonald's restaurant operators, who
said it would put additional cost pressure on franchisees struggling
to maintain profits at a time when sales have been weakened by
intense competition and internal missteps that have slowed service.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which backs the
worker protests, also is pressuring McDonald's through legislative
and regulatory channels.
On Wednesday, a group of top U.S. pension fund leaders warned that
McDonald's and other companies may be jeopardizing their own futures
by returning excessive amounts of cash to investors via share
buybacks.
Twenty-nine states and Washington, D.C., currently have minimum
wages above the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
(Additional reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by
Lisa Lambert and Leslie Adler)
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