McDonald's advises own employee to apply for food stamps

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McDonald's advises own employee to apply for food stamps
by Marisa Taylor

@marisahtaylor

October 25, 2013 4:30PM ET
Recording of phone call to McDonald's employee helpline suggests workers are advised to seek federal benefits


Fast-food workers protest outside a McDonald's on New York City's Fifth Avenue on Aug. 29, 2013. Richard Drew/AP

The burgeoning battle between fast-food workers and their employers over low wages and benefits was ratcheted up a notch, this week, with the leak of a phone conversation from a McDonald’s employee helpline in which a longtime employee was advised to go on food stamps in order to make ends meet.
Fast-food employee advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a video on its website on Wednesday featuring a recording of a phone call made by McDonald’s employee Nancy Salgado to McResource, a phone line for McDonald’s employees to call for information about housing, child care and other resources.
Salgado, 27, a single mother of two children, has worked full-time at McDonald’s for the last decade but says she has never received a raise from her $8.25 an hour salary, the minimum wage in Chicago, where she lives.
She was having difficulty paying her bills and feeding her kids, so when she heard about the McResource phone line at a recent meeting with her fellow employees, “it caught my attention,” she told Al Jazeera in a phone interview. “I need help, so I wanted to see what kind of help they can provide for me.”
Salgado said she wanted to record the phone call – she disclosed this to the representative who answered her call, who said that was fine – and asked about how she might obtain medical benefits or get help paying her heating bill. She also told the representative, who asked whether Salgado had children, that she was “rationing food” in order to feed her kids.
The representative offered to connect Salgado with a number of federal benefit programs for which she was eligible, including Medicaid, a medical care program for low-income adults and their kids, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.
Salgado said she was surprised the company advised her to seek government benefits, and didn’t address her current salary or benefits situation.  “I feel very angry. I wasn’t expecting to get the number for government assistance,” she said. “I was expecting they’d give me some other kind of answer.”
She added, “I believe that I work for one of the richest companies that can afford to pay better wages to their workers.”
McDonald’s, for its part, told Al Jazeera in an email message that “this video is not an accurate portrayal of the resource line as this is very obviously an edited video.”
Salgado emphatically denied that the call was edited. “That’s what I did, and those are the answers I got,” she said.
Al Jazeera was sent an audio file of what appears to be the full recording of Salgado's 15-minute phone conversation with the McResource line. While the video posted by Low Pay Is Not OK is only two minutes long and contains only short audio excerpts of that call, the main points of the phone conversation did not appear to have been misrepresented.
During the call, the help line operator tells Salgado that franchises must pay a fee for their employees to be able to use the McResource line.
“None of the restaurants that are franchised in Chicago are on [the McResource line],” the representative said. “Because of that, we don’t provide a service to employees of restaurants that aren’t signed on. We’re just so busy with people where the restaurants have paid to be part of the service."
Instead, she offered to email Salgado the contact information for federal benefit programs and apologized that -- because the franchise by which she was employed was not signed onto the McResource line -- she couldn't sign Selgado up for the benefits herself. “We can do a lot of the legwork that takes a lot of the stress off you, making a million phone calls trying to find services," the rep said.
Recent research has found that more than half of the employees of the nation's fast-food companies require public assistance to make ends meet, at an annual cost of between $3 and $7 billion to the U.S. taxpayer.
When asked whether McDonald’s requires franchises to pay for the McResource service, the company did not directly address the question, and simply wrote in an email: “The fact is that the McResource Line is intended to be a free, confidential service to help employees and their families get answers to a variety of questions or provide resources on a variety of topics including housing, child care, transportation, grief, elder care, education and more.”
Asked whether Salgado should receive a raise or health benefits, McDonald’s wrote: “McDonald’s and our independent franchisees provide jobs in every state to hundreds of thousands of people across the country.  Those jobs range from entry-level part-time to full-time, from minimum wage to salaried positions, and we offer everyone the same opportunity for advancement.”
Falling behind
Low wages in the fast-food industry are nothing new. Front-line fast-food workers earn a median hourly wage of $8.94, according to the National Employment Law Project (PDF). Those front-line positions make up 89.1 percent of all the jobs in the industry. And the Center for Economic Policy Research says that fast-food workers make less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, and more than 25 percent are raising at least one child.
But the need to seek government assistance to supplement their wages hits fast-food workers particularly hard.
“It’s not that these workers are not working enough, because the problem doesn’t go away even when they’re out working full time,” said Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California – Berkeley.
In fact, Allegretto and a group of labor economists from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana released a report earlier this month (PDF) in which they found that 52 percent of fast-food workers rely on public assistance. That’s compared with 25 percent of the rest of the population.
Those supplemental benefits for fast-food workers cost the government about $7 billion annually, according to the report, which Allegretto called “a conservative estimate.”
Fast-food workers, for their part, have increasingly started speaking out about their low wages. The fast-food employee union Fast Food Forward organized a protest of around 200 employees in the New York City area last November, which inspired a day of coordinated strikes in more than 60 cities nationwide on Aug. 29.
In response to those strikes, Scott DeFife, vice president of policy and government affairs at the National Restaurant Group, released a statement saying that the protests were “a coordinated campaign engineered by labor organizations and partisan groups to attack our industry and for their own political and financial gain.”
Allegretto said fast-food companies like McDonald’s routinely argue that profit margins at their franchisees are too narrow to afford raises for their employees, but that in reality, the corporation could just charge its franchisees a little less so they’d be able to pay their employees more.
“This idea that somehow they can’t afford to pay more seems a little bit ludicrous in light of their profits," she said. “Somehow when it comes to this issue (wages), they separate themselves from their franchisees, but they control everything that the franchisees do.”
The scenario could worsen next week when the boost to SNAP benefits from the 2009 Recovery Act run out on Nov. 1. The House of Representatives recently voted to cut $49 billion from the program over the next 10 years, which would cause millions of people to lose their benefits, though the Senate hasn’t yet approved the plan.
The fact that so many fast-food workers are forced to rely on programs like SNAP, Allegretto says, “is indicative of a much larger problem that we have in our economy, which is that low-wage workers are following further and further behind.”
Al Jazeera

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/24/mcdonald-s-employeehelplineadvisesfoodstampsnotwageincrease.html

An by the way I've never had a poor man sign my pay check!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mbryan wrote:i think micky ds and the other small fast food places have plenty of teen agers to fill the spots. That is how micky ds and the rest were set up for to flip burgers and serve em up to you,then also we cant all be ceos,or can we just be the ceo of our own business

Ok so during lunch hour those people serving you are Teeny boppers and breakfast too.

Diamond wrote:kelnchp you think people are suppose to give up their salaries so other people are to make more money, well why dont you give part of your pay to some underpaided worker, see how that works into your liberal way of thinking. The CEOs an VPs of McDonalalds are on more this worrying about flippin burgers. McDonalds parent company is marten bower an is control of dozens of companys an earn their money an if they make 5 million a year more power to them!!!!

Well the CEO's get more than a living wage....all I am saying is pay their employees a living wage. How do you know I do not give up some of my paycheck to underpaid employees or someone in need of help you do not have a clue about me...I know that the rich keep getting richer and the middle class is becoming extinct.

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/08/5_depressing_ways_the_1_percent_is_strangling_the_us_economy_partner/


5 depressing ways the 1 percent is strangling the US economy

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.

1. Income Redistribution is Worse than Usually Reported

We are told that the richest 1% doubled its share of income in the past thirty years. But from 1980 to 2006, according to both IRS and CBO figures, they nearly TRIPLED their share of income — and that’s after-tax income.

After 2006, the recession set everyone back temporarily, but in the first two years of the recovery, the richest 1% captured an incomprehensible 121% of the income gains (others saw debt rise faster than income).

2. Wealth Redistribution is Even Worse than Income Redistribution

In 1983 the poorest 47% of America owned about 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, an average of $15,000 per family.

In 2009 the poorest 47% of America owned ZERO percent of the nation’s wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).

Hard to believe it could get even worse. But because of the housing crisis and recession, the median family net worth dropped 40% between 2007 and 2010, while the richest Americans were regaining all their losses, and beginning an even steeper climb to the top.

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Perhaps the biggest reason for this wealth redistribution is that the richest 10% own almost 90 percent of stocks excluding pensions. Since the recession, as the U.S. economy has “recovered,” almost two-thirds of the gain was due to growth in the stock market.

3. The Redistribution of Productivity: Boosting Profits rather than Wages

From 2001 to 2011, total  corporate profits more than doubled, to almost $2 trillion, while the corporate federal income tax rate was cut in half.

Incomes for 99% of Americans have declined since the recession, with the median household income dropping by 7.3 percent. Low-income jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) made up 1/5 of the jobs lost to the recession, but accounted for 3/5 of the jobs regained during the recovery.

4. Finance is Outrunning Society, and Taking the Money with Them

Americans once trusted the financial industry to safeguard their retirement money. But high tech has transformed high finance, at a much faster rate than the average investor can understand the changes.

Rolling Stone reports on the loss of $2.3 billion in pension money in Maine — and the simultaneous billing of $2.1 billion by the hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Another report tells of local funding crises caused by indecipherable “structured finance” deals sold by bankers with promises of big returns. In 2007 a hedge fund manager (John Paulson) made $3.7 billion by conspiring with Goldman Sachs to create packages of risky subprime mortgages, so that in anticipation of a housing crash he could use other people’s money to bet against his personally designed sure-to-fail financial instruments.

The high-speed high-tech chicanery continues in the stock market, where programs can intercept ‘buy’ orders and in a few nanoseconds purchase the stock and then complete the ‘buy’ order for a few pennies more.

The bankers and hedgers and hustlers have made up new rules for making money, and our government representatives don’t know what’s going on, or don’t care, or don’t want to stop the financial games that ultimately generate campaign funds. Finance is quickly printing its own new money. In less than ten years, the world’s wealth has approximately doubled, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion. Much of that is sheer speculation: the derivatives industry is worth over  $1 quadrillion. But those speculative transactions get cashed in as real money.

It’s a dizzying high-speed fantasyland that redistributes the real money of the middle class to the super-rich while inventing new forms of fees and bonuses along the way.

5. Redistribution through Government Manipulation

There are numerous ways the very rich have cajoled and coerced and connived their Congressional partners to redistribute money in their direction. Like the lower capital gains rate. An astonishing  75 percent of dividend and capital gain subsidies go to the richest 1%. That’s still not enough for hedge fund managers, who call their income “carried interest” instead of “income” to keep their tax rate at the capital gains rate. And even this small amount may not be paid. Hedge fund managers with incomes in the billions can pay  ZERO income tax by deferring their profits through their companies indefinitely.

About two-thirds of nearly $1 trillion in individual “tax expenditures” (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers.

Banks have arranged to get lower interest rates, saving them $83 billion per year.

The U.S. federal government spends $100 billion a year on corporate welfare, almost half for big agriculture and the fossil fuel industry.

Another $150 billion per year goes for excessive pharmaceutical expenditures, as the drug companies have lobbied for laws to keep cheaper medications out of the hands of Americans.

Better to Call it Pre-Distribution

The term ‘pre-distribution’ better represents, according to political scientist  Jacob Hacker, “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” Unregulated free-market capitalism simply makes the rich richer. Even if they have to break the backs of productive middle-class Americans to get their way.

Ok so during lunch hour those people serving you are Teeny boppers and breakfast too. I get your point kelnchp but let me do it this way the flippin and serving were designed to be part time low pay if that helps. As for me personaly i dont eat there i like home cooked meals myself. btw we have waitresses here that earn 6 figures a year serving food to people but they are dam dam good at what they do. And they know they will not make it working at micky ds or other fast food resturants so if micky d servers wanna make more they are free too anytime they want its up to them. I am not trying to beat you up in any way just from where i stand imo.

McDonald's needs  UNION Representation, just as we have been pushing and pushing Walmarts employees. But, as Mbryan called it, I have to agree with him, you work where you can excel not be slaved.Common sense would say, "Its Time To Look For Something Else".. ;)

I have to wonder how many of you are going to be willing to drive in MacDonalds and pay 15.00 for their hamburger. Entry level jobs are just that, entry level jobs. McDonald's was not set up to be a career job but for high school and college kids to work part time and learn some basic skills. I've spoken to people who worked at McDonalds when they were in their teens and felt grateful for the opportunity to work there because they learned some life skills that served them well when they went on to their chosen profession.

I can't speak for any other area than this area, but half of the current employees around here in McDonalds wouldn't be able to find employment anywhere else unless they changed their behavior. So many are sullen, loud when talking to each other but  mumble instead of speaking clearly when talking to the customer, and could care less if one's order is correct ect. 

I know a man whose family owned a chain of McDonalds and he sold the chain because he couldn't handle the employee problems any longer. So many think nothing of just not showing up for work without notification, or decide to take off in the middle of the shift, or get in verbal attacks with each other in front of customers or with a customer

All I can say about MacDonald's and Walmart is I've never seen them go out and snatch someone off the street and demand they work for them. When someone goes to a company and ask for employment, the pay scale, benefits, hours, etc are explained to them. If they don't like the hours, pay, etc, then go on down the line and see if they can find a better fit for their skill set and higher pay. 

One of the smartest economists who ever lived (imho and others) is Milton Friedman.
The discussion in this thread is an ages old discussion.

The following short videos succinctly explain the difference between the capitalist society and the socialist society. 

Redistribution of wealth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

Greed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

The Free Lunch Myth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

Responsibility for the Poor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rls8H6MktrA

Healthcare in a Free Market
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6t-R3pWrRw

 Do Gooders Who Do Harm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0XAPuASNes

A smart man who tells it like it is!, our government has gotten way to big with it's nose stuck into everything, I have only one question, "If the U.S. Government is so great at running things why is it so screwed up & so deep in debt?"