by Alan Pyke
Posted on February 26, 2015 at 1:43 pm Updated: February 26, 2015 at 3:38 pm
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Labor unions in Europe and Brazil are asking their governments to help put a stop to McDonald's alleged hamburgling of worker wages and government tax revenues.
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As McDonald's struggles to weather years of labor unrest and increasing government scrutiny of its treatment of workers in America, its international operations are now coming under similar pressures that could ultimately force the company to revamp its relationship with workers around the world..
The threats to the company take two very different forms and come from separate continents. Unions asked European tax officials to investigate McDonald's on Wednesday over its alleged exploitation of a tax shelter in Luxembourg. And in Brazil on Tuesday, another group of unions filed a suit over alleged worker abuses including wage theft and poor working conditions.
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The company's alleged misdeeds in Brazil have a very human face. The suit alleges "unwholesome and unsanitary working conditions, time-clock fraud and failure to pay mandatory unemployment and retirement insurance…below legal or contractual minimum wages, forced double-shift work without breaks, forced workers to take in-restaurant lunch breaks with employer-supplied food and failed to make mandatory severance payments," according to Reuters.
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Some of those violations hint at how much more robust worker protections are in Brazil than in America, but others - timecard manipulation and wage theft in particular - echo key complaints from U.S. frycooks and burger-slingers. The suit purports to show that Arcos Dorados Holdings Inc. - or Golden Arches Holdings, in English - has been conducting such abuses for 30 years. If the suit succeeds, the company could be barred from opening new stores in Brazil until it proves it has ended the abuses, and Arcos Dorados could be fined nearly a third of its total profits.
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