Six weeks after
Walmart announced it was raising its entry wage to $9 an hour, McDonald's is raising its starting pay to a dollar above minimum wage.
But there's a really big but: the change will only apply to restaurants McDonald's operates itself, which is only a small fraction of U.S. McDonald's.
Starting July 1, McDonald’s will pay at least $1 per hour more than the local legal minimum wage for employees at the roughly 1,500 restaurants it owns in the U.S. The increase, which McDonald’s said will apply to some 90,000 workers at all levels of experience and rank, will lift the average hourly rate for its U.S. restaurant employees to $9.90 on July 1 and more than $10 by the end of 2016, from $9.01 currently. McDonald’s also will enable workers after a year of employment to accrue up to five days of paid time-off annually.
The changes come amid mounting criticism from labor groups over wages and conditions at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains. The move doesn’t apply to employees of the franchisees who operate nearly 90% of the 14,350 U.S. McDonald’s—a fact critics may seize on. McDonald’s says franchisees are free to set their own pay policies. The company said it does plan to make subsidies for some education costs available to all U.S. workers as part of its plan.
In fact, a cynic might almost wonder if this was intended not just to get good publicity and compete for workers with Walmart and the
other retailers that have announced pay raises, but to combat the National Labor Relations Board's decision to treat McDonald's as a joint employer of workers in franchisee-owned stores. See, the argument for treating McDonald's as a joint employer—a status that makes the company responsible for labor law violations in franchisee-owned restaurants—is that McDonald's substantially controls their labor policies. Now, McDonald's can point to distinctly different pay policies in the restaurants it operates as part of its attempts to bolster its claims that though the company dictates just about everything else that goes on in every McDonald's restaurant, it has little to do with how workers are treated.
A cynic might further suspect that this is an effort to blunt the momentum of workers organizing for $15 an hour, who are planning a major mobilization on April 15. And a cynic might note that throughout much of the country, $1 an hour above minimum wage still leaves a worker eligible for government aid.
A raise and paid vacation days are great things. But let's not kid ourselves that McDonald's has pure motives or is doing everything it can to improve wages and working conditions in its restaurants.