Protests in Store for McDonald’s Annual Meeting

Hard numbers are unavailable for last week’s strikes and other job actions, but organizers expected thousands of some 4 million U.S. fast-food workers to participate. The global strike was organized by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations, a federation comprised of 396 trade unions in 126 countries representing 12 million workers.

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In its annual report for last year, McDonald’s suggested that a wage hike may be necessary as a result of continued pressure:

The impact on our margins of labor costs that we cannot offset through price increases, and the long-term trend toward higher wages and social expenses in both mature and developing markets, which may intensify with increasing public focus on matters of income inequality…

Because so many fast-food outlets are franchised, corporations sometimes try to pin wage issues on franchisees. But as someone once pointed out, the fast-food companies set wages by setting the cost of everything except wages.