Thursday, April 17, 2014

The House That Ronald Built

... seems to be undergoing some serious perturbations these days. Earlier in the month came the story of three McDonald's outlets in British Columbia abusing the Harper regime's TFWP (Temporary Foreign Workers Program) by hiring temporary workers instead of available local people and reducing the hours of Canadian employees.

Now comes word from Edmonton of more abuse by the hamburger giant, this time of its temporary workers. CBC News reports the following:

Foreign workers recruited from Belize are accusing McDonald’s Canada of treating them like "slaves," by effectively forcing them to share an expensive apartment – then deducting almost half their take-home pay as rent.

Records from three employees show they made $11 an hour working at various McDonald’s locations and the company took $280 from their pay for rent, bi-weekly. Their remaining take-home pay for the same pay periods was roughly $350.

“[The apartment lease] contracts are signed by McDonald’s. All of our bills – utility bills – were billed [to us] under the name of McDonald’s,” said Montero.

“They brought us here and they are this big huge corporation. We felt that we didn’t have a chance to even voice our opinion to them because they had brought us here so they could ship us back whenever they wanted to," said Montero. "It was like modern day slavery."


You can read the full tawdry tale of corporate malfeasance here, and watch a video report below:

Kind of takes away your appetite for when the next 'Mac attack' happens, doesn't it?

4 comments:

  1. Lorne, it looks and sounds like slavery. Mac is indeed attacking these poor workers - that is the real Mac Attack.

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  2. Well-said, LD. Those corporate appetites for profit do seem insatiable, don't they?

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  3. The appetite for what they demand is always insatiable. It is so systemically both with regard to profits and in what is required from workers. There is always only one thing demanded: more.

    You've got to have something left when you get home and you'd like to take a home a little more than it will cost you to get back to the grind tomorrow. But if you’ve got something left at the end of the day and you end up with a little left over after paying off your costs of sales, the system will want that as well. It isn't yours if we can squeeze it out of you; it's ours. That just one of the reasons why we love our TFWP so much.

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    Replies
    1. People as just another set of commodities. That's the corporate ethos in far too many cases, John

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