Federal labor officials say the McDonald’s franchise that controls 12 restaurants in metro New Orleans violated child labor laws and has hired more than 80 minors in two states.
“The franchise received a $56,106 civil penalty for the violations, according to the news release.”
Cost of doing business
That’s like $700 per violation. Easily worth it if it means filling the position a week earlier than following the law.
It’s so strange that you get a bulk discount on criming.
Yes, and the sad part is that almost no one will have the guts to boycott these 12 stores. I know it’s not the customer’s fault the penalty is so small, but it’s almost like people in power could be found to have murdered families and children and people would still buy their stuff.
Less about guts than the fact no-one will see this ruling; news content is so global and so quick that it will pass up most who need to see it.
This is the reason that “just don’t buy from bad businesses” is a terrible solution. Even if someone magically know who was bad at a point in time a company can change for better or worse and there is just too much to keep track of.
Govt needs to get some fucking teeth.
I ran some basic calculations:
I assumed that the child workers are making minimum wage, the adult workers are making $10 per hour (pay seems to be between $9.27-11.05 per hour), each shift has three people (two of which are child workers), and this is occurring during the summer when school is out.
Using this I figured that if the store was run by 3 adults, each working 12 hour shifts (4 hours of OT), then paying the employees would cost $960 per day per franchise [2(3((8x10)+(4x20))) = 960]. For a store that employs 2 children and one adult per shift and doesn’t pay OT for the children the savings per day is about $292 per location [2(160) + 4(12x7.25) = 668, 960 - 668 = 292]. If they did pay OT to the children then the difference would be $176 [2(160) + ((8x7.25)+4(14.50)) = 784, 960 - 784 = 176]. So if we take these savings and multiply them across the 12 locations and then multiply that daily savings across the entire franchise by the amount of weeks off in the summer ≈ 11 then you get a total franchise savings of either $38,544 [292x12x11] without OT) or $23,232 [176x12x11] (with OT). All it takes is for them to do this for two summers and the fine becomes irrelevant. Not to mention that this doesn’t even count child labor usage during off school times.
You’re not considering the lost revenue from not filling those positions at all which is a lot more money. There’s a big shortage for positions that pay peanuts and they likely wouldn’t have been able to hire/get more hours out of adults at the same pay rate.
We saw a kid who couldn’t have been more than 13 working in a McDonald’s in Montana. There was a sign apologizing for delays as they were short staffed.
He got told off by an older employee who was almost certainly his mom because he pointed out that we only ordered fries, fries were ready, and he could give them to us now. Nope. Orders are served in order.
When our number finally came up, he gave us the most mature and put upon “I’m very sorry about this” - a lone, 13 year old voice of reason in a world gone mad.
They don’t have to hire children. They could simply pay adults more. There isn’t a labor shortage; there’s a pay shortage.
Did anyone else read that Children at Work book as a kid? It was sort of a picture book aimed at teaching kids about historical child labour in the US (mine workers, factory workers, residential factories, etc). As a kid I thought we’d committed to being ashamed of that practice which stole the energy, youth, and vitality from a disproportionately poor population of children.
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They’re just going to change the laws to allow it instead.
Why hasn’t the IRS put them under the jail yet? Falsification of an I-9, W-4, etc.
Either the business process their paperwork with accurate information KNOWING they were violating the law.
OR they submitted false information KNOWING they were violating the law.
