After suffering a public relations embarassment with their sample budget for employees, McDonald's is facing a new issue after the University of Kansas released a study that proved raising the wages of employees would not mean sacrificing low menu costs.
Protests have broken out across the country over the minimum wages being paid to fast food workers. Workers are calling for wages to be raised to $15 per hour, as opposed to the minimum wage limit of $7.25. They're also looking for the right to organize protests without fear of retaliation from their companies. The strikes are happening in seven different cities over a four-day period.
In the University of Kansas study, research assistant Arnobio Morelix found that doubling the salaries and benefits of all McDonald's workers would cause the price of a Big Mac to increase by $.68 and add a $.17 increase to every item on the Dollar Menu.
During his research, Morelix found that only 17.1 percent of McDonald's revenue goes towards salaries and benefits. Therefore, for every dollar that McDonald's earns, only $.17 of that dollar goes to the wages of their 500,000 employees nationwide.
Last week, McDonald's CEO Donald Thompson claimed his company has always been an "above-minimum wage employer" in response to the strikes. However, according to policy analyst Jack Temple of the National Employment Law Project, McDonald's has never been fully transparent about their wages. According to Glassdoor, McDonald's pays an hourly wage of $7.81, just above the national average of $7.50.
To make Thompson's claim look even worse, the sample budget assumed the workers would have a second job and left essential expensives like food and clothing completely out of consideration.
While wages for fast food workers remain stagnant, New York Times writer Mark Bittman notes workers have much less buying power than they did 50 years ago.
