McDonalds
djt appointees hand McDonald’s a win in labor case, this week in the war on workers
https://www.ecowatch.com/mcdonalds-plastic-straws-2571961793.html
McDonald's Shareholders Vote to Keep Distributing Plastic Straws
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McDonald's shareholders rejected a proposal to take the first step in banning plastic straws at its 36,000 outlets worldwide.
The proposal, published in an SEC filing in April, would have required the fast food giant to prepare a report on the business risks of using plastic straws, and the company's efforts to develop and implement more sustainable alternatives in its restaurants.
"We believe our company has an opportunity to improve its brand by demonstrating leadership in the elimination of plastic straws," the proposal states.
Despite vigorous campaigning from environmental activists, the proposal received only 7.65 percent of the vote at Thursday's annual meeting, USA TODAY reported.
The result was not surprising. The shareholders followed a recommendation from the chain's board of directors, who said the proposal would divert resources from their other environmental initiatives, such as a pledge made in January to source all packaging from renewable or recycled sources by 2025.
"[T]he requested report is unnecessary, redundant to our current practices and initiatives, and has the potential for a diversion of resources with no corresponding benefit to the company, our customers, and our shareholders, particularly in light of our ongoing packaging sustainability efforts," stated materials shared with shareholders before the meeting, theMercury News reported....
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Walmart, for example, has tried to grease its pledge to provide next-day delivery for online customers by having its low-wage workforce use their own time and vehicles to drop off packages as they go home after work.Likewise, McDonald's has imposed a complicated, high-tech ordering and curbside pick-up service that requires existing workers to handle more tasks, with no hike in pay. There's a technical term for such unpaid work requirements: Stealing.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-pollution-mcdonalds-2525962206.html
...In a separate announcement on Tuesday, McDonald's said it will add recycling to its more than 36,000 locations around the world by 2025 and pledges that all packaging on customer products will come from "renewable, recycled or certified sources" by that same year.
The moves from Iceland and McDonald's are very important. Sure, an individual's own efforts to reduce their plastic footprint makes a difference, but when global corporations also step up to reduce waste, it can make a big impact.
"The onus is on retailers, as leading contributors to plastic packaging pollution and waste, to take a stand and deliver meaningful change," Richard Walker, Iceland's managing director, said. "Other supermarkets, and the retail industry as a whole, should follow suit and offer similar commitments during 2018. This is a time for collaboration."
Iceland aims to become the first major retailer globally to eliminate plastic packaging from its own brand. Its new products will consist of paper or pulp trays food trays and paper bags instead of plastic ones. The items will be fully recyclable through domestic waste collection or in-store recycling facilities.
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fang intercept
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
Yet other In-Q-Tel-backed companies are now openly embracing the practice. Geofeedia, for instance, promotes its research into Greenpeace activists, student demonstrations, minimum wage advocates, and other political movements. Police departments in Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and other major municipalities have contracted with Geofeedia, as well as private firms such as the Mall of America andMcDonald’s.
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http://www.alternet.org/food/nations-second-largest-school-district-wants-kick-mcdonalds-out
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tyson mcbooty
- ### Graphic Video Shows McDonald’s, Tyson Supplier Stabbing Chickens
- ### Tyson Foods Under Fire As Second Video Shows Chicken Abuse
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/i-know-true-cost-mcdonalds-world-famous-fries
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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/mcdonalds-marketing-kids-mcteachers-night
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Should McDonald’s & Monsanto Have the Same Rights as People? A Debate on Corporate Personhood
Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United v. FEC decision striking down the prohibition on corporate expenditures in federal elections. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, with the same right to influence politics as voters. Meanwhile, many corporations including McDonald’s, Monsanto and Peabody Energy have cited the principle of corporate constitutional rights in recent efforts to fight back against new laws. McDonald’s and other franchises are suing the city of Seattle over its new $15-an-hour minimum wage law, arguing it violates its corporate personhood rights. They are basing their case on the 14th Amendment, a constitutional provision written to protect newly freed slaves after the Civil War and ensure equal rights for all people. Monsanto is challenging Vermont’s recently passed GMO-labeling law under the First Amendment, claiming that it forces them to "speak" against their will. We host a debate on the movement to draft a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights with two guests: Ron Fein, legal director at Free Speech for People, and Kent Greenfield,professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/13/should_mcdonalds_monsanto_have_the_same
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alternet, right next to huge coupon ad
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY AND WORKPLACE
Not Lovin' It: McDonald's Falls Flat at Enhancing Its Public Image
The company's PR initiatives can't disguise its unfair labor practices.
By Jim Hightower / AlterNet January 20, 2015
McDonald's is scrambling, and I'm not talking about eggs. You know your business has what image consultants call "quality perception issues" when you have to launch a PR initiative that publicly addresses such questions as: "Does McDonald's beef contain worms?"
Thornier yet for the world's largest burger machine is its boneheaded response to the remarkable, ongoing rebellion by fast-food workers, who're demanding a $15-an-hour wage and the freedom to unionize without corporate retaliation. The overpaid and clueless executives at McDonald's responded by -- guess what? -- retaliating against hundreds of the employees who joined the protests. Big Mac managers illegally reduced the hours (and therefore the pay) of those who joined the "Fight For 15" campaign, spied on them, interrogated and threatened them, and imposed restrictions on their freedom even to talk about unions or working conditions.
The corporation now faces federal charges on hundreds of labor law violations -- as well as rising customer anger over its ham-handed tactics. Naturally, McDonald's responded by apologizing and raising worker's wages.
Ha! Just kidding. Instead, it's running a new series of TV ads that, astonishingly, tries to tap into people's emotions about such tragic events as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as linking its logo to people's positive feelings about veterans, birthdays, and even "love." McD's corporate marketing director explains that the ads are all about the Golden Arches shining bright in every community, being with us through the good and the bad. As she puts it, "Who better to stand up for lovin' than McDonald's?
What a joke. For over a decade the burger behemoth has pushed its product with an advertising slogan that exuberantly proclaims, "I'm Lovin' It."
But it turns out that putting words of praise in customers' mouths doesn't sell more burgers -- in fact, customers have been putting fewer Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets, and other McEdibles in their mouths, causing sales to sag. This decline in affection has to do with the corporation's boring burger, unappetizing news reports that some of its suppliers have been repackaging expired meat, its corporate-wide policy of paying poverty wages, its ruthless anti-union tactics and its cynical strategy of having tax payers subsidize its labor costs by directing employees to go on food stamps and Medicaid.
Not to worry, though, for new CEO Don Thompson (the second replacement in the top slot in only two years) is all over these boo-boos. Is he offering real improvements in quality, wages and benefits, and corporate attitude?...
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McDonald's on Friday described an updated approach to marketing its brand, but the long-running "I'm lovin' it" tagline isn't going anywhere.
The chain is instead "reigniting" the "I'm lovin' it" theme "by introducing a new platform that puts more focus on lovin'," said the company in a statement. The messaging will focus more on positivity "with more uplifting content and conversations in the lovin' spirit.
Ad Age first reported the brand campaign after Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnettwon a pitch for ideas to refresh the brand. "I'm lovin' it" was not expected to be jettisoned, but rather to be evolved.
"This new focus will inspire everything we do moving forward, from advertising and marketing to how we interact with customers in restaurants and on social media," the company said.
National TV and digital ads starting Jan. 3 were created by Leo Burnett with support by partnering agencies, the company said. Other agencies on the McDonald's roster include Omnicom's DDB, Alma DDB for Hispanic marketing, Burrell for African-American marketing and OMD for media.
U.S. CMO Deborah Wahl, who joined the company in early 2014, said in a video about the brand refresh that the company will move from a philosophy of "billions served" -- a line featured on the chains' marquees -- to "billions heard." On various social media platforms, McDonald's will continue to actively listen to customer feedback and keep the lines of communication open, as in its recent"Our food. Your questions" campaign, she said.
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The rainforests that endangered orangutans call home are quickly disappearing, and McDonald's may be to blame.
One of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation is palm oil. At the current rate of deforestation, the Sumatran rainforest will disappear within twenty years, taking the 7,000 remaining Sumatran orangutans with it. As tropical forests are clear-cut to make way for palm oil plantations, the habitat available for endangered orangutans shrinks.
As a leader in the fast food industry, McDonald's is one of the top ten largest users of palm oil in the world. While palm oil can be produced in ways that protect orangutans and the rainforest, McDonald's has continued to use palm oil that could be wreaking havoc on our environment and orangutans' homes.
Just thirty years ago Sumatra and Borneo, the homes of the only two populations of orangutans, were filled with rainforests and wildlife. Now more than half of these great forests have been felled, and plans are already in place to convert 70% of what remains into plantations.
McDonald's palm oil policy commits the mega-corporation to 100% Verified as Supporting Sustainable Production palm oil by 2020. That sounds good, right? However, the use of so-called "sustainable" oil does not ensure that orangutans or their tropical forest homes are protected.
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jim hightower
I've noticed that local celebrations of Martin Luther King Day tend to be unique, for they've generally not been turned into yet another excuse for beer and barbecue parties.
Rather than trivialize the meaning of this courageous man's life, most people treat the day as a moment of serious reflection. Many even memorialize it by vowing to confront the Powers That Be on some of the BIG issues that Rev. King asked America to redress, such as entrenched racial inequality and the exploitation of poverty-wage workers. But now I've learned that joining the gritty struggle for justice is not the proper way to honor King. No, no – 'tis a far better thing you do if you just traipse down to a local McDonald's outlet, order a Happy Meal, and join the joyous, integrated, Golden Arches family in singing a few verses of Kumbayah.
At least, that's what the world's largest hamburger chain urged us to do in a shameless PR campaign. It used this year's MLK Day to try whitewashing its own sorry record of worker mistreatment. One full-page ad pictured three McDonald's "crew-members," each one a person of color, beaming with delight above ad copy that extolled the corporation's commitment to "a diverse and inclusive workforce." I think Dr. King would've upchucked, and asked: "What about a workforce that's paid a living wage, with benefits – so they don't have to work second or third jobs and go on food stamps to subsidize the labor costs of this miserly, superrich, fast-food empire?"
The touchy-feely ad turned to total squish at the end, calling on all Americans to embrace their differences: "We can't imagine a better way to honor [King's] day than by doing just that," it gushed.
Dr. King, however, had a sharper imagination. He would've helped the workers unionize McDonald's to gain real justice for themselves.
"A day that inspires all of us," McDonald's Ad in The New York Times, January 20, 2014.
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In an October 2013 report, public health lawyer and activist Michele Simon documents how the transnational burger colossus McDonald’s benefits from the Ronald McDonald House Charities brand, yet only disburses roughly 20 percent of the funding globally and ten percent locally. The Ronald McDonald Houses operate internationally to assist financially beset families with shelter and […]
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AlterNet [1] / By Rod Bastanmehr [2]
More Heartless Advice from McDonald's to Employees: Sell Your Christmas Gifts
November 21, 2013 |
As the giving season approaches, fast-food giant McDonald’s has found a new way to avoid helping its low-paid workers with a living wage: this time by urging employees to sell their Christmas presents for extra money. The helpful bit of corporate advice was posted on the company’s “McResource” employee webpage in an effort to help staff manage finances and stress as the holiday season approaches. Companies like McDonald's and Walmart are really outdoing themselves with the holidays appaoaching: Retail giant Wal-Mart's recently requested help with the company's food drive, with proceeds going to their own employees, because Wal-MArt does not pay them enough to afford food.
Of course, McDonald's also recently advised employees break food into little pieces in an effort to feel more full on less food. In yet more helpful tips from this very caring empyer, McDonald’s also recommended singing away stress and taking two vacations a year to lower the risk of heart attack. And, of course, selling your possessions is not just good for Christmas presents, they advise “selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist” for “some quick cash.”
The company recommendations were publicized on Tuesday through Low Pay Is Not OK, an advocacy group for higher wages for fast food workers, arguing that the conglomorate asking its employees to make up for a lack of financial stability because of pitifully low wages was reprehensible. The organization quickly experienced blowback from McDonald’s, with the company flaming that the company-wide advice was taken out of context.
“This is an attempt by an outside organization to undermine a well-intended employee assistance resource website by taking isolated portions out of context,” the company said in a public statement.
The group was in the news earlier this month for releasing a recording of McDonald’s workers calling the company hotline asking for assistance, where the operators then urge the decade-long employee to apply for federal food stamps and Medicaid assistance.According to a recent study, [3] 52% of families of major fast-food employees are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, compared with the 25% of the whole workforce. The same employee in question was arrested that same month after confronting McDonald’s USA President Jeff Stratton during a speech in Chicago regarding the $8.25 hourly wage that left her unable to purchase clothing from her children, which has since been used as a major rallying cry for those asking for a major overhaul in fast food companie's obligation to their employees.
See more stories tagged with:
mcdonalds [4],
fast food [5],
minimum wage [6]
*Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/labor/more-heartless-advice-mcdonalds-employees-sell-your-christmas-gifts*
*Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rod-bastanmehr
[3] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/30/want-to-end-corporate-welfare-for-mcdonalds-raise-the-minimum-wage/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/mcdonalds-2
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fast-food
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/minimum-wage
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B*
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Historic “McLibel” Leaflet Was Co-Created by This Undercover Cop
Bob Lambert, while working as an undercover cop, co-wrote the infamous leaflet about McDonald’s that led to the “McLibel” trial, the longest court case in English history.
Bob Lambert was an undercover cop in who spent years infiltrating Greenpeace and other protest groups in London. He has previously been exposed for bombing a department store in the name of the Animal Liberation Front, and is also under investigation for sexual relationships he had with four women while undercover.
Now Paul Lewis and Rob Evans at The Guardianhave reported that Lambert, while undercover, co-wrote the infamous leaflet about McDonald’s that led to the “McLibel” trial, the longest court case in English history:
The true identity of one of the authors of the “McLibel leaflet” is Bob Lambert, a police officer who used the alias Bob Robinson in his five years infiltrating the London Greenpeace group, is revealed in a new book about undercover policing of protest, published next week.
McDonald’s famously sued green campaigners over the roughly typed leaflet, in a landmark three-year high court case, that was widely believed to have been a public relations disaster for the corporation. Ultimately the company won a libel battle in which it spent millions on lawyers.
Lambert was deployed by the special demonstration squad (SDS) – a top-secret Metropolitan police unit that targeted political activists between 1968 until 2008, when it was disbanded. He co-wrote the defamatory six-page leaflet in 1986 – and his role in its production has been the subject of an internal Scotland Yard investigation for several months.
At no stage during the civil legal proceedings brought by McDonald’s in the 1990s was it disclosed that a police infiltrator helped author the leaflet.
The response from a police spokesman is particularly salient: “At some point it will fall upon this generation of police leaders to account for the activities of our predecessors, but for the moment we must focus on getting to the truth.”
McDonald’s Wants Another Corporate Jet, Not Raises For Low Wage Workers
October 24, 2013 |
Shame on McDonald’s. The giant fast-food corporation, whose 700,000-plus American employees are paid so little that they rely on $1.2 billion [3] in taxpayer-funded welfare to can get by, just bought “another $35-million-dollar luxury jet.”
That’s according to the Campaign For America’s Future, which has launched an online petition [4] calling for the nation’s largest fast food chain to pay living wages—starting at $15 an hour instead of pennies about the federal minimum wage, which is half that.
“It’s not right to impoverish your employees while sailing above them at a rate of $2,500 an hour. It's immoral to do it with a taxpayer subsidy,” the Campaign said. “Sign the petition telling Donald Thompson, CEO of McDonald's to cancel his order for another corporate jet until he pays all his employees a decent wage.”
According to the National Employment Law Project, Thompson made [3] $13.7 million in 2012, and the corporation reported $5.6 billion in profits. Progressive economists have reported [5] that McDonald’s could pay the $10.50 an hour wage if it raised the price of its popular Big Mac items by a nickel.
The Campaign has previously noted [6] excesses in McDonald’s corporate suite. This week, reports surfaced [7] that the company was advising workers to make budgets that include food stamps—instead of paying a living wage. Meanwhile, the CEO’s salary tripled [6].
The jet that McDonald’s want to buy, the Campaign said, is “a luxurious Bombardier 605,” whose marketing materials tout “listening to Beethoven on the dual Blu-Ray Disc player, or watching a movie on either of the two 22” HD monitors, a real pleasure.”
The Campaign For America’s Future petition is here [4].
I was looking forward to my new job when I started working at a McDonald’s location in Pennsylvania in April, but I was disappointed to find out that in order to be paid, I would have to activate a JP Morgan Chase debit card with heavy fees attached.
I’m a young single mom. When I started my job at McDonald’s, I knew that I would only be making slightly more than minimum wage. I didn’t expect that the only way I would be paid would be on a debit card that would dock pay that I earned through lots of different fees. When I asked if McDonald’s could pay me through direct deposit to my local credit union, which doesn’t charge withdrawal fees, I was told that the debit card was the only option.
These cards come with a lot of fees: from fees for cash withdrawals to balance inquiries to lost or stolen cards to overdrafts and even inactivity fees. The federal government has helped reduce fees on credit and debit cards that most consumers use, but those protections don’t apply to the kinds of cards companies like McDonald's are using to pay employees. In the end, I feared that once all of the fees from getting my own hard-earned wages through this card were taken out, my pay would go below minimum wage.
I decided to leave my job at McDonald’s not because I didn't like the people, but because I think it's only fair that I get paid for all of my work there.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/sustainable-seafood-labeling_n_2677195.html?view=print&comm_ref=false Sustainable Seafood Labeling Brings On Host Of Challenges: NPR Report] (audio) 2/13.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/mcdonalds-apologizes-for-_n_3053820.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
pulled out of alec 4/12
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http://grist.org/news/mcdonalds-new-sustainable-fish-is-surprise-not-so-sustainable/
6. McDonald’s
McDonald's is a brand virtually synonymous with America, cited as an example of US cultural hegemony around the world. Yet it is known almost as much for its low-wage jobs as it is for its French fries, having spawned the term “McJob,” implying a low-wage, low-skill position.
Remember last year, when the company announced its "National Hiring Day” to fill 50,000 of those $8 an hour jobs? Hundreds of workers showed up to grab those McJobs. Nationwide, McDonald's is the third-largest low-wage employer after Walmart and Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, employing nearly 860,000 workers. While the rest of the economy (and low-wage workers) are suffering, McD's has been profitable over the last three years, and famously expanding. It's got more revenue, profits and cash holdings than before the recession began. According to Business Insider, its CEO/chairman of the board, James A. Skinner, made $7 million in 2011 (he also owns stock in the company worth some $16 million), and its COO/president, Donald Thompson, made $3.3 million.
Business Insider's Henry Blodget asked earlier this year how Walmart, McDonald's and Starbucks felt paying their employees so little. Henoted that they could pay employees an additional $5,000 a year out of their operating profits and still make “boatloads of money” but have workers living above the poverty line.
In response, corporations hired private detectives to spy on activists
and law firms to drag them through the courts. Such efforts sometimes
backfired. In Alaska, the Wackenhut Corporation, a private
security firm, was hired by the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company to
investigate oil broker Charles Hamel, a critic of the handling of the
FIGHTING BACK 237
1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wackenhut set up a phony environmental
organization, the Ecolit Group, hoping to gather information on oil
company critics. Hotel rooms were bugged, meetings were secretly
videotaped, and activists were spied on. Eventually, the operation came
to the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on
Interior and Insular Affairs, which found that Wackenhut had “engaged
in a pattern of deceitful, grossly offensive and potentially, if not blatantly,
illegal conduct to accomplish their objectives … [in] Alyeska’s
disastrous campaign to silence its critics.”
In London, McDonald’s Corporation hired two different spy agencies,
without telling either about the other, to infiltrate a tiny group of
environmental activists. (Not surprisingly, the spies spent much of their
time writing up reports on each other.) McDonald’s then sued the group,
but remarkably, two of its members succeeded in holding an squad of
corporate lawyers at bay in the longest libel trial in English history. In
the course of the trial, the plaintiffs called up expert after expert, defending
the charges they had made about McDonald’s environmental
and labor practices. The British press followed the story closely, and the
two activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, became international folk
heroes. gangs of america
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2. Marketing to Children Under Guise of Charity
Anna Lappé is a mother and food health educator, known for her work as an expert on food systems and as a sustainable food advocate. She spoke in March at TedX Manhattan on behalf of her group, Food Mythbusters, about ways to combat the fast food industry’s marketing to kids.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity—proven to cause diabetes and other serious health conditions—has more than doubled in the last 30 years. More than a third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese in 2010, and the numbers are increasing.
“What children are enticed to consume today has truly life-and-death consequences,” Lappé told AlterNet.
While the fast food industry reported spending less on marketing to kids to the FCC, a discerning look at the numbers in the report will show otherwise. Rather than advertise less, the industry is using sneakier, less traditional channels to market to young audiences, like social media, branded “advergaming” websites and “philanthro marketing.”
Lappé says following her TedX Mahattan talk she received an email from a concerned parent. Her third-grader’s class had taken a lunchtime field trip to McDonalds to hear from Ronald the clown about Ronald House Charities.
“The trip was under guise of charitable giving, but what it meant in effect was two third-grade classes, during the school day, going to McDonalds to eat lunch with their teachers,” Lappé says.
Lappé says that kind of under-the-radar “philanthro marketing” is a common tactic for fast food companies to reach young audiences, and points out that while it exposes kids to fast food brands, it is not reported as “marketing” to the FCC and other regulating organizations.
Food companies are also using the Internet and social media to keep in touch with youth, including some websites, like McDonalds’ Ronald.com, that are marketed to kids as young as preschool-aged.
“They're called advergames, but they're videogames embedded in websites,” says Lappé. She adds that, while marketing to kids is inherently unethical, social media marketing is worse because it is under the radar and all but unregulated.
“Children are unable to distinguish between what is entertainment, educational material, and advertising,” she says. “My particular issue with social media marketing to kids is that the technology around social media is advancing at such a fast pace—much faster than advocates can monitor it, much faster than regulators can keep up with it—so that you have this space of marketing to kids that’s increasingly unregulated.”
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