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What McDonald’s Really Owes Its Workers

TIME

At the McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting on May 22, CEO Don Thompson claimed that his company “has a heritage of providing job opportunities that lead to ‘real careers.’”

It’s true, former CEO Jim Skinner, who never graduated from college, joined the fast-food giant as a management trainee in 1971 and rose to the top spot in 2004.

But the McDonald’s of today does not seem like the same land of opportunity it must have been when Skinner got his start at the company. [...]

A Demos report entitled “Fast Food Failure” found that fast-food “wages have increased just 0.3 percent in real dollars since 2000.” [...]

The Demos study found that the accommodations and food services sector, on average, has experienced higher levels of pay disparity than any other sector in the U.S. economy from 2000 to 2012 — and the CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio is highest in fast-food, having grown 470% over that time period.
 

The SEC has not yet finalized the Dodd-Frank requirement for disclosure of CEO-to-median-worker pay, so it’s impossible to compare McDonald’s CEO pay to the median or average McDonald’s worker pay, said Catherine Ruetschlin, the Demos study author.

Read the report: Fast Food Failure: How CEO-to-Worker Pay Disparity Undermines the Industry and the Overall Economy