McDonald’s is the first job for many people. The wages aren’t high and they tend to hire people without a lot of experience for many of their positions. This is fabulous and they should be praised for giving people their first chance.
However, there’s a downside to this: inexperience matters at work. It’s easy enough to learn how to make hamburgers and fries, but it’s not quite so easy to learn how to navigate a world of work. The result of that can mean that many employees are easy targets for sexual harassers.
The New York Times reports that Times Up Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and Fight for $15, combined forces to file a total of 23 new complaints against McDonald’s. 20 of these are complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and three are civil lawsuits. All are of concern to McDonald’s.
To keep reading, click here: McDonald’s Faces 23 New Sexual Harassment Complaints
These 23 cases are just the tip of the iceberg. McDonald’s needs to implement an absolute anti-fraternization policy, prohibiting managers — including those at franchise locations — from sexual relationships with their employees, upon pain of termination of their jobs or franchises.
I’m pretty sure this is the wrong way to go, for a few reasons.
First, there’s the squick factor of having my boss dictate who I can have a relationship with. I know the lines between “personal” and “professional” life aren’t as hard as some of us would like, but that’s a bit too far. I know I’m in the minority here.
More significantly: A LOT of these employees are going to be teens or in their early 20s. Even managers. Many shift managers come up from the ranks, and many are high school/college students. Dictating who they can date is going to be an exercise in futility. The logistics are going to be a nightmare as well. If someone’s a good employee, and worthy of moving up, but happens to be dating a fellow employee on the same level, do I refuse to give her the promotion? Do I promote her but tell her she must break up with her partner (and risk the impending lawsuit)? Or do you explain to her “You’re moving up in the world, and that means new responsibilities. I need to know you can handle it”?
I’m all for coming down hard on those who commit sexual harassment. I don’t think that punishing everyone (and that’s how this is going to be viewed by the majority of the–again teenage or early 20s–staff) is the way to go.
Since the majority of McDonald’s are a franchise location, the corporate McDonald’s needs to come down hard on these owners to eliminate this problem. For it to have come up as a New York Times article, means that this has been kept under wraps by the franchise owners until someone connected the dots and sued the corporation to get results. I am quite sure this is discussed quite rigorously at Hamburger University at corporate headquarters.