{"id":122739,"date":"2014-06-04T17:49:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T17:49:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=122739"},"modified":"2014-06-04T17:49:32","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T17:49:32","slug":"fast-food-giants-picking-workers-pockets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/business-news\/fast-food-giants-picking-workers-pockets\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast Food Giants Picking Their Workers\u2019 Pockets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Jim Hightower<\/em><\/p>\n<p>No matter how small the haul, a thief is a thief, right?<\/p>\n<p>If a poverty-wage fast-food worker sneaks out a couple of burgers to take home to the kids, the bosses yell: \u201cThief!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But what do you call it when the bosses steal from those same workers? How about outrageous, disgusting \u2013 or simply unbelievable? Well, believe it or not, it\u2019s happening every day in multiple ways, and not by a few bad apples, but in what has become routine corporate practice by McDonald\u2019s, Burger King, Domino\u2019s, and other hugely profitable giants.<\/p>\n<p>Technically this shortchanging is called \u201cwage theft.\u201d It involves such slick-fingered moves as erasing hours from employee time cards, requiring off-the-clock work, not paying for overtime hours, refusing to reimburse workers for gas they burned while making deliveries, or inventing uniform fees and other deductions that illegally drop pay below the minimum wage.<\/p>\n<p>Come on \u2013 isn\u2019t it shameful enough that these global behemoths pay rock-bottom wages without them circling back like low-life pickpockets to steal from their own employees? This isn\u2019t just corporate thievery, it\u2019s thuggery.<\/p>\n<p>How low can fast-food greed go? So low that the top bosses at headquarters play a sleazy game of hide and seek, pretending that they have nothing to do with this ripoff. Personnel practices, they airily claim, are left to local franchisees, who are \u201cindependent business owners.\u201d Bovine excrement! Corporate central dictates how much mustard each franchise can put on a bun, so to think that it doesn\u2019t monitor every dime in payroll is a ludicrous lie.<\/p>\n<p>In a recent survey of fast-food workers, 9 out of 10 said they\u2019ve had\u00a0<a style=\"color: #003366;\" href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/economy\/2014\/04\/02\/3422111\/wage-theft-poll-mcdonalds\/\">wages stolen by their bosses<\/a>. This thievery has become business as usual, and it\u2019s worse than shameful \u2014 it\u2019s slimy. For more information, go to the National Employment Law Project:\u00a0<a style=\"color: #003366;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nelp.org\/\">www.nelp.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/otherwords.org\/fast-food-giants-picking-workers-pockets\" target=\"_blank\">Republished<\/a> with permission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jim Hightower No matter how small the haul, a thief is a thief, right? If a poverty-wage fast-food worker sneaks out a couple of burgers to take home to the kids, the bosses yell: \u201cThief!\u201d But what do you call it when the bosses steal from those same workers? How about outrageous, disgusting \u2013 or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-business-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}