A lawsuit has been filed against Mc Donald’s by its employees in a Michigan court, alleging that the fast-food chain takes no action in cases of sexual harassment and allows the same to thrive across its outlets in the US.
In the past three years, about 50+ complaints have been registered against the food chain in the US. The workers allege that McDonald’s has no policies to address sexual harassment, nor has it ever tried to provide any sort of training to its managers to prevent such incidents. It has been accused of nurturing a toxic work culture by taking no action even when workers complain of sexual harassment.
A majority of the US outlets of McDonald’s are franchises. Clearly, the Company has not tried hard enough to train the staff at these outlets appropriately.
However, the Company has said that it is in in the process of ensuring training on safety at the workplace in all its corporate-owned restaurants, and is also pushing its franchisees to follow suit.
The latest lawsuit is one of the first that has led to a class action. The employee in question, has been employed with a franchise of the chain for one and a half years. She accuses a restaurant manager of making repeated sexual advances, and alleges that he even tried to pin her against a wall in a walk-in freezer. Fear of being rendered jobless was what kept her from quitting.
The lawsuit seeks appropriate training, protection for staff, and over $5 million in damages.
