Caught Employing Slaves, McDonald’s Promises to Do Better
The dire conditions of fast-food work cause enormous staff turnover, which puts franchisees in a constant search for desperate workers. It’s no wonder that one McDonald’s in England failed to notice that it was employing victims of human trafficking.
A McDonald's franchise on May 15, 2024, in Minehead, England. (Anna Barclay / Getty Images)
In October 2019, British police arrested a couple who had lured sixteen men from the Czech Republic — all of them struggling with homelessness, drug addiction, or both — with promises of jobs and a new life. Instead they were forced into slavery.
The couple forced the men to work at factories supplying local grocery stores and at a McDonald’s in Caxton, a village just west of Cambridge. When the couple was arrested, laws intended to protect victims’ privacy barred journalists from gathering much information on the case, but a recent BBC investigation has brought new details to light. The investigation makes clear that both the McDonald’s and factory employers either egregiously failed to notice or willfully ignored red flags associated with modern slavery.
The Czech men spoke little to no English, so another person sat in for interviews and filled out their applications. At the Caxton McDonald’s, nine men worked up to seventy or one hundred hours per week, but had all their wages deposited into a single bank account that none of them controlled. It was four years before the traffickers were arrested, and only then after one of the men called Czech police for assistance.
While there’s no indication that slavery is widespread in fast-food restaurants in the UK or any other country, the fact that it happened at all invites scrutiny of the industry’s business model.
High Turnover, Low Oversight, Rampant Abuse
As a low-paying industry, fast food has always relied on a steady inflow of desperate and often vulnerable people to staff its restaurants. For example, I recently wrote about how Burger King was instrumental in drafting US plans for moving welfare recipients into jobs in the late 1990s. The fast-food industry was one of the leading beneficiaries of this policy: the gutting of welfare created a looser labor market, which in turn meant that fast-food companies could hire more workers at lower wages.
The same can be said of major retailers like Amazon and Walmart. But whereas those companies employ low-wage workers directly, exposing the entire company to legal problems should they arise, the ownership structure of the fast-food industry is complex in a specific way, with major companies often shielded from consequences by franchise arrangements.
Like most fast-food restaurants around the world, the Caxton McDonald’s is a franchised operation, meaning its owner is an independent businessperson who pays the McDonald’s corporation to use its likeness, menu, and methods of doing business. Under a typical McDonald’s franchise arrangement, the corporation provides exact mandates for almost every aspect of the restaurant’s operations — not only for menu items but for where to buy the raw ingredients to make them and how to greet customers.
One of the very few areas in which fast-food corporations generally do not provide direct mandates is employment. Under the law, franchisees are usually allowed to hire whoever they want and pay them whatever they’d like. That freedom often leads to worker abuse, for which major corporations disavow responsibility. In a 2022 study commissioned by the Service Employees International Union, 85 percent of four hundred surveyed fast-food workers said they had experienced some form of wage theft.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent fast-food labor practice comes from Alabama, where two groups of incarcerated people are currently suing the state department of corrections for enrolling them in jobs, including fast-food jobs, taking 40 percent of their wages, and then threatening them with punishment or transfer to more violent facilities when they tried to quit. Those suits allege that, by forcing people to stay in jobs against their will, the Alabama Department of Corrections has enslaved inmates under its protection — an illegal practice under the state’s constitution.
The Alabama fast-food franchisees employing prisoners are, according to the suits, willful participants in the state’s forced labor program. By contrast, McDonald’s UK told the BBC their Caxton franchisee unknowingly employed the Czech slaves, having apparently ignored what should have been some obvious red flags. Speaking on his behalf, the company said the franchisee was only made aware of “the full depth of these horrific, complex and sophisticated crimes” during the police investigation.
But even as they’ve downplayed the incident as a horrifying anomaly, those executives also seem to think a recurrence is more than theoretically possible. In response to the latest revelations, McDonald’s UK told the BBC it has “taken action” to better “detect and deter potential risks” in the future.
Fast-food workers have always faced low pay, unsafe and grueling conditions, and few opportunities for advancement. As the speed of operations has increased, the stress and the risk of on-the-job injury have increased precipitously too. Those dire conditions cause enormous yearly turnover — often exceeding 100 percent in the United States — which then puts franchisees in a constant search for new workers. With so little attention paid to how they find and employ people, we shouldn’t be surprised when some cut corners and ignore red flags. If anything, we should expect it.