Federal labor officials say the McDonald’s franchise that controls 12 restaurants in metro New Orleans violated child labor laws and has hired more than 80 minors in two states.
We saw a kid who couldn’t have been more than 13 working in a McDonald’s in Montana. There was a sign apologizing for delays as they were short staffed.
He got told off by an older employee who was almost certainly his mom because he pointed out that we only ordered fries, fries were ready, and he could give them to us now. Nope. Orders are served in order.
When our number finally came up, he gave us the most mature and put upon “I’m very sorry about this” - a lone, 13 year old voice of reason in a world gone mad.
“The franchise received a $56,106 civil penalty for the violations, according to the news release.”
Cost of doing business
That’s like $700 per violation. Easily worth it if it means filling the position a week earlier than following the law.
It’s so strange that you get a bulk discount on criming.
I ran some basic calculations:
I assumed that the child workers are making minimum wage, the adult workers are making $10 per hour (pay seems to be between $9.27-11.05 per hour), each shift has three people (two of which are child workers), and this is occurring during the summer when school is out.
Using this I figured that if the store was run by 3 adults, each working 12 hour shifts (4 hours of OT), then paying the employees would cost $960 per day per franchise [2(3((8x10)+(4x20))) = 960]. For a store that employs 2 children and one adult per shift and doesn’t pay OT for the children the savings per day is about $292 per location [2(160) + 4(12x7.25) = 668, 960 - 668 = 292]. If they did pay OT to the children then the difference would be $176 [2(160) + ((8x7.25)+4(14.50)) = 784, 960 - 784 = 176]. So if we take these savings and multiply them across the 12 locations and then multiply that daily savings across the entire franchise by the amount of weeks off in the summer ≈ 11 then you get a total franchise savings of either $38,544 [292x12x11] without OT) or $23,232 [176x12x11] (with OT). All it takes is for them to do this for two summers and the fine becomes irrelevant. Not to mention that this doesn’t even count child labor usage during off school times.
