McWow!
Employees at a McDonald’s in Ohio recently got a Payday Surprise tucked in with their paychecks — a pamphlet from the Big Boss telling them that if they want to keep getting raises and benefits (and maybe paychecks) they better vote GOP:
Along with their recent paychecks, employees received a pamphlet from their employer on company letter head that stated “as the election season is here, we wanted you to know which candidates will help our business grow in the future.” While pointing out that the vote is the employee’s “personal decision,” the pamphlet explicitly states, “if the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected we will not”:
No, really:
Can you say McCorporatocracy?
UPDATE: Can you say “walk it back”?:
In response to inquiries, Paul Siegfried, the owner of Siegfried Enterprises which owns the Canton McDonalds, released a statement confessing to an “error in judgement,” and offered a hedged apology to “those that I have offended.”
“Those that I have offended” — which would be anyone with even a modicum of professional ethics, awareness of elections law and a functioning brain stem. The full statement is here. It doesn’t refute any of the statements about raises and benefits being threatened by the election of Democrats — yet another meaningless “I’m sorry you were offended” steaming load of a non-apology from a sleazy shit-eating douchebag who’s probably only sorry he got caught. I hope his staff all walks off the job on Saturday afternoon.
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unrepentant old hippie 
Good morrow, JJ!
And you are surprised, why?
The Corporate Oligarchy has spoken. The lumpenproletariat have to remember on which side their McMuffin is margarined.
Some animals are more equal than others – CTZen
Walking the fine line between electoral coercion. Reminds me of Deadwood.
“Walking the fine line between electoral coercion.”
What a hoot! Unions are not only involved in telling their members who to vote for, but in actually organizing their members to stage rallies, knock on doors, man phone banks, etc. This is not being done by their employers, but rather is being done with money that they actually worked to earn, only to have the unions take their “cut!”
Now this is going to be a difficult request, because I know that abstraction is a rare ability.
But imagine for a second that there were actually a sufficiently polar election wherein if the democrats won Micky-D’s would actually go out of business, and if the Republicans won, the current situation would continue — Micky-D’s still open for business, workers still have jobs. This is a thought experiment, and that is the set up, so don’t bother to point out that things are not that way — I know things are not like that; it’s not the point.
Under those circumstances, would it be wrong for the employer to try to alert the workers to that situation? I mean, if the workers thought that their employer going out of business in that way was a good thing, it would serve to educate them that they could help bring that about, after all.
I think that WOULD be OK, just as I think what McDonald’s did do is. I think it would actually have been OK to go the extra step & advocate voting Republican, a step they didn’t take.
I think it is probably true that a much higher percentage of McDonald’s workers don’t know what’s going on in the election than the population at large. That they are proportionately younger than the population at large, is the main reason I think that.
Brian
Analogy FAIL: a union isn’t the same thing as a corporate employer.
The whole purpose of unions is to advocate for the workers — squeeze out better pay, benefits & safety regs for workers through collective bargaining. As opposed to corporate management who’d have workers labour as indentured slaves if they could get away with it 👿
CTZen – No, actually this doesn’t surprise me at all. The only surprise is that it’s taken them so long to become so emboldened.
B York
Yes. I suppose one could say that the company at least stated that voting was the employee’s own personal decision, but in that case their list of candidates should have included Democrats and everyone else.
The truth is, the only thing employers should have to say to their employees about voting is that they’ll be getting time off to go and do it. Anything beyond that is unacceptable.
I remember shortly after Obamacare passed, this whackjob doctor in Florida had a sign outside his door for those who voted for Obama to find another doctor; that he wasn’t treating democrats. It was in HuffPO.
The difference being that employers have the power to fire you for being a Democrat (and can make sure you can’t get a job elsewhere), whereas the evil, water-fluoridating unions can’t fire you for not “voting the right way.”
BTW, Brian, have you ever seen Firefly? You’ll recall the episode “Jaynestown,” where the A plot involved the plight of the “mudders” and Jayne Cobb’s accidental “heroism” on their behalf. It’s explicitly stated in the episode that the way the mudders are treated is just one step above slavery. Well, that’s where we would be today if not for the evil, water-fluoridating unions.
JJ, I fully agree with you but I think that MacDonald’s found a loophole that they had vetted by their lawyers. It’s disgraceful and undemocratic but I wonder whether they could be successfully prosecuted. I guess not providing a list of ALL candidates could be a wedge. Not a legal expert so I don’t know.
Well I just had my last McFlurrie. The list of fast food joints and retailers I won’t use is growing by leaps and bounds.
I know that “The whole purpose of unions is to advocate for the workers.” But what they do instead is advocate for the union. That makes it closer to a valid analogy.
Perhaps it is true that “corporate management [would] have workers labor as indentured slaves if they could get away with it” (though that is debatable; the understanding of what makes for a profitable company is more sophisticated than it used to be), but they cannot — and not because of the continued existence of unions, even if it were true that things are not like that because of unions (though that, too, might not be true).
“[T]he only thing employers should have to say to their employees about voting is that they’ll be getting time off to go and do it. Anything beyond that is unacceptable.”
1) Why should they be getting time off to do it? Why should the company pay for employees to exercise their franchise? Polls are open hours that were chosen to make it so that workers of any shift can make it to the polls.
2) Why is anything beyond that unacceptable?
“The difference being that employers have the power to fire you for being a Democrat …”
No they don’t. This would be covered under “creed” (what you believe), and is a protected category. And unions have the power to ensure you don’t work, through keeping you off the roster, losing your paperwork, or whatever.
“Well, that’s where we would be today if not for … unions.”
I know that the “party line” is that it was unions that ended child labor, that ended 14-hour days, that ended 7-day work weeks, and so on. But there is a valid case to be made that the rise of unions & the ending of those practices were, in some measure, co incidental (happening at the same time) and coincidental (not tied together).
For instance, prior to the industrial revolution, for all of human history everyone in the family worked all day, or there would not be enough food, water, and repairs. With the advent of machines, one person could do the work of more than one person without the machine. This made shorter days & higher pay even possible.
With that possibility, but without unions, eventually (and I mean in like a decade) the employers would not have been able to keep the quality of workers they needed, and would have found it financially preferable to improve conditions.
If, at that point, they had not, someone else would entice away their workers with better conditions.
If we lost all machines today, by next week working conditions would be awful again. Wages would be lower, goods would cost more, it would take more hours of labor to be able to feed your family, and so on.
“It’s disgraceful and undemocratic …”
How could you see this as undemocratic?!?
The workers still vote for whom they want, the ballot is still secret (unless they are voting on whether to unionize), and democratic elections in the US have always involved aggressive, intense advocacy. I think that to find this undemocratic is a bit alarmist viz what it really is, objectively.
But my first question was not rhetorical; I would listen to the case being made that it is undemocratic, if one could be made.
“The list of fast food joints and retailers I won’t use is growing by leaps and bounds.”
I would respectfully submit that the only person being inconvenienced is you. Perhaps some more effective reaction could be developed. In this particular case, perhaps handing out handbills to McD. employees contradicting what they were given in their paychecks.
I wonder how much of this originates with
John Kasich, a former Fox News “specialist”
and shill for the GOP. Now he’s running
for governor and it’ll be interesting
to see the fallout of this matter and
his political future.
Of course, it’s Ohio and it’s to be
expected. Just look at some of the others
who have emerged from that state and one
wonders what’s going on in that bit of
fly-over America. Jim Traficant immediately
comes to mind.
And it’s the state that brags about being
the home states to the most presidents!
Brian
Well yeah, because now we have labour laws now that dictate things like 40 hour weeks, minimum wages, on-the-job safety etc. But employers didn’t give those things out of the goodness of their hearts: they were only given under duress, whereupon they were codified in law.
I can see why that might make some people think that unions have outlived their usefulness, but it kind of reminds me of the “Women are equal now so we don’t need feminism anymore” argument. To paraphrase your great Thomas Jefferson, Eternal Vigilance is the price of workers’ rights, womens’ rights, human rights in general. Someone has to keep six.
Ck
Yeah, I remember that too. I think it earned him the title of Worst Person in the World on Olbermann 😆
b york
Really? I think it looks more like a case of an overly enthusiastic franchisee who’s not very well versed in election law and unaware of the havoc that’s about to be unleashed on businesses like his in the near future 😐
Torontonian
Specialist in what?
JAB
Exactly. They may be able to harass recalcitrant workers who don’t toe the line as far as output, but they can’t fire them.
I’ve only ever had one union job and I hated it because my way of making dumb jobs interesting is to set continually upward-moving goals and see if i can keep achieving them. I was doing this at Ma Bell and it wasn’t long before I came into work one day and found myself surrounded by other workers in the locker room… “You’re working too fast, you have to slow it down”. 😆
John Kasich was a regular on Fox News to give
Republican spin to anything in the news.
I support the free speech of everyone including the low life scum that run Macdeathburgers.So let them say what they think,but don’t forget to tell those folks what you think of them.
Paen – Well said 8) (Mcdeathburgers 😆 )
“… that bit of fly-over America …”
Yeah, these country class rubes aren’t real Americans.
“Well yeah, because now we have labour laws now that dictate things like 40 hour weeks, minimum wages, on-the-job safety etc. But employers didn’t give those things out of the goodness of their hearts: they were only given under duress, whereupon they were codified in law.”
Employers taking action out of the goodness of their heart. if implemented en masse, would be the end of the businesses. They are not in business for that.
But, on a different note, take this that was discovered: Workers are more productive if they get breaks. Now, that is codified, to be sure. But if it were not, businesses would still give breaks, because it makes for more productivity. I suspect persons trying to make a name for themselves ouched for codification of this after employers started moving that way in light of the evidence that it was a sound business idea.
But still, accurate though the above quote is, it is only part of the picture, and leaves out the impact of machines making a mna’s labor more productive. (I know you can’t put every detail in every post or paragraph, I’m not finding fault with your statement, just fortifying it a bit.)
That was a nice paraphrase. Kudos.
Paen
Exactly!