In reality, the McDonald’s Corporation is a real estate company and will do just fine. They make the same profits if their restaurants sell a million fries a day or one fry a day. The franchise owner, however, who still has to pay the same rents, and the fast food worker, who is putting himself in danger of coronavirus, will suffer. I’m not sure if McDonald’s offers health insurance. My guess is they offer it for full time workers, and then make sure that everybody has a part-time schedule. And not all McDonald’s employees are young.
Was it a rumor or a conspiracy that McDonald’s uniforms are made by prisoners in USA? And of course an Amazon union organizer was fired and smeared by Amazon. Very funny in Quebec, grocery clerks and hospital orderlies have been given a raise for being “essential”. (Mostly because the Federal gov’t was offering $2000 a month to workers to stay home, which would be more than these people get at work.) A deadly crisis gives some capitalists a conscience. The province of Alberta has declared “oil workers” an essential service as they work in crowded camps for 3 weeks in and then take the virus home for a week.
I’m now aware of that particular story (of McDonald’s using prison labor). I don’t even know if they use a centralized provider. But I’m sure some franchise somewhere outsources their uniforms to some company that at some point has used conflict labor.
The stupidest thing I’ve seen so far is a local grocery store that shut down 80% of their self-checkout lines. Why? It meant longer lines and less social distancing. But I guess they were concerned that people were ringing up toilet paper as prime rib.