Ben Chacko
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TENS of thousands of current and former employees of McDonald’s in New Zealand will receive back pay after the burger giant agreed a deal with the country’s Unite trade union.
About 9,000 current staff and 40-60,000 ex-staff will be eligible for a minimum of $500 (£250) per year, the company acknowledges, and it estimates the average payout will be closer to $1,000 (£500), meaning the overall bill will be somewhere between $45-90 million (£22.5-45m). The deal commits the firm to pay arrears back to November 1 2009.
McDonald’s is not the only New Zealand firm owing its employees money for failing to comply with the Holidays Act, and Unite is fighting similar battles with Burger King and a security firm called Armourguard.
Even government departments have been found not to have complied with the act — the publicly owned NZ Post has set aside $38m to pay workers their holiday wages, as the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) starts to clamp down on bad bosses.
Unite’s Auckland and Northland lead fast-food organiser Gary Cranston told the Morning Star the win was down to “building a union in companies like McDonald’s from the bottom up.”
If workers around the world organise “as we have in New Zealand, you can get rid of unjust rostering arrangements like zero-hours contracts, end discriminatory youth rates, significantly increase starting rates, defend these conditions on the ground and as we have seen today reclaim wages systematically stolen by the biggest companies on Earth,” he said.
Unite says the deal it has negotiated with McDonald’s means staff and ex-staff will get bigger payouts than workers at other companies who have not been paid what they’re owed — with Restaurant Brands, which owns Pizza Hut, being let off with paying out six years’ entitlements by MBIE. Burger King and Armourguard have yet to agree to pay back anything, the union’s national director Mike Treen says.
McDonald’s said it had spent “tens of thousands of hours” trying to work out what it owed people and “with the agreement in place, we can now start the process of doing individual calculations.”
