Paco Alvarez: You’ve been investigating sexual harassment and labor violations in McDonald’s for several years. What initially inspired your reporting?
Bryce Covert: Well, I was mostly inspired to look into it by the workers themselves. They had started speaking out around 2017, 2018 in really large numbers. They also held a nationwide strike over the issue in 2018, which was the first ever national strike over sexual harassment that had been held. And this was around the time of the Me Too movement and I think they were sort of using that momentum. So I covered the strike at the time. And then there were a series of lawsuits that came before then and after then from McDonald’s workers alleging sexual harassment. And so I had been following this issue for a while.
There was also a survey that found that the levels of sexual harassment in McDonald’s were pretty egregious, even for a fast food restaurant. And so the impetus to start reporting on it more in depth was, I had seen the strike, I had these lawsuits come out in sort of a trickle one by one and they’d get a little bit of coverage. But I hadn’t seen anyone really dive into this problem and grapple with what was happening across this company, across the brand, and why. Why is this so bad at McDonald’s?
Alvarez: What were conditions like when you started reporting?
Covert: When I started talking to workers, this was probably in 2019 and 2020, they were pretty egregious. I was hearing things like people being regularly grabbed, people being being regularly groped, people threatened with rape. And these were serious, serious issues that people were confronting, as well as the – I shouldn’t say mundane, but maybe more common things like comments and people getting too close to them. It’s a very close environment. It’s a very fast-paced environment. There’s a lot of teenagers who work at McDonald’s. So it has all of these symptoms of this problem that all sort of come together and create, well, it can create a pretty bad hazard.
I think the challenge is, you know, sexual harassment can happen in any workplace and it is somewhat common in fast food. But if you don’t respond to it, if you do something about it, then it continues to grow and it becomes an endemic problem that people feel emboldened to do it, those who are victimized feel like there’s nothing that can be done, they have no recourse and it sort of just grows and grows and that seemed to be what had happened at McDonald’s that had really spread and had really taken root.
Alvarez: What was McDonald’s response to the initial wave of scrutiny in like 2020-2021? Did they make any changes to their policies?
Covert: So there was sort of this perfect storm of the reporting I had done and the workers who had been speaking out on the restaurant level, and then their former CEO, Steve Easterbrook got caught up in a series of sexual scandals at the corporate level. And so I think those two things combined really put a spotlight on this issue at the company and forced their hand to feel like they had to do something about it. And so they came out and said in early 2021, they said, we’re gonna do something about this problem. And here’s what we’re going to do. That’s when they said that they were going to implement these new, what they call, “global brand standards,” which they said were going to create an environment of safety in terms of not just sexual harassment but also discrimination and actual violence because there’s problems with violence in McDonald’s restaurants.
And, I thought this was really interesting, the standards were supposed to apply not just to the restaurants that McDonald’s corporate owns itself but also to franchisees, which is really important because the vast majority of McDonald’s locations are franchised and they tend to pass responsibility on just to the franchise owner and say, corporate has nothing to do with this, it’s being run by somebody else. So they were putting their foot down in theory and saying, we are going to make change everywhere. We’re gonna make sure these franchisees do it too. And those standards were supposed to take effect in January, 2022. So when I was watching all this happen, I sort of had it in the back of my head, “all right, let’s see. Let’s see what happens after they go into effect.”
Alvarez: You note in your investigation that McDonald’s has kept the details of its global brand standards secret, even from restaurant employees. How did you go about trying to get a sense of what these brand standards are and whether they’ve been effective?
Covert: Yeah, so this story came back to me via some of the lawyers who have been working with the McDonald’s employees who’ve been speaking out themselves. And they basically said, look, we’ve got this case where we know that sexual harassment is still happening after January 2022. And we’ve also seen the global brand standards. They could not say anything about them to me because they’re under seal. So there’s this class action lawsuit in Florida. That’s what I’m referring to and McDonald’s has fought very hard to keep the global brand standards under seal in that case. They claim that it’s a business secret, that its competitors would get an unfair advantage if it could see what McDonald’s had done to combat sexual harassment.
So I considered actually trying to intervene in that lawsuit and convince the judge to unseal them so that I and the public could see them. The challenge that I ran into there is that the judge is currently considering whether or not to grant class action status and has said publicly, I am not going to consider any other questions regarding this case until I make that decision. And the wheels of the justice system move pretty slowly. So I had a feeling that that was not going to be a venue. So I basically started asking everyone else, I started looking for other sexual harassment incidences that had happened after January, 2022. and asking the people who were working with those workers, have you seen this document? Have you seen any details? Can you share them with me? And eventually I was able to get a copy.
Alvarez: You spoke to a number of employees who experienced sexual harassment. How did you get in contact with them? Were people open to talking about their experiences?
Covert: I did actually find people who were pretty open. I was mostly getting in touch with people via lawyers, and so there’s already a level of having spoken out. Basically, everyone I talked to, I believe, had already filed some sort of legal complaint. Not all of those are public. Some of them were with either the EEOC or state-level versions of the EEOC, and those aren’t public record. But even so, they’d already spoken out to someone, outside of their family, outside of their friends. So that helps a bit.
I also just think. Employees at McDonald’s who have been sexually harassed, my experience is they feel wronged, they feel violated, and they feel like the company should be held to account and are pretty primed to talk about it in the hopes that something will change. The people I talked to were pretty mad about what happened to them. And some of them are still dealing with the ramifications either financially or emotionally or both. Um, you know, there was certainly some work done to gain trust, but I think most people were already pretty primed to want to talk about their experiences.
Alvarez: Since the implementation of the global brand standards, what type of training or educational resources about sexual harassment does McDonald’s provide for their employees?
Covert: Well, I will say they declined to make any materials available to me. I did ask a number of detailed questions and asked to see the trainings, I asked to see the policies, at least the ones that they use at corporate headquarters, because they basically say that they will make things available to franchisees, but they won’t mandate that the franchisees use any particular thing. And this is, I think, the problem with the global brand standards that I saw is the details show that yes, McDonald’s is requiring certain things of both corporate and franchise locations, and franchisees have to do new things to comply with them, but it’s pretty vague.
So for example, they have to have training, sexual harassment training in place, and everyone has to take it, but the company is silent on what that training consists of, or how often it happens, or does it have any effect on whether or not people are inclined to harass. Similarly, they have to have a harassment policy and they have to hand it out to employees. Doesn’t say what the policy has to say. They have to have a protocol for investigating incidents of harassment and how people should report doesn’t say anything about what that has to consist of.
So, you know, what I found is that on the ground when I was talking to workers, you know, the training was pretty cursory. It was digital. It was… a couple slides in a presentation or a short video, nothing that stuck, nothing that made a difference. When they went to report sexual harassment, all of them said nothing really was done, and a lot of them actually were retaliated against and fired themselves for speaking out.
Alvarez: Related to that, what recourses do McDonald’s workers have when they face sexual harassment or assault?
Covert: Well, the company says that they should be able to report it, and that there’s a hotline that they’ve set up of some kind if they want to go outside their own restaurant. What workers are told on the ground is that they are supposed to report it to a manager or a general manager, and there seems to be some… They seem to discourage going outside of one of those people. which is a problem if your manager or your general manager doesn’t do anything. It’s also a problem, if they’re the one harassing you, which happened in a couple of incidents. So those things supposedly exist, but it seems like they are not really doing much to change the problem on the ground.
So outside of that, you know, workers can take legal action, and that’s what a lot of these folks have done. The first step always for that is to file a complaint with either the EEOC, which is a federal agency, or your state-level version – they’re called different things in different states. And the challenge there is that you’ve actually got a short window of time after you experience something to do that, and I’m not going to remember the numbers because it varies by state and it varies by if it’s a federal EEOC, but they have to act fairly quickly. It’s like a year or so. You also may feel like you need a lawyer for that, which is a challenge, not everyone can afford a lawyer, find a lawyer willing to do this with them. And then once you take that first step, you can sometimes go file a lawsuit on your own with a lawyer. But again, that’s very expensive. It takes a very long time to wind its way through the court. McDonald’s corporate has successfully, in every case I’ve seen, wriggled out of responsibility for these lawsuits. So a franchisee might be found to be responsible for sexual harassment, but corporate so far that I’ve see has not. Which limits however much money you probably can get, but it also limits the reach of change. Even if a franchisee that owns, let’s say, half a dozen locations in Michigan has to change its practices, that’s not gonna help anyone else across the country, right, so there is recourse. It’s not that workers have nowhere to go, but it’s limited and it’s challenging to do it on your own.
Alvarez: You’ve reported a lot on kind of like protests by workers against McDonald’s. What do those look like and I guess like what would have been the outcomes?
Covert: Yeah, I mean, in terms of what they look like on the ground, I’ve been to a couple and they’re loud and they are fun. And, you know, the Fight for 15 has led a lot of these and they will go to the McDonald’s or if it’s another fast food chain, they’ll show up and they’ll bring a bunch of signs and they all be wearing the same color and they have a bull horn. And, the ones I’ve to,it’s usually in some kind of strip mall. So they’re like yelling at the cars, going by on the highway and the cars are honking. And, I think it’s… It’s a show of force and it’s trying to make it something, I don’t know if I wanna say fun, but, you know, upbeat.
In terms of the response, I mean, it’s hard to say. I do think that the workers have put the issue of sexual harassment on the radar of this company. I mean they did this “global brand standards” thing and I don’t know that they would have done that. if it weren’t for workers speaking out. I do think it took that and the CEO scandal to sort of come together and create some change, but I think if they hadn’t already been taking action and speaking out, I don’t know that they would have got that kind of change. We’ve also seen, you know, the Fight for 15 has been demanding a higher wage and wages have risen. I mean, states have passed, a lot of states have passed $15 minimum wages, and McDonald’s has to comply with them. And I think McDonald’s has actually been increasing its base pay over the years. So I definitely think there’s some successes that they can point to. But, you know, widespread corporate change in how workers are treated at McDonald’s, I’m not sure I can say that that’s happened yet.
Alvarez: My last question is, do you have any advice for journalists reporting on large corporations from like a labor perspective?
Covert: I mean, my tactic is usually to sort of go down to the worker level and start there. I mean workers can tell you what’s happening at their workplace, they can tell what it’s like to work somewhere and you’ll get a more realistic view of what things are like inside of a McDonald’s restaurant or a Walmart shop floor than whatever corporate’s gonna tell you. I do often find lawsuits and lawyers to be a really helpful avenue. I think labor lawyers in particular are pretty good at understanding what they’re seeing and how that might fit into a broader narrative beyond their one particular case. They are also typically taking on cases where they’re trying to fight for workers’ rights. So, you know, They have sort of that perspective. And again, those workers are. more primed to be willing to talk about their experiences because, again, they’ve already shared it with somebody. And also, a lot of the time, the lawyer will be on the call with me. Sometimes that’s just because if a case is ongoing, they need to make sure their client doesn’t say anything that they’re not supposed to. But I think it also helps to have them feel like they’ve got an ally on the phone. And most lawyers stay silent the whole time, but I think, it’s still that sense of security when you’re talking about something as… traumatic and sexual harassment. It can really help.
But also organizers, I mean the Fight for 15 has been pretty interested typically in working with journalists and telling stories and you know I think they do a pretty good job of pushing workers to the front and not just connecting you with a union organizer but really connecting you with the workers themselves. So you know wherever workers are coming together and speaking out again they’re already ready to tell their story so it’s a place where you can kind of get in and listen to what they’ve got to say.