McDonald’s UK: Will the company engage to end gender-based violence in its restaurants

The IUF welcomes the recent decision of the UK Department for Business and Trade to offer mediation in a complaint about McDonald's UK's failure to act to prevent sexual harassment at its restaurants.

The complaint was made last year by a coalition made up of the IUF, EFFAT/IUF-Europe, affiliated trade unions BFAWU and SEIU, the UK Trades Union Congress and the Corporate Justice Coalition, a UK-based NGO. It alleges that serious and continuing violations of global labour standards on gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) continue to take place at McDonald's UK, meaning the company is in breach of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct.

These Guidelines aim to promote ethical behaviour by multinational corporations -including prevention of gender-based violence and harassment - and engagement with workers, trade unions, and civil society to put an end to such conduct. In the UK, the Department for Business and Trade is the national contact point (NCP) for the Guidelines and has responsibility for receiving and accessing complaints.

The complaint draws on widespread media exposés of repeated episodes of gender-based harassment against McDonald's workers, most of them teenagers, and failure by management to engage with workers, unions, and civil society to halt such conduct.

The IUF and allies have accepted the offer of mediation but must now wait for McDonald's response. BFAWU President Ian Hodson said, "We hope that McDonald's UK management will join us in this NCP-sponsored mediation to jointly develop a programme to address GBVH abuses through deep and sustained engagement with McDonald's workers and their unions."

Luise Schroter, Senior Policy Officer at the Corporate Justice Coalition said, "The systemic gender-based violence and harassment at McDonald's must end. Workers and their unions are key to ending these systemic abuses and must not be sidelined. While we welcome this invitation to mediation, it is not binding on McDonald's and cannot replace binding legislation."

McDonald's UK has over 1,000 restaurants in the UK and employs more than 175,000 workers. It is the UK division of McDonald's Corp., which has over 40,000 stores in 120 countries employing 2 million workers, with annual revenues surpassing £18 billion.

Read the coalition's press release here and the Department for Trade and Business' Initial Assessment here.