McDonald's in Oregon puts up a huge banner asking '14 and 15-year-olds' to apply
"Now Hiring 14 and 15-year-olds."
The call to action isn't shy. A McDonald's in Oregon is pushing towards a new business model: Hiring 14-year-old and 15-year-olds to help offset a shortage of workers in the COVID era.
The fast food industry has long relied on teen workers – mainly 16-and up – but this store in Medford, Oregon, put out a large banner to advertise directly towards potential teen workers even younger. The banner is still out front of the store, store manager Ashley Fincher confirmed to USA TODAY on Wednesday morning.
Restaurant operater (owner, basically) Heather Coleman told Business Insider that staffing has never been this bad in her family's four decades of operating McDonald's franchises. But once management opened the floodgates to the younger teens, Coleman said she received 25 applications in two weeks.
"There are always staffing issues, but this is unheard of," she said. "(14-year-old and 15-year-old workers) have been a blessing in disguise. They have the drive and work ethic. They get the technology. They catch on really quickly."
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Coleman said she's tried everything, as fast food businesses around the country have been forced to close their lobbies and dining rooms to operate solely off their drive-thrus due to shortage of staff.
The Oregon McDonald's move seems to signal a growing trend around the country.
Earlier this year, an Ohio Burger King showcased a sign in its restaurant that went viral and is strikingly similar to the Oregon McDonald's banner. It read: "Do you have a 14- or 15-year-old? Do they need a job?? We will hire them!"
Child labor laws are different in every state, but the U.S. Department of Labor is firm with 14 being the minimum for nonagricultural jobs. Young teen workers' hours are monitored and are specified by law, varying by state. Minors are entitled to minimum wage payment.
The turning to young teen workers could be more of a bridge to survive an economic crisis, as many workers are staying at home to collect unemployment and meet childcare demands versus working a minimum wage job. Pandemic-related federal unemployment benefits (an extra $300 per week to those unemployed) expire in September.
It's not a labor shortage — it's a wage and workers rights shortage
As we approach Labor Day, America’s working people are deep into a protracted general strike. Millions are refusing to go back into low-wage, no-benefits jobs that require they abandon dignity and rights at the workplace door. Their struggle has brewed for 40 years as wages stagnated, benefits vanished and public policy offered working families little reprieve. Employers complain that too few people are returning to work, but America’s “labor shortage” is really a shortage of good wages and workers rights on the job.
Recent jobs reports show an uptick in the numbers of workers returning to work, but payroll tallies are still more than 5 million shy of pre-pandemic levels. Restaurants, retailers and hospitality firms say it is especially difficult to hire, and some blame generous unemployment checks. However, even those states that have rescinded supplemental unemployment benefits are finding that many people remain hesitant to take the sorts of jobs that are on offer.
The pandemic shook up what workers want and expect from a job. America cheered front-line workers during the early days of the pandemic, banging pots and pans for health care workers, honking for delivery drivers, and thanking cashiers. But these workers’ wages remain too low to cover rising housing, education and health care costs. You’d need an average of $25 an hour to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and minimum wage workers can’t afford rent anywhere in the nation. An extra dollar or two more just isn’t cutting it for most people, especially when they’re putting their health on the line.
Meanwhile, women are still shouldering the bulk of unpaid child and elder care, a balancing act that the pandemic has made nearly impossible. Nearly 2 million women dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic, and many did so in order to take care of their kids or sick parents. It’s no coincidence that the sectors having the most difficult time staffing up — food service and retail — are majority female occupations. Women are looking at their paltry options and voting with their feet by staying home.
This isn’t the first time Americans withheld their labor to turn big societal changes in their favor. W.E.B. Du Bois posited in his masterful "Black Reconstruction in America" that enslaved people engaged in a general strike when they ran away from plantations, took up arms and sabotaged cotton production, forcing President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to end slavery. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Depression-era revision to labor law gave employers the upper hand, general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and the textile industry helped convince him to pass the National Labor Relations Act.
The U.S. is at another such historical crossroads due to the pandemic, and working people are weighing in by staying home. In the 1970s, employers started creating the kinds of bad jobs that are now the norm; they started hiring part-time, contract labor, lowering wages and benefits, and attacking workers unions with new vehemence. Meanwhile, U.S. policy didn’t keep up. It abandoned working people to the whims of corporations and the market. America’s working women and men are now looking at these bad jobs and the lack of governmental oversight and support, weighing the risks and personal costs, and deciding that they just aren’t doing it anymore.
Working people’s reluctance to rush back into poorly paid and precarious jobs could help bolster Democrats’ chances of passing the $3.5 trillion budget resolution agreement, which marks a long-overdue expansion of the federal social safety net. This legislation could help get people back to work and keep them there because it gives workers many of the supports they need to navigate today’s economy. It would expand child care, create universal pre-K, boost affordable housing, offer free community college, enact paid family and medical leave, support long-term home care, and expand Medicare. Alongside higher wages, these wraparound supports would mean that people who wait tables, deliver packages and ring up customers can finally pay rent, afford health and child care, and even send kids to college.
This Labor Day, working women and men are deeply fed up and ready for the kind of economic game changer that will improve their lives for decades to come. Until they see more rights and support, they might just choose to stay home.
Moving Toward a New Era of Labor Rights in Trade Policy?
A novel trade enforcement tool creates an expedited process to protect labor rights.
Labor rights have not often been at the forefront of America’s international trade policy. In recent years, bipartisan policymakers have criticized past trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for harming U.S. workers, leading to job losses, and undermining the middle class. A particular cause for concern has been the difficulty in enforcing provisions designed to guarantee workers’ rights abroad. Without adequate protections, businesses that violate workers’ rights can gain a trade advantage.
When the United States was negotiating the terms of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the new trade pact replacing NAFTA, congressional Democrats and major U.S. labor organizations successfully pushed for the bipartisan agreement to include a novel trade enforcement tool to combat violations of labor rights—the facility-specific rapid response labor mechanism (RRLM). The RRLM provides an expedited dispute resolution mechanism between the United States and Mexico to address labor rights violations at specific production facilities, which can ultimately result in trade penalties being imposed on the goods produced at the violating facility.
The RRLM is now being put to use. On July 8, 2021, the United States and Mexico announced a first-of-its-kind agreement under this new enforcement mechanism to address a denial of workers’ rights at a General Motors (GM) plant in Silao, Mexico. Although it is too early to say how effective this tool will prove in the long run, its development and initial use is a welcome sign that effective protection of workers’ rights is becoming a larger priority in trade policy.
The GM case stemmed from a union election in April 2021 at the company’s plant in Silao that was reportedly prematurely ended “after Mexican officials detected ‘serious irregularities’ including destroyed ballots.”
A few weeks later, the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Ambassador Katherine Tai, asked Mexico to review whether workers at the plant were “being denied the right of free association and collective bargaining,” invoking for the first time the facility-specific RRLM under the USMCA.
The first step in the RRLM process is for the complainant to request a review of the situation and, if applicable, for the respondent to try to agree with the complainant on a course of remediation. Accordingly, after the United States requested a review from Mexico, the Mexican authorities conducted the review and began discussions with U.S. authorities to create a remediation plan. Ambassador Tai commended Mexican officials “for taking swift action when they recognized that workers’ rights were denied.”
The remediation agreement announced on July 8 called for a new union vote to be held at the GM facility by August 20 and provided for Mexican federal inspectors and international observers to be present at the facility ahead of the vote. The new vote went forward as planned, with workers choosing to reject their existing collective bargaining agreement.
In a press release following the vote, Ambassador Tai declared that “The vote results announced today are another important demonstration of the role of the USMCA’s rapid response mechanism in getting prompt and meaningful results for workers.” Tai also congratulated the Mexican government for overseeing the vote and thanked international and local organizations for their assistance as observers.
In this case, the United States and Mexico appear to have readily reached an agreement on an appropriate course of remediation. In the event of disagreements as to whether a denial of workers’ rights has occurred or how to remediate, the RRLM provides for the establishment of a dispute resolution panel—the rapid response labor panel.
The RRLM applies more broadly to Mexican production facilities than it does to facilities in the United States because the RRLM in the USMCA does not apply to U.S. facilities unless they are “under an enforced order of the National Labor Relations Board,” the independent U.S. agency charged with ensuring fair labor practices.
The debut of the RRLM illustrates its appeal, especially in terms of its speed. The tool has so far shown that it can indeed deliver a “rapid” response to a denial of rights. Of course, this is only a single case, and, even in this case, additional steps still remain ahead for the plant’s workers as they seek an improved agreement.
Given what appears to be a positive result so far, however, additional RRLM cases are likely. A second RRLM case also signals the tool’s potential. Days before USTR filed its RRLM request with Mexico in the GM case, several labor organizations filed a petition with the U.S. government seeking to invoke the RRLM in a separate case against a Mexican auto parts factory. In response to that petition, on June 9, USTR submitted a request to Mexico to review that case under the RRLM.
On August 10, roughly two months after that request, USTR announced a settlement with the auto parts company entailing labor rights commitments and the payment of severance and backpay to certain affected workers. USTR described the agreement as “the second time USTR successfully used the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement’s (USMCA) Rapid Response Labor Mechanism … to benefit workers,” and the first in response to an RRLM petition.
Future cases and developments remain very important for evaluating the RRLM. For example, because these first two cases were readily resolved by agreement, the full dispute resolution provisions of the RRLM have not yet been tested.
A potential ramification of the use of the RRLM is that the U.S. Congress may adopt the tool in future trade deals. When Congress incorporated the provision into the USCMA, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)—a principal proponent of the provision, along with Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—called for its inclusion in “every trade agreement going forward.”
If the RRLM catches on as an effective trade dispute resolution tool for labor issues, it is also possible that it could spread beyond the confines of labor rights to other areas, such as the environmental protection provisions of trade agreements. As with factories that violate labor laws, those businesses that break environmental laws could also theoretically be targeted with facility-specific trade penalties in situations where there is a failure to remediate violations.
The RRLM is only one aspect of the USMCA’s labor provisions, and it remains to be seen whether the USMCA will, on balance, benefit workers. The early use of the RRLM, however, shows promise.
