After Public Outcry, McDonald’s Takes Down Shameful Employee Website in Attempt at Damage Control

After Public Outcry, McDonald’s Takes Down Shameful Employee Website in Attempt at Damage Control

by Nick Goroff

It was a short and highly celebrated life for the McDonald's employee website "The McResource Line," but now to the dismay of comedians and social commentators throughout the web, McDonald's has announced that they will be scrapping the employee help line after considerable criticism was leveled at it for it's often laughably out of touch content.

Earlier in the year, McDonald's caught the attention of activists and critics throughout the country when a number of their suggestions for employee home budgeting were made public. Among the McNuggets of tragic comedy gold that were found in the midst of McDonald's poverty wage confessional, the company gave advice to their employees such as:

• Breaking food into smaller pieces to help stretch it out.
• Maintain a positive attitude (stop bitching) about work
• Sell some of your Christmas gifts on e-bay to help make ends meet
• Try to take two vacations a year, but remember step two and don't complain about not being able to afford to take them...

As if these sometimes insulting and generally absurd suggestions weren't enough, the teams at McDonald's human resource and web management departments, doubled down on their efforts to help guide their employees through the impossible waters of full time poverty level employment by offering their own employee budget guide, which all but outright declared that living on the McPoverty-wage alone was all but impossible.

As the debate over raising the minimum wage and the general treatment and poverty endured by fast food employees continues heating up, McDonald's move to take down the farcical employee website is being seen more as a public relations disaster response effort than any actual admission of bad labor practices on the company's part. Still fighting tooth and nail to maintain the poverty level wages that help them maximize their profits, the fast food giant took a defensive line regarding their latest decision, claiming the website's removal was due inappropriate commentary, stating on their main website,

Between links to irrelevant or outdated information, along with outside groups taking elements out of context, this created unwarranted scrutiny and inappropriate commentary. None of this helps our McDonald's team members.

And so true this is, since neither the website, nor the company itself, seems to have much in the way of help to offer their struggling and often desperate workers in the age of the American wage slave.

Nick Goroff