Add McDonalds to your BLAME LIST
Taxpayers are shelling out $1.2 billion a year to help pay workers at McDonald’s, according to an estimate from the National Employment Law Project published Tuesday. The organization used estimated figures from a study by University of California-Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on how many fast food workers rely on public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid for its analysis.
Overall, low wages at the top 10 largest fast food chains cost taxpayers about $3.8 billion per year, NELP found.
As Republicans in Congress fight to curb spending on entitlement programs like food stamps, the report offers an often overlooked solution: Companies could pay workers more to decrease their reliance on public assistance.
"A very easy policy fix here would to raise the minimum wage," said Sylvia Allegretto, the co-chair of Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics and one of the authors of the Berkeley/UI study. "The firms that pay a large share of their workers at or near the minimum wage -- these workers disproportionately have to rely on public subsidies."
The National Restaurant Association, a trade group representing more than 500,000 restaurants, took issue with the reports. It argued that the Berkeley and UI researchers' decision to consider the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax break given to working, low-income families, as a subsidy "inflates" the study's findings.
McDonald's wrote in a statement that the company and its franchisees provide hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the country that offer opportunities for advancement.
"As with most small businesses, wages are based on local wage laws and are competitive to similar jobs in that market," the statement reads.
