An eagle-eyed Twitter user recently posted a pic of an unspecified McDonald’s with a sign in the window offering a free iPhone to new employees after six months of work.
The sign was spotted by Twitter user @brogawd_, who shared the image to the tune of 212,000 likes and 34,000 retweets.
There seems to be a little pattern happening here. Another McDonald's in Tampa, Florida, was offering $50 to applicants who showed up for their interview, according to Newsweek.
The owner was quick to note though that the franchise has been more successful with signing bonuses or letting people apply via text than these sorts of one-time payoffs.
To many social media labor hawks, these quirky attempts feel like phony distractions from simply paying a living wage.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the COVID era, it’s that multinational corporations might slowly but surely be learning what the term “living wage” means.
McDonald’s itself has recently announced that over the next few months it will raise its employee wages by an average of 10% (anywhere from $11 to $20, depending on location and title).
Since the last year was spent praising face-front food workers as “essential,” the workers themselves are rightly taking that praise to heart.
Among a number of more examples of in-window signs, Newsweek noted a sign on a Chipotle exclaiming: "Attention Chipotle customers. Want to know why we're closed? Ask our corporate offices why their employees are forced to work in borderline sweatshop conditions for 8+ hours without breaks. We are overworked, understaffed, underpaid, and underappreciated.”
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