McDonald’s supports a wage hike. Maybe.

McDonald’s supports a minimum wage hike — at least according to a headline on Huffington Post:

McDonald’s CEO: ‘We Will Support’ A Minimum Wage Hike

Here is the a piece of the story:

McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson recently suggested his company would support a bill, proposed by President Barack Obama, raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. Such a wage hike likely wouldn’t satisfy his workers, some of whom recently stormed the company’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters demanding $15 an hour. But it would be a noticeable shift in attitude for the world’s biggest restaurant chain, which has so far been neutral as the debate about higher wages has roiled around it.

“You know, our franchisees look at me when I say this and they start to worry: ‘Don, don’t you say it. Don’t you say we support $10.10,'” Thompson said during a little-noticed talk at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management last month, according to a Chicago Tribune report. “I will tell you we will support legislation that moves forward.”

So, McDonald’s has come around — or maybe not quite. The HuffPo story is loaded with what I’ll call “qualifying language” — the writer says Thompson “suggested his company would support a bill” and alludes to a potential disagreement with franchisees who are the ones who will have to pay the wage. This qualifying language is important, as the Tribune report makes clear. The Tribune — in the form of a business column by Phil Rosenthal — writes that Thompson, “in a less combative forum” at the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told students that McDonald’s “could handle a theoretical bump in the minimum wage to, say, $10.10 an hour, the figure supported by President Barack Obama and others.”

“McDonald’s will be fine,” Thompson said in the May 12 discussion. “We’ll manage through whatever the additional cost implications are.”

Rosenthal goes on to explain what the Huffington Post only alludes to — that Thompson was not offering corporate policy, that corporate policy may not matter and that all Thompson was actually saying was that he thought a wage hike was inevitable:

“I want to make it clear I’m not here to give any corporate answers,” Thompson said at Kellogg, which streamed his talk online. “You all get a chance to talk to Don, not the CEO. … I understand that CEO is attached to my name. But when I give an answer, it’s the truth.”

Those truths, as he laid them out, were: Minimum wages will go up over time. McDonald’s, which he said doesn’t consider itself a minimum-wage employer, will pay whatever the law and market forces require it to pay. Some decisions on matters such as pay are made not at the corporate level, but by the company’s franchisees, generally small-business owners, that he said control roughly 90 percent of the company’s U.S. restaurants.

So, is McDonald’s supporting a minimum wage hike? Read to the end of the HuffPo story and you find this late addition — a McDonald’s spokesperson walking back the CEO’s comments:

What Don Thompson said at Kellogg reflects our existing position on this important and evolving issue: an increase in the minimum wage would primarily affect McDonald’s independent franchisees, who would have to factor into their business models the additional expenses and the potential impact on prices and hiring decisions. As such, McDonald’s, and our independent franchisees, believe that any increase should be implemented over time so that the impact on small and medium business owners is manageable. Additionally, we believe that any increase needs to be considered in a broad context, one that considers, for example, the impact of the Affordable Care Act and its definition of “full time” employment, as well as the treatment, from a tax perspective, of investments made by businesses owners.”

I guess you have your answer. Or not.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Quote of the day: On the economic recovery

Courtesy of today’s column by David Cay Johnston, a reminder that the economic recovery that has been trumpeted by the president may not be the kind of economic recovery we need:

News reports tend to focus on the short term — on yesterday, on last year compared with the year before. But look back farther in time and an overwhelming case can be made that the vast majority of Americans are worse off. Indeed, coming out of the Great Depression eight decades ago, the vast majority fared vastly better than most people have coming out of the Great Recession, which officially ended on June 30 six years ago.

It may be jarring to hear that the vast majority of Americans, the 90 percent, enjoyed bigger income gains in the 1930s than in recent years, but that is what the data show.

The data also indicate tandem increases in both want and wealth, with the vast majority worse off in 2013 than in 2009, while those at the apex of the economy are enjoying a much larger — and growing — share of national income.

Johnston goes on to point out that economic indicators like workforce participation and hourly wage-growth do not indicate improvement in the economy — if we are looking at the way the economy affects the bulk of Americans and not just those at the top and we are willing to look beyond the immediate year-over-year and month-over-month numbers on which the mainstream press tends to focus.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.