A McDonald’s franchise in southern Virginia is facing a lawsuit from fired minority workers, claiming discrimination based on their race and ethnicity. The federal complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, detailed the struggle of the employees while under the employ of the Soweva listed franchise. Owner Michael Simon reportedly hired several new white employees, and pulled aside several black and Hispanic employees and told them they just “didn’t fit the profile” for the franchise he was looking to develop. That was just the tip of the iceberg, reports the former employees.
Many of the fired minority employees said while working for the McDonald’s location, managers would belittle them, by referring to them as “ghetto,” “dirty Mexican,” and whining there were “too many black people in the store.”
Simon, who is the owner of three McDonald’s locations and is black, said discrimination had nothing to do with the firings, and said he was not “at liberty to discuss issues regarding employment or termination.” The employees contested that claim strongly, following Simon’s takeover of the branches in 2013. Things turned from bad to worse when female minority employees reported a male supervisor made suggestive comments, including offering sex for a better working environment. One of the fired employees, a shift manager, told reporters she endured “constant abuse” at the hands of her superiors, and was left without a job to support her family for several months.
While Simon operates his McDonald’s franchise under his Soweva company name, his connection to the major fast food chain can bring McDonald’s corp. smack in the center of this lawsuit.
Currently, McDonald’s Corp. is fighting a National Labor Relations Board’s decision, after the agency classified McDonald’s and their franchisees as a joint employer relationship, due to the conditions and influences deemed by the corporate office. Reportedly, the fired employees tried reaching out to McDonald’s Corp. but were denied representation and told to take their complaints to the same franchisee who fired them.
Lawsuits aimed towards their franchisees can negatively impact McDonald’s core message of reaching out to minority neighborhoods, and perhaps impact future franchise opportunities.
The NAACP chapter is working with the employees to help them pursue the lawsuit, calling it a racism “reality they are confronting today.”