McDonald’s employees forced to work 25-hour shifts say they were kept in boss’ basement

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/21/mcdonalds-employees-forced-to-work-25-hour-shifts-say-they-were-kept-in-boss-basement/



McDonald’s employees forced to work 25-hour shifts say they were kept in boss’ basement
By John Byrne
Friday, February 21, 2014 11:27 EST

A McDonald’s franchisee will pay $205,971 in damages and back pay to 291 workers who were subjected to threats of deportation after they complained about 25-hour shifts.

The employees, who were working at McDonalds under a cultural exchange program, said they were forced to work shifts that ran longer than a day and pay for housing in the basement of the franchisee, where their rent was nearly in line with what they were paid. They had come to the United States under the State Department’s Summer Work travel program; some had paid $3,000 on the promise of full-time work but were given only a handful of hours a week.

“Nothing that they told me is true, because everything (was) a lie,” onetime employee Luis Fernando Suarez told Salon’s Josh Eidelson last year. He said the program had “like an ugly face of the United States … I didn’t feel safe.”

Most of the students came to the U.S. from Latin America and Asia under the Summer Work program, ”to experience and to be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States.”