Insight Junction

By Kieran Kearey 25/08/25 9 min read

Welcome to business breakdown episode one. This series is a longer version of my Instagram series “Business Breakdown In 60 Seconds”, where I provide information about a business, such as who their current CEO is, who founded the company, controversial news or general facts about the business, etc. But here on the blog, I will dive just a little bit deeper into each business.

As the title says, episode one is about McDonalds.

*This information is purely an objective view based on information taken from internet research*

Table Of Contents –

*Click on each heading to go to that section*

• What is McDonald’s?
• Ray Kroc and the controversy that follows
• McDonald’s controversy continues
• Slavery at McDonald’s
• Sexual Harassment and other abuse at McDonald’s
• Israel-Hamas war McDonald’s controversy
• Sources

What is McDonald’s?

McDonalds is a popular fast-food chain originating in California and it founded by the McDonald’s brothers, Richard and Maurice McDonald, in 1940.

In the United Kingdom, there are about 1400 McDonald’s chains and around 44,000 worldwide at the time of this post. According to Investing.com and Tasting Table, McDonald’s reported that it sold roughly 6.48 million burgers in a day, which equates to roughly 75 burgers a second, in 2021. Something to consider though, is that this information is very outdated, so the burgers per second would likely have changed.

There is, however, a website (EverySecond.io) that suggests McDonald’s currently sells roughly 91 hamburgers a second (I have no proof that this website is even remotely true, but It’s interesting if it is). Based on this information, McDonald’s would be selling 5460 hamburgers a minute, 327600 hamburgers an hour, and 7862400 hamburgers a day, which is substantially more than the 2021 information.

Source – https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/mcdonalds-facts-and-statistics/#products-and-services
Source – https://www.tastingtable.com/1824809/how-many-burgers-does-mcdonalds-sell-a-day/
Source – https://everysecond.io/mcdonalds

Ray Kroc and the controversy that follows –

Although Richard and Maurice McDonald were the founders of McDonald’s and had the original ideas for the business, Ray Kroc has been named as the founder on both Google search (when you type in “Who is the founder of McDonald’s?”) and on the McDonald’s website. On the McDonald’s website, information about the McDonalds’s bothers is almost entirely cut out and seemingly puts Ray Kroc in the spotlight, implying that he was the founder of the original McDonald’s.

It’s known that in 1961, Ray Kroc purchased the rights to McDonald’s from the McDonald’s brothers for $2.7 million, but there was a supposed handshake deal that stated the McDonald’s brothers would receive a 1% royalty from the company’s’ revenue. However, because this was a handshake deal, there was no legal leg to stand on to prove that this interaction/promise/deal ever happened, resulting in Kroc denying he ever made such a promise, which meant the brothers never received any royalties.

Source – https://mcdonalds.gr/en/our-history/

McDonald’s controversy continues –

Slavery at McDonald’s –

McDonald’s failed to spot slavery in their Caxton branch in Cambridgeshire, where nine victims were forced by a gang to work at the branch. All nine victims, were vulnerable people, most of whom had experienced homelessness or some kind of addiction. It’s said that McDonald’s missed the warning signs of this slavery for at least four years.

The red flags and warning signs that McDonald’s missed are the following:

• Victims’ wages were paid into other people’s bank accounts, with at least four of the victim’s wages being paid into one bank account
  
• The victims worked extremely high hours, 70-100 a week, with one victim reportedly working a 30-hour shift
  
• Multiple victims had the same address
  
• The victims were unable to speak English and the gang supposedly filled out their job applications for them and were able to sit in on the job interviews to act as a translator

The BBC reported that these victims were living on just a few pounds a day as most of their wages had been taken by the gang to fund their rich lifestyles, buying fancy cars, expensive jewellery and a three story house in the Czech Republic, while the victims were forced to live in poor conditions such as a leaking shed and an unheated caravan.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2kdg84zj4wo
Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2kdg84zj4wo

Sexual Harassment and other abuse at McDonald’s –

In 2023, it came out that McDonald’s was a hotspot for sexual assault, harassment, racism and bullying for employees, some as young as 16 (that has been reported). A BBC article spoke about how these employees were being harassed and groped “almost routinely”.

Included in this article are a number of claims from employees who had experienced issues at work:

“A 17-year-old current employee in Cheshire who says a colleague 20 years older than her called her a racial slur word and asked to show her his penis, and said he wanted to make a “black and white” baby with her”

“A former worker who was 17 when a senior manager at a Plymouth restaurant choked her and grabbed her bottom. A shift manager also sent her sexually explicit images”

“A manager in Hampshire who suggested a 16-year-old male worker perform sexual acts in exchange for vapes”

“A manager who preyed on 16-year-old new female starters in a Cheshire restaurant, trying to pressurise them into having sex”

“A woman who said she was called a slur word and subject to racist jokes at an Aberdeen branch”

“A current worker in Essex who says she faced antisemitic abuse”

“A current worker in Oxfordshire, originally from India, who says crew members spoke in “gibberish” to imitate her and called a Pakistani colleague a terrorist”

“Male managers and crew members at a branch in Wales making jokes about putting cash bets on which of them could sleep with a new recruit first”

“An outbreak of gonorrhoea at a branch in Northern Ireland where sexual relationships between staff members were commonplace”

And these are just some of the many claims that have materialised at McDonald’s. In addition to this, the BBC article said that young women were scared of going to work as they were seen as “fresh meat” by other colleagues. Despite many of these claims being made as formal complaints to McDonald’s, managers had turned a blind eye and in some cases told the employees to ignore the behaviour and get back to work.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65388445

Moving on from this article, the BBC released another article on the 7th of January 2025 that details more cases sexual harassment brought up by employees of McDonald’s. Like the last article, cases in this one were from staff as young as 16 years old.

The first case is from a 19 year old member of staff reporting that multiple of his colleagues were afraid of coming into work because his manager would “touch up” them.

A second claim in this article is from 2023, where a woman spoke up after having been touched inappropriately by her managers and was sexually harassed by customers. Unfortunately, speaking up about this resulted in her being told to “suck it up”.

Another claim was from a 16 year old boy who said he was shouted at and sworn at by managers.

Another claim on this article was a 20 year old female worker who said that a male manager had sent her topless pictures.

The claims spoken about on this post are a small amount of the significantly large total of claims. When the BBC article was released, there were around 700 current and former junior employees taking legal action against McDonalds, I suspect the number is far larger now. In Addition to this, there’s likely hundreds or thousands of employees who never spoke up about them facing abuse at the company in fear of something happening to them, which shows just how big this issue really is.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c75ngl49695o



It doesn’t stop there. On the 14th of March 2025, the BBC wrote yet another article about sexual abuse and harassment continuing at McDonalds, despite McDonald’s saying they were committed to combatting the issue and ensuring their employees are safe.

In addition to this, McDonalds’ human rights policy (dated 2024) states the following “I am confident that we will continue to do business in a way that makes us all proud to be part of McDonald’s.”, “McDonald’s is committed to respecting human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to developing and implementing its human rights approach in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs)” and “Identified human rights focus areas include: child labor; data privacy; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); education and employment creation; effective remedy; forced labor; freedom to associate (or not associate) and collectively bargain; land rights; discrimination and harassment; nutrition; Occupational Health and Safety (OHS); working conditions (contracts, hours, overtime, wages); and workplace security.”

Immediately, we can see that these promises and commitments have been broken or haven’t been followed or upheld in the first place, not only with these sexual harassment cases, but with the slave labour case that I covered previously in this post. These issues have also been going on for at least two years, likely many more, and yet McDonald’s has been and is sat here saying they’re committed to stopping these issues.

Source – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c337m3v3mgzo
Source – https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/corp/nfl/pdf/McDonalds_Human_Rights_Policy-2024.pdf

Israel-Hamas war McDonald’s controversy –

In 2023, an Israel-based franchise announced that they’d be giving free food for members of the Israeli military, resulting in consumer backlash because of accusations that the Israeli military committed war crimes, and this gesture suggested that this McDonald’s branch supported the Israeli military.

A post from Amnesty International suggested that this military had wiped out entire families in Gaza. Additionally, the post goes on to say that “Israeli attacks violated humanitarian law, including by failing to take feasible precautions to spare civilians, or by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, or by carrying out attacks that may have been directed against civilian objects.”

Sources

Source – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/05/mcdonalds-israel-franchise-boycott
Source – https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/
Source – https://abcnews.go.com/Business/companies-starbucks-mcdonalds-face-controversy-amid-israel-hamas/story?id=104219615