McDonald's Employees Protest at Company's Annual Meeting Demanding Higher Wages

Thousands of McDonald's employees demanding higher wages have descended on the city of Oak Brook, IL for the company's annual shareholder meeting, just as the city of Los Angeles became the largest municipality in the country to say that it would increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Reuters reports that the protests are intended to pressure McDonald's into taking action similar to that taken by Wal-Mart, which has changed it minimum base pay to $9 at all its locations. That figure will rise to $10 by Feb. 2016. The McDonald's protesters are demanding that the minimum wage increase to $15 an hour.

McDonald's also recently announced a change to its minimum wage policy saying that employees would make at least $1 above the local minimum wage. That new policy came with one major catch, however. It only affected stores owned by McDonald's itself, while the vast majority of McDonald's restaurants are actually franchises with independent ownership, if not standards and policies.

The policy McDonald's announced that affects stores owned by the corporation itself includes 90,000 workers. McDonald's employees who work at franchises, which are not affected by the new policy, number around 660,000. It is this large discrepancy in people benefitting from the new wage policy that has brought so many McDonald's workers to the annual meeting to protest.

One protester interviewed by Reuters says he has worked at McDonald's since 1992 and only makes $8.55 an hour.

The protesters got an unexpected boost from the Los Angeles City Council, which voted 14-1 to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, according to The New York Times.

Although Los Angeles is the largest city to raise its minimum wage, a number of states have recently passed ballot initiatives that also saw their minimum wages increase. Those states include places like Alaska and South Dakota, which are not typically associated with labor friendly policies.