Filed One Week Before Shareholders Meeting
"McDonald's workers say restaurants are a magnet for crime"
Violent Incidents Soar in Multiple City's & No Media Coverage

In a report filed this week with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, employees at a McDonald's on the south side of Chicago said their workplace had been the scene of 31 violent incidents over six months during the past year. The mayhem included violent fights and customers attacking workers over missing french fries — three recent incidents involved customers assaulting or threatening workers with a firearm.

McDonald's isn't training workers and store managers on how to deal with violence at its restaurants, workers and labor advocates say.

Customers brandishing guns; bloody fistfights; physical attacks on employees — for workers at one Chicago McDonald's restaurant, life behind the counter can sometimes be downright life-threatening. Labor advocates also say such incidents occur with alarming regularity at other of the fast-foot chain's restaurants, including shootings, sexual assaults and robberies.

The Chicago workers, who worked with the union-based Fight for $15 campaign to file the OSHA complaint, said in their letter that employees placed dozens of 911 calls from the restaurant since November but that its manager urged them to tone down their distress out of concern the eatery might get shut down. Now they want OSHA to investigate McDonald's handling of what they contend is "systemic" violence at its U.S. locations.

1,356 calls to 911 from 1 Chicago McDonalds alone.

The complaint cited numbers from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a worker rights group that tallied 721 news accounts of violence at McDonald's stores over the last three years, with guns involved 72% of the time. Yet incidents covered by local media represent only a fraction of all the incidents at the hamburger chain's stores, the group said in its report.

The police department in St. Louis lists 67 violence incidents at McDonald's in the city during the last three years, only three of which were covered in local news reports, the NELP analysis found. In Chicago, more than 21 calls are made on an average day to emergency services from McDonald's stores in the city. One Chicago McDonald's was the source of 1,356 calls to 911 in the last three years, with the media covering just two of those incidents. NELP reported.

"Interviews with workers suggest that McDonald's is not sufficiently training staff or equipping its stores consistently with violence hazard controls, such as cash handling procedures, necessary visibility, panic buttons accessible to all staff, and safe drive-thru windows to prevent violence or at least minimize the number and severity of such incidents," NELP said in the report.

Asked about the complaint and NELP's findings, McDonald's said it would roll out national training safety initiatives at its corporate-owned U.S. stores this year. cbsnews.com