McDonald’s confirms contracts trial

The fast food chain announced that it is trialling new methods to offer a range of flexible and fixed hours contracts.

A McDonald’s spokesperson said: “We pride ourselves on being a flexible employer and our contracts reflect this. In order to ensure we remain an attractive employer, enabling us to recruit and retain the best employees, we’ve continued to listen to our staff. Whilst more than 75% of our people tell us they’re happy with their existing contracts a small and growing number of people fed back that a fixed hours contract would be of use to them when applying for financial products, such as a mortgage for example. In January we launched a trial with 246 employees in three stores in the North West, offering the teams the chance to switch to a 4, 16 or 30 hour contract. Over 80% of the employees opted to stay on their existing flexible contract.

“We want to now review this in other parts of the UK and therefore will be increasing the trial to a further six restaurants to enable us to gauge how this works for our people and our business during busier times such as school holidays and on a bigger scale. We feel that the offer of a range of contracts, flexible and fixed hours, will be of greatest appeal to our workforce and pending the outcome of the trials would look to make this offer more widely available.”