Taiwan reopens McDonald's harassment case after prior dismissals, fine follows

Taiwan’s prosecutors reopened a McDonald’s harassment case after it had been dropped twice, putting fresh scrutiny on how one of the world’s biggest restaurant chains handled a complaint that was first reported inside the company in March 2024.

The case centers on Lee, a former McDonald’s supervisor accused of sexually assaulting and harassing a teenage worker in employee changing rooms, a storage room, a stairwell and later at her apartment. The victim’s mother said the family filed both a police report and a sexual harassment complaint with McDonald’s in March 2024. The worker later became too afraid to keep going to work, and the case has since been linked to wider questions about how workplace abuse is handled when the first response does not stop it.

McDonald’s said it received the harassment complaint in March 2024, investigated it, found evidence of harassment and dismissed the supervisor. But Taipei labor authorities later fined McDonald’s NT$1 million in December 2024, saying the company breached gender-equality rules and failed to take effective corrective and remedial measures. The penalty turned the case from an internal personnel matter into a public test of whether the company’s safeguards worked when a complaint landed on management’s desk.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Labor says employers must take immediate and effective corrective and remedial action when they learn of workplace sexual harassment. Employers with more than 30 workers must also have prevention, complaint and punishment measures in place and make them accessible to employees. In a chain as large as McDonald’s, that matters not just for corporate offices but for the restaurant floor, where crew members often work late shifts, move between isolated back rooms and depend on managers to escalate complaints quickly.

McDonald’s Taiwan issued a public apology on Dec. 27, 2024, saying it had not prevented the incident and had not handled it promptly enough. It said it would add an internal workplace safety committee, an outside structure involving experts, lawyers and employee representatives, an anti-violence complaint hotline, mental-health counseling and legal consultation services.

The reopening now raises the same question workers face in any McDonald’s restaurant: whether reporting misconduct leads to action, or whether it gets trapped in a slow, defensive process until the damage is already done. For crew members, the case is a reminder that safety includes more than knives, fights or parking lots. It also depends on whether a company treats harassment reports as urgent, documents them properly and acts before an employee feels forced out.