The billion-dollar fast food chain McDonald’s announced that it will boost its United States wages to $17 an hour to recruit workers for positions at its company-owned locations across the country.

McDonald’s executives said this week they will increase hourly wages for current workers by an average of 10 percent at its 650 company-owned locations while increasing its wages for new recruits from $11 to $17 an hour. On average, employee wages would increase to $13 an hour and up to $15 an hour later in the year.

The wage increases, McDonald’s executives said, is an effort to bring 10,000 new employees on board over the next three months. By 2024, McDonald’s executives said they expect all company-owned locations to have average hourly wages set at $15 an hour.

The move comes as employers seek to get millions of Americans back in the workforce. Currently, about 16.4 million Americans are jobless but all want full-time jobs. Of the 9.8 million Americans considered unemployed, about 12.3 percent are teenagers — those most likely to compete for entry-level service industry jobs.

Another 5.2 million Americans are underemployed.

The nation’s real labor shortage has been spurred by ongoing increased unemployment benefits, not a shortage of available Americans who can fill jobs, according to Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney.

“It’s not that people do not want to work or do not understand that in the long-run they are better off employed than on the dole,” Carney writes. “It’s just that right now, the enhanced unemployment benefits pay so much that workers rationally choose to take the higher income for a few more months, quite reasonably expecting they will be able to find work when the enhancement expires.”

Americans, across all demographic groups, much prefer employers to recruit Americans with higher wages and better benefits than to import foreign workers. In the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, 64 percent of likely U.S. voters said it is better for businesses to recruit Americans for jobs than to import foreign workers to take jobs.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.