Day 175 - 18 Oct 95 - Page 27
1
2 Q. You talked in your next paragraph about crew members
3 encouraged to be management sneaks, and any information
4 that managers might find useful was rewarded in favour of
5 promotion and pay rises. Have you anything to say further
6 on that?
7 A. Well, there was a very intimidating atmosphere in the
8 workplace. People did not really feel comfortable airing
9 grievances and saying what they liked and they felt they
10 were being watched by members of staff who quite openly
11 would go to managers and report things that they had heard,
12 and it seemed quite obvious that certain people were in a,
13 sort of, favoured staff category, and one person who was
14 considered by the staff to be not up to the job was
15 promoted quite quickly, became a lobby hostess, because of
16 her friendship with the Manager and for, presumably,
17 passing on information about what the staff were talking
18 about. This was something that was seen quite clearly as
19 happening in the staff -- by the rest of the staff.
20
21 Q. You have talked about racism at the store where some crew,
22 well, basically Asian, black and oriental crew -- sorry,
23 Asian male staff were specified, got jobs of cleaning the
24 toilets or put on environment/index.html">litter patrol. Do you say that that
25 racism had any effect on you, yourself?
26 A. Well, I witnessed situations that made me feel
27 uncomfortable, but I witnessed some staff complaining that
28 they were always given certain tasks and that they felt it
29 was because they were black or Asian, and I agreed with
30 them. I thought it was because I could not see any other
31 reason why they were always given those jobs.
32
33 Q. What about you, as a white person?
34 A. Well, I very rarely did them. I very rarely -- until
35 the activities where we were discussing trying to unionise
36 came into force, I very rarely did a environment/index.html">litter patrol, but
37 once we started about unionising I was suddenly doing a lot
38 of environment/index.html">litter patrols because I saw it as a way of keeping me
39 out of communication with the rest of the staff. Before
40 that time it was a job that was mostly done by the black
41 and Asian males, and there was quite a lot of arguments
42 about it. I can remember lots of incidents where some of
43 the Asian males complained that they were given the worst
44 jobs, and they had quite big flare ups over it.
45
46 Q. You talked about staff being abused by customers and that
47 managers would often allow that, rather than lose a
48 customer. How do you know that?
49 A. Because I was actually in that situation. I mean, when
50 the pub closed every night, we would get the drunken yobs
51 and anyone else pouring out of the pubs and coming into
52 McDonald's just as we were getting ready to close, and they
53 used to come in, abuse us because of the uniform, just
54 because we were behind the counter; and I can remember very
55 well an incident where I was sworn at by a customer very
56 aggressively who lent over the counter at me and tried to
57 make contact with me, and I refused to serve him. The
58 Manager told me to just get on with it, and walked away
59 from the counter area, so he did not have to be part of
60 what was going on. That was the norm; people expected that
