Day 172 - 12 Oct 95 - Page 48
1 building and in fact because of the positioning of the crew
2 room and the way that the air conditioning system flowed
3 around the building, it was impossible to believe that air
4 could be supplied to certain parts of the building to which
5 it was supplied without it being supplied to the crew
6 room. I had to wear a sweatshirt and overcoat just in
7 order to be able to sit in the crew room during the break.
8 There was nowhere else to go for the break.
9
10 11. I normally got one break of 45 minutes which I would
11 take at 10.00 a.m., after three hours of work. However, if
12 for some reason I missed the break at 10.00 a.m. I did not
13 get another chance to take a break until 2.00 p.m. at the
14 earliest. It might happen that I missed the 10.00 a.m.
15 break because the store was short-staffed and busy. If
16 conditions were hot, it was quite possible that people
17 would dehydrate. People were often told that they could
18 not stop to have a drink, and it was a fairly regular
19 occurrence that people would become dehydrated. I myself
20 once came very close to fainting, although I am not a
21 person given to fainting and I had never felt like that
22 before. It was entirely due to the fact that I was not
23 allowed to drink. Drink breaks were generally cancelled or
24 not allowed when the store was busy; for example, if a
25 person wanted to go at 1 o'clock and there was no backing,
26 there was no way he would be allowed to leave even for two
27 minutes. In my experience of the restaurant trade in
28 Ireland, chefs were always allowed to have drinks if
29 required, even at peak times. This is considered to be of
30 great importance in catering work since people who work
31 close to the stoves can very easily dehydrate. The
32 situation could certainly have been remedied if there had
33 been more staff at the store, although there is probably an
34 optimum number of staff who could work in that kitchen at
35 any one time. I was amazed by the general lack of space in
36 the McDonald's kitchen. It should have been much bigger.
37 I worked for five years in hotel maintenance, traveling
38 round various hotels and restaurants in Ireland, repairing
39 and maintaining kitchen equipment. I have therefore seen a
40 large number of kitchens in my time and I believe I am in a
41 very good position to judge how adequate a kitchen is. The
42 size of the McDonald's kitchen was totally inadequate. For
43 the quantity of staff and turnover, it was unbelievably
44 small.
45
46 12. The staff allocation functioned on the basis that each
47 station in the store - for example, kitchens, lobbies and
48 backroom - required a set number of employees in order to
49 be operative. It was therefore not difficult to see when
50 the store was understaffed at a given moment. They should
51 have had more staff instead of overworking people - for
52 example, although there were several grills in the kitchen
53 for the preparation of hamburgers, McDonald's never used
54 all these grills at any one time, even at the busiest
55 moments. They operated on the basis of keeping the bare
56 minimum going but requiring the employees to work extremely
57 fast. I could not say that there was certainly a serious
58 long term understaffing policy, but there was a slight
59 understaffing squeeze.
60
