Day 303 - 19 Nov 96 - Page 43
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Anyway, I think the answer is you have done
3 that. Do you have another week?
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5 MS. STEEL: Yes.
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7 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Give me that quickly and I can compare what
8 you have done with what I did and with what Mr. Rampton is
9 going to give me in due course.
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11 MS. STEEL: This one is actually better because it is time for
12 which we have actually got what the minimum rates of pay
13 were. It is 18th October 1986 and he worked 94.02 hours in
14 that period, in that fortnight, and the minimum wage was
15 £1.99 an hour. So 78 hours at £1.99 would come out at
16 £155.22, plus 16.02 hours at £2.98 an hour would come out
17 at £47.74, and that comes to a total of £202.96. Mr.
18 Alimi's gross pay on his payslip was only £201.90, the
19 point being that these are, even by the argument that
20 McDonald's are advancing now, illegal. Obviously, it is
21 our position, and we would say it is quite clear from the
22 Wages Council Act that was enforced during 1986, that the
23 overtime should have been on top of the premium rates that
24 were paid for the unsociable hours that people worked, in
25 which case it is clear that the Company were underpaying by
26 a substantial amount Mr. Alimi and no doubt thousands of
27 others.
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29 MR. MORRIS: There were quite a number of admissions which
30 I have not brought up about the Company being prosecuted
31 for various accidents - Burnley and Bury, Luton, Guildford
32 and Slough. I have not got them all in front of me, but I
33 just want to make that point. I do not want to read them
34 out. It will take too long.
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36 MS. STEEL: There are formal admissions on 17th May 1993 about
37 Guildford -----
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39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If you want to, please do, but I am going to
40 go through all the admissions in relation to all the
41 sections of the case. We have a schedule of them.
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43 MS. STEEL: Right. There are a considerable number of
44 admissions in relation to offences of employing children or
45 young people for excessive hours, not allowing them to have
46 enough breaks, not having enough gaps between shifts,
47 employing them on too many Sundays in any one month, and so
48 on, and employing them at too late in the day, and although
49 they run in the main in the early and mid part of the
50 1980s, that is relevant bearing in mind that the alleged
51 publication is -- well, it is now from 1987 to 1990. So
52 there is not a great distance of time between those dates.
53 Obviously, the documents that we have seen in court show
54 that the practices are continuing; they are just not
55 getting prosecuted for it.
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57 MR. MORRIS: Our pleading number -- I do not know what number it
58 was actually; I have a little 36 against it on page 17 of
59 my Employment Practices Abstract -- I cannot remember what
60 happened to this. I am sure we put it to Mr. Preston that
