Day 002 - 29 Jun 94 - Page 49
1 the top compared to the wages of those that do the work on
the ground, the majority? Mr. Rampton said that the
2 workers get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. Under
no circumstances is that a fair comment because of the
3 hard work that they do and the poor wages they get in
comparison with the people at the top who work no harder
4 than the crew members on the ground who take home a
million dollars, or whatever they take home, in a year.
5
So parts of the case will be that subsistence farming in
6 Central America or South America or poor countries is
undermined as agri business takes over. Again can we say
7 that McDonald's is a family business when families living
on the land are up-rooted and turned into wage slaves, not
8 for McDonald's, but up-rooted and generally have to look
for work and families get split up. In Brazil, when they
9 opened up McDonald's stores, a lot of indigenous small
street stalls could not manage the competition and
10 closed.
11 When they give the impression they are a family business,
we are saying they do not really care about any effect on
12 any families they have as long as they continue to make
and expand their profits. We think their approach on
13 their motivation, say, for example, in the counterclaim,
are they attacking us because they genuinely on the eve of
14 trial are concerned about their criticisms they have been
getting, or are they attacking us as part of a general
15 campaign to disparage those that criticise them or oppose
them, as they have done when people have tried to organise
16 trade unions, people that have criticised them have got
writs, even dealing with local residents' complaints,
17 which, although they may make a show and have listened to
complaints, there really is not anything they are going to
18 do which is going to affect their profits in terms of
changing their practices.
19
In a number of cases, many cases, when people hand out
20 leaflets outside their stores, the Police are immediately
called and the company hopes thereby to stop the process.
21 This obsession verging on paranoia of the critics has
resulted in what we call very sinister development which
22 is the infiltration and use of spies against London
Greenpeace during the preparation for this case, and the
23 burglary by those spies of letters and correspondence of
London Greenpeace, especially letters regarding McDonald's
24 campaign, which is the sort of activity that we do not
want to see corporations indulging in and should be
25 resisted.
26 Those people will be appearing as witnesses at the end of
the trial and will be cross-examined by myself an Helen.
27 I think the McDonald's Corporation would be extremely
unhappy if we infiltrated their executive and took
28 documents away. We cannot even get them under discovery,
let alone taking them. So I have dealt with that.
29
Our alternatives to the McDonald's Corporation: We are
30 not motivated by malice. We are motivated by a concern to
see society progress, to see good food being eaten and
