Day 150 - 07 Jul 95 - Page 49
1 do anything to me they are not exactly going to like me or
2 favour me for having said something unpleasant about them
3 or critical"; are there any arrangements for minimising
4 that fear?
5 A. Well, the only person who will really know who attended
6 that rap session, especially in the sort of time period
7 that I was doing it, was by me making sure that the people
8 who attended paid for it. But, again, those people were
9 willing to stick their names up on Notice Boards. So
10 I would suggest there was no real feeling of there was
11 going to be retribution. They seemed quite willing to want
12 to attend and would always put their names down on a list,
13 or the Managers would know anyway who was going in there;
14 the idea being I would not say, "Frank Stanton said the
15 following". There were no direct quotes. I would sort of
16 paraphrase everything and there would be no direct quotes
17 attributed to any one particular person. It would all be
18 very paraphrased and general.
19
20 Q. It was an open agenda, was it, in the sense that any topic
21 relating to work at McDonald's was allowed to be discussed?
22 A. Yes, sure.
23
24 Q. Was there any bar on what could be talked about?
25 A. No, no. The way I used to approach it was, there was a
26 sort of agenda that I needed to get through in terms of
27 some specifics that, perhaps, the Company wanted to find
28 out about, and the idea was that if we wandered off the
29 topic then we wandered off the topic. I was almost there
30 sort of as chairing the meeting, recording the notes, so to
31 speak, and if it got too way off track then I would bring
32 it back in again.
33
34 Q. How long did they generally go on for, the rap sessions?
35 A. Gosh. An hour and a half; two hours sometimes.
36
37 Q. You cannot be precise but roughly?
38 A. I would say at least an hour and a half.
39
40 Q. I will not ask you whether there were any complaints about
41 trade unions, but were there any complaints about pay or
42 hours worked?
43 A. No.
44
45 Q. Why are managers or Supervisors, whatever, bothered about
46 what the crew think, if they are bothered - I assume they
47 are?
48 A. Because once again it will give us direct feedback.
49 I mean, we will do opinion surveys which will take some
50 more broader issues about the Company, so to speak. But
51 this is direct feedback concerning the restaurants
52 themselves and the restaurant management team. So I do not
53 think you can get any better or finer feedback than hearing
54 it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
55
56 Q. Are problem areas acted on by management?
57 A. That is part of the credibility of the system, is that
58 once it is highlighted the next stage is for the Manager
59 and Supervisor to follow up on it. Some of them are
60 impractical suggestions and we will say as such. But, in
