Day 303 - 19 Nov 96 - Page 33
1 compliance among crew. Mr. Harrison told the court that an
2 authoritarian them and us attitude was created between crew
3 and managers which aimed to exploit crew members wherever
4 possible. He left, he said, due to "the job, the hours and
5 mounting dissatisfaction with the Company philosophy in
6 general".
7
8 Can I say that a lot of the criticisms aired by our
9 witnesses were admitted to some, usually much smaller,
10 extent by McDonald's own witnesses and also are reflected
11 in the documentation, such as it was, that we had from the
12 Colchester store, such as performance reviews and rap
13 session notes and whatever. It is only a shame we did not
14 have the clock cards, which we should have had, because, as
15 we know, there are legal specifications on how long such
16 documentation should be kept.
17
18 We had pleaded to Colchester, I think as early as 1993 or
19 something, 1992, and all the relevant documentation should
20 have been kept going back five years previously. We might
21 have saved a lot of court time because that probably would
22 have shown the reality quite easily.
23
24 Kate Harrison, who had worked at five different McDonald's
25 stores, told the court about the harsh reality -- well, of
26 the pressure of working, stated that crew members were
27 often denied breaks in busy periods and sometimes worked
28 whole shifts without a break. At three of the stores she
29 had witnessed under-18s working illegal hours. She
30 recorded two occasions when sewage came up out of the
31 drains into the kitchen but staff had to continue preparing
32 and cooking food.
33
34 There were other witnesses as well, but finally there was
35 Ray Coton, who was the Store Manager from August 1987 to
36 1991. He backed up the allegations made by the defence
37 witnesses from the store, and explained how he was under
38 continual pressure from McDonald's supervisors and above to
39 boost profits and how he eventually resigned, as a result.
40
41 His evidence obviously is very interesting because
42 McDonald's suddenly switched their line completely, when
43 faced with the former Store Manager. Initially it was kind
44 of they were going to deny everything, but once we had
45 found the Store Manager prepared to back up what the other
46 people were saying, suddenly yes, all these practices were
47 going on but only under him because he was a poor manager,
48 which is just a line to discredit someone who was obviously
49 in a position where their evidence could not be challenged
50 in terms of the truth because he would know everything that
51 was going on.
52
53 But effectively they are admitting our case for us, because
54 if it was going on under Ray Coton, and it was clearly
55 going on under Mark Davis, because the same patterns appear
56 in the documentation that we all looked at overall, but in
57 particular McDonald's are now accepting certain things were
58 going on for a substantial part of the period that we are
59 talking about at the Colchester store, basically only
60 damages their case further.
