Day 118 - 01 May 95 - Page 66
1 Q. What is the basis for wanting to limit overtime? I can
2 imagine all sorts of possible reasons; you might say people
3 work more efficiently for the first 39 hours than they do
4 for the next whatever, or you might say: "The wages
5 inspectors would accept our overall approach provided we
6 were not paying a lot of overtime". That is just
7 speculation. Do you know what the reason is?
8 A. No, I do not. When I came into McDonald's, they had a
9 policy then worldwide of discouraging people working
10 overtime. That policy came from the States. We obviously
11 adopted it in our early years. It was in place when I came
12 into the Company. I have never challenged it.
13
14 MR. MORRIS: So when you brought in your special reporting
15 system for crew members working over 96 hours in a
16 fortnight, you did not actually know the reason why you
17 were concerned to ----
18 A. Yes.
19
20 Q. --- monitor or limit those numbers of hours?
21 A. Yes.
22
23 Q. What was the reason you were concerned?
24 A. It is a tool for the operations department to help them
25 control overtime.
26
27 Q. But you did not know what the reasons were. What was the
28 reason though?
29 A. The reason was because I had been advised that there
30 was overtime being worked in the restaurants by crew people
31 and that we wanted to know how much, and that was the tool
32 that we used to find out.
33
34 Q. As Head of Personnel, the top person in the country
35 concerned with, presumably, policy-making to do with
36 personnel issues, you do not know the reason why the
37 company was concerned to monitor or limit overtime?
38 A. I do not know why they set the policy of not working
39 overtime. I was never involved with it.
40
41 Q. You just accepted it without question?
42 A. Yes, of course I did. If they did not want to work
43 overtime I accepted they did not want to work overtime.
44 This was a tool to control overtime.
45
46 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Do you think it might have been because the
47 more overtime a person works the greater is the risk that
48 they will go over the maximum level under the Wages Council
49 order? That stands to reason, does it not?
50 A. It does. It protects that.
51
52 Q. Suppose you are being paid 10p an hour above the minimum
53 rate, then if you work one hour overtime you may well be
54 within all the extra 10ps you have accumulated?
55 A. Yes.
56
57 Q. If you work eight hours overtime you may well run into debt
58 on the 10ps you have accumulated?
59 A. It certainly has the effect of keeping us within the
60 meaning of the Wages Council order, but I am not sure that
