Day 195 - 04 Dec 95 - Page 12
1 A. Any Manager who was running the shift would have told
2 you that.
3
4 Q. "I worked, on average, six days a week and could do
5 anything between 32 to 60 hours per week. Part-timers were
6 generally there just to fill in the gaps where there was
7 nobody else to work. There was no difference in the hours
8 worked by a full-time worker simply because that person was
9 under 18.
10
11 People were often phoned up and asked to come in to work on
12 their rest days. Those who were rung generally did come
13 into work for similar reasons to the reasons why peopled
14 worked past their schedule hours. Pressure was put on them
15 and they were made to fear that their work hours would be
16 cut down. Generally, however, management always turned to
17 those people who they knew needed the extra hours and there
18 is no doubt that sometimes people were quite prepared to
19 come in on their rest day anyway.
20 However, management sometimes went too far and took
21 advantage of a situation.
22
23 Nobody was ever allowed to take a taxi home paid by
24 McDonald's if they had worked a late shift. I only lived
25 10 minutes walk away so I had no worries, but I complained
26 five or six times that I thought that it was wrong that
27 women were left to make their own way home at 3 a.m. and
28 other such times. Some employees in fact had to get taxies
29 and pay for them themselves.
30
31 If it was nearly pay day and crew members did not have any
32 money left, they would have no choice but to walk home, and
33 this occurred regularly. In a few other stores, for
34 example, Basildon, people used to get taxies paid for by
35 McDonald's. When I drew this inconsistency to the
36 attention of management they told me that all stores
37 outside Inner London did not give taxi fares. I pointed
38 out that Basildon was outside Inner London - the Floor
39 Manager I was addressing just laughed. I could not get a
40 decent answer out of management and eventually management
41 got very cross with me for complaining.
42
43 I threatened to write to Head Office and tell them about
44 the taxi issue I knew that it was meant to be a rule that
45 people were given their taxi fare where they had been
46 working very late at night. I was about to leave
47 McDonald's at this stage. I was told that if I wrote to
48 Head Office the Store Managers could create problems for me
49 after I left, when called upon to give references for a
50 future job. Once I had left, I decided that I was going to
51 write to Head Office about the taxi issue. I did not do
52 because this case came up and I thought that this was a
53 much better way in which to express my complaints". Do you
54 just want to explain what "this case" was?
55 A. The case was McDonald's suing The Guardian and TICL.
56
57 Q. "Staffing levels were calculated as a percentage of sales.
58 The level of labour cost at my store could be, and very
59 often was, as low as 12 per cent of sales. I got this
60 information from the Managers and I occasionally saw the
