Day 185 - 07 Nov 95 - Page 56


     
     1        witness about being misled, misinformed and pressurised,
     2        and things like that, lied to-- strong words that she said
     3        in the witness box that were not ruled irrelevant or
     4        inadmissible.  But she does not of course feel the same way
     5        when the Manager is saying such things.
     6
     7   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  For better or worse, I think you have rather
     8        lost me there, because the Labour Board is another firm of
     9        litigation.
    10
    11        Anyone who is involved with litigation knows that people
    12        put forward as much as they can in support of their case;
    13        and, obviously, the lawyers involved here thought one of
    14        the options was to challenge; in a case where the case was
    15        that some of the crew had been overborne, thought it was
    16        worth an argument, obviously, to say they were under 18,
    17        anyway.  Presumably, their hope was that the Labour Board
    18        might think it more likely that they are overborne if they
    19        are under 18.
    20
    21        The whole point of this is that all these points are put
    22        forward on one side or another so it can all come out in
    23        the wash, either by the Labour Board's recommendations or
    24        decisions or, better still, as happened here, by the
    25        parties reaching some agreement as to what the next step
    26        was.
    27
    28   MR. MORRIS:  Yes.  But he might feel that if a store owner in
    29        the McDonald's system is telling one thing to a crew
    30        meeting about how much he cares about their equal rights to
    31        join a union, and then actually what he is doing is drawing
    32        up a demand that they should be debarred from union
    33        membership because they are under 18, it shows actually
    34        maybe he was only saying certain things at that meeting
    35        because he thought -----
    36
    37   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I just cannot accept that.  There he is at
    38        the meeting ---
    39
    40   MR. MORRIS:  I think it is -----
    41
    42   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  -- saying -- I will have to decide what he
    43        says, but if he did say what Miss Wetli says, then no doubt
    44        he goes to lawyers and they tell him what the best case to
    45        put forward is.
    46
    47   MR. MORRIS:  He has to stick by it, because -----
    48
    49   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  No.  It is only part of the case, surely.
    50        I mean, no one has suggested that both sides did not abide 
    51        by it as it came out in the wash.  The vote went the way 
    52        that Mr. Ballantyne no doubt hoped it would, so he did not 
    53        have to challenge it.  It went against the union; and, as
    54        far as I am aware, they abided by it.
    55
    56   MS. STEEL:  I think there was a separate point where
    57        Mr. Ballantyne actually applied for this thing to stop all
    58        18-year-olds.  So it is not really something that came in
    59        with all the other things about intimidation.  It was a
    60        separate point that he wanted to make that, irrespective of

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