Day 188 - 15 Nov 95 - Page 24
1 grill team leader and to the Floor Manager. It was at the
2 height of the lunchtime rush, when the pressure to keep
3 producing is intense. Again, both grill team leader and
4 Floor Manager shrugged. The Floor Manager suggested that
5 by the time the Big Mac sauce was on, nobody would ever
6 taste it."
7
8 You said in that paragraph that the pressure to keep
9 producing is intense. How does that affect, if things go
10 wrong, how crew perceive what is happening at the time?
11 Explain what you mean there?
12 A. Yes. I think at the moment in the peak periods of
13 custom, you have to keep -- the grill teams have to keep
14 producing the Big Macs and the quarterpounders and
15 everything, just keep getting it through to the front, so
16 that it can be served; and it is a very tight schedule that
17 the Big Macs are produced on, or the burgers are produced;
18 that, you know, they are put on to the grill, whizzed off
19 the grill, put on to the person who has to put the buns and
20 the burgers together and dress them, and pass them through
21 to the person who is going to wrap them; and those buns
22 just keep coming and those burgers just keep coming, and
23 are shoved up and are put up to the wrapper. Now, if you
24 were to discard four buns because they were mouldy or
25 something, that would wreck the whole way that the --
26 production line keeps going; it is like a production line,
27 that everything just has to keep going; and, if you
28 actually stop it in some way, then what would happen is
29 that the person who was wrapping, the person who is
30 responsible for selling the buns on to the customers would
31 yell at the grill: "Come on, keep those buns moving, keep
32 them moving", and there is kind of, you know, constant
33 pressure to keep that production line going. So that it
34 was easier for the crew to actually ignore something like
35 the blue mould or the rotten lettuce and keep the
36 production line going. If they stopped it and said, "I am
37 sorry, I am going to have to go and get another bag of
38 lettuce", or something, then the reaction from everyone
39 else down the line was: "Just keep it coming, keep it
40 coming. What is wrong, what is wrong? What has gone
41 wrong?" It would just be that intense pressure all the
42 time, to keep the production line going; so that all the
43 those people were just, you know, bobbing away and could
44 not find the time to stop.
45
46 Q. What are the managers doing while this is happening?
47 A. That is where the pressure comes from. The managers
48 are standing there kind of, you know, cajoling people,
49 clapping hands: "Come on, move it, move it." I mean,
50 particularly in Croydon, there was a lot of "Come on, move
51 it, move it, come on, come on, hustle, hustle hustle"; and
52 it is just that intense pressure all the time to keep
53 everything going.
54
55 If something does stop and it breaks down, then I saw
56 managers just yelling quite abusively at the staff, you
57 know, just telling them really to keep -- just, you know,
58 just -- not swearing; it is kind of, you know, it was not
59 using four letter words or anything; it was just
60 this: "Come on, keep going. What the hell is wrong? What
