Day 130 - 26 May 95 - Page 70
1 management, achieving excellence in safety management,
2 there was a moral reason in terms of the safety and the
3 well-being of employees, there were the cost implications
4 and, third, the legal requirements. You said that there is
5 no conflict at all between those three things?
6 A. Accidents cost money. They can cost you a lot of
7 money. If somebody has an accident on your shift, it
8 really does impact the service you can give your customers
9 and the business that you are doing -- never mind the fact
10 that if that person is injured severely enough they are
11 going to be away from work.
12
13 Q. Not if it is a minor accident, they would continue working,
14 would they not?
15 A. Obviously, a minor accident will not have such a big
16 impact, but also, remember, as we said earlier, a lot of
17 the very minor accidents, it is virtually impossible to
18 prevent them. There is hot surfaces and there is hot
19 equipment in a kitchen. It is a kitchen used for preparing
20 food. We advise people of that. We train them how to do
21 things, but they are all humans beings and occasionally
22 they are going to get the co-ordination wrong.
23
24 I just cannot-- you know, I would love to stand here and
25 say to you: Look, it is possible in McDonald's to prevent
26 all accidents happening". But, in a real world, it just is
27 not; yes, we still feel we have some way to go on the
28 serious accidents and we are all behind doing that, but
29 with some of these very, very, very minor accidents, there
30 is just no way we are going to prevent them all.
31
32 Q. No, but in terms of the cost, you were saying that it cost
33 money, but if there is a minor accident it probably costs
34 less money than skimping on paying the wages of an addition
35 employee for a year?
36 A. You know, there is still moral reasons. There is no
37 way I want any of our employees to get hurt at all.
38
39 Q. If the moral obligations or moral reasons are so important
40 to you, why did it take you 18 months to fit the RCDs?
41 I mean, you said that part of the reason it took that was
42 because it was costly?
43 A. Part of the reason why it took that long was because,
44 logistically, it was very difficult. With the newer
45 restaurants, it was quite easy to do because of the
46 technology involved. With some of the older restaurants it
47 involved work on site before we could even start putting
48 the RCDs in, and it just takes time to organise. You
49 cannot do that sort of thing overnight. The sort of
50 contractors that we trust, that we are used to working in
51 our restaurants that we know are up to the right standards
52 are limited in number.
53
54 Q. We are not talking about overnight, though, we are talking
55 about 18 months.
56 A. Yes, but we had, what, 450 restaurants at the time.
57
58 Q. If you had been prepared to put more money into it, you
59 could have done it much more rapidly than that?
60 A. Look -- rubbish -- the EHO, as I said to you, never
