Day 302 - 18 Nov 96 - Page 36
1 page 9, line 48 - he saw back of house areas, off peak
2 times, both stores seemed to be near the limit of their
3 safe working capacity. And then he later goes on to say
4 how they were quite small kitchens compared to the amount
5 of work being done in them. And that was off peak times.
6 Obviously at peak times there would be more staff, more
7 pressure; no doubt that is why he was not allowed to see
8 them at those times.
9
10 On page 10 he talks about the turnover and he said that the
11 60 percent labour turnover figure which was quoted in the
12 fact sheet was double. He said there was about double the
13 industry average for the restaurant sector. We now know
14 that the actual turnover rate at the relevant time was
15 something like three times greater, which would have been
16 five or six times the industry average for the restaurant
17 sector.
18
19 He talks about the difficulty of recruiting people into
20 unions with that kind of turnover level. And he points to,
21 of the 27 witness statements from former employees - this
22 is on page 11 at the top - that we had given him to read,
23 14 referred to trade unionism and that company hostility,
24 real or perceived, featured in most of those cases.
25
26 He did not make a calculation, but he said that most of the
27 staff will not be covered by general industrial tribunal,
28 wrongful dismissal protection, because, I mean, how many
29 part-time staff at McDonald's have worked for more than
30 five years. We can say it is probably less than half a
31 percent. And full-timers for more than two years. The
32 point being that a lot of full-timers who end up working
33 that long tend to be absorbed into management grades and so
34 the amount of people covered by wrongful dismissal
35 legislation rights may be less than 3 or 4 percent of the
36 entire workforce, may indeed be less than that, apart from
37 people who have become management grades, who obviously
38 still have rights. But the point is, they begin to see
39 things through the company's eyes, they have made their
40 choice to move up into the management grades.
41
42 He said, including the Crew Handbook conditions which debar
43 the distribution of union literature or the collection of
44 union dues, et cetera, whether the staff are on or off
45 duty, along with the turnover levels, concludes for these
46 reasons: The McDonald's staffing and labour relations
47 system in my view is fundamentally inimicable to unions.
48 This may appear in the form of a prevailing anti-union
49 initiatives culture at store management level as would
50 appear from the employee statements, or in the arrival of
51 senior personnel at the scene of tentative first attempts
52 to establish union presence. Which we heard is what
53 happened with Mr. Nicholson in the examples that we had
54 managed to get information about. Also, it applies to
55 Mr. Stan Stein jetsetting around the world whenever there
56 was any union disputes. Which would send out a message to
57 the workers involved in that dispute of a certain kind.
58
59 And he talks about the rumours of McDonald's closing down a
60 unionised restaurant. And then he says the company appears
