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
