Day 303 - 19 Nov 96 - Page 28
1 Terry Pattinson, former industrial editor of the Daily
2 Mirror, also gave evidence for the defence informing the
3 court about an interview in December 1986 with Sid
4 Nicholson, at the time McDonald's head of personnel, who
5 stated to him, "We will never negotiate wages and
6 conditions with a union and we discourage our staff from
7 joining". He testified further that Paul Preston had
8 stated much the same to him in conversations in May 1990
9 during a trip to former Soviet Union.
10
11 Andrew Cranna, a former Assistant Manager of the West
12 Ealing branch of McDonald's in the mid 1980s, gave evidence
13 for the defence telling of dictatorial management,
14 employees are afraid to criticise due to fear of
15 "recriminations", how talking to the press was banned,
16 work was "greasy and high pressure", of pressure from
17 officials in McDonald's to achieve low labour cost
18 targets. All of the witnesses that we called who had any
19 experience or knowledge of cost targets said that they were
20 under pressure to achieve the minimum labour costs. He
21 told of how people could be sent home early to save money,
22 and of how "any active member of a union will not be
23 tolerated", how staff were made "to feel they were fully
24 expendable", and that if they fell out of favour they would
25 be discriminated against until they quit.
26
27 Ian Whittle related his experience as a crew member at
28 McDonald's stores in Sutton from 1983 to 1986, portraying
29 McDonald's as an oppressive anti-trade union company in
30 which "paranoid" managers competed to reduce staffing
31 levels to save money. He described how managers' obsession
32 with profit levels sometimes led to the sale of undercooked
33 and unhygienic food. I think he was the one who said he
34 would not go into McDonald's at certain times of the day to
35 buy food because in any store he would expect corners to
36 have been cut at peak times.
37
38 By the way, a general point about our witnesses; none of
39 them expressed any grudge against McDonald's, none of them,
40 as far as I can see, virtually none of them were --
41 Mr. Rampton did not -- Mr. Rampton made very little
42 cross-examination of any of our witnesses in general, we
43 would say clearly because our witnesses are telling the
44 truth and there is no point in cross-examining and getting
45 more of it. But the ones that he did cross-examine, we
46 believe he made absolutely no progress whatsoever with any
47 of our witnesses in the case and in particular with the
48 employment witnesses, whereas when we cross-examined their
49 witnesses the picture that they started off with, almost
50 all of McDonald's witnesses in this case, began to change
51 as more information and more reality began to be revealed.
52
53 I think that should be borne in mind when Mr. Rampton slaps
54 his 500 page carefully-crafted submissions that he has been
55 working so hard to produce over the last few weeks, that it
56 is the contradictions and the admissions and the
57 information that came out that was not present at the
58 beginning when McDonald's witnesses gave evidence. We
59 would say that is the significant aspect of their evidence,
60 because we cannot possibly compete with the Plaintiffs'
