Day 302 - 18 Nov 96 - Page 46
1 catering workers, full and part time. That was page 37,
2 middle of the page.
3
4 Then we go on to the catering review group on page 38,
5 which was the confidential catering industry firms' own
6 survey of wage rates between different firms. Anyway,
7 I have not got the actual document.
8
9 MR JUSTICE BELL: No, well, I remember it.
10
11 MR. MORRIS: I think there were three different wage review
12 documents, wage comparison documents. All very much the
13 same, it came down to it.
14
15 Actually, no, sorry, before he went on to that, you came in
16 with a question about -- that was on page 38. It was about
17 how family credit, Mr. Phil Pearson said, provides for
18 employees, 16 hours or more a week, two children and above,
19 working in a low paid job, it lifts their wage to the
20 equivalent benefit level paid by the State, and the family
21 credit bill nationally is about £1 billion per year.
22 Basically, what he is saying is the State is subsidising
23 employers who are paying low pay by paying a portion of
24 effectively their income rather than the company doing
25 that. And obviously, that would apply to McDonald's for
26 the low pay, depending on the circumstances of the person,
27 whether they have children, whatever, who are working for
28 McDonald's.
29
30 Anyway, going on to the... He said that -- this is on
31 page 40, line 27 -- the catering jobs of waiting, chef, bar
32 staff and so forth, appear among the lowest 10 male
33 occupations by pay, and female as well, that was true in
34 1983 when I looked at the figures, first, and it is true in
35 1995. So the lowest 10 occupations in the low pay league,
36 as he called it, catering, appears in the bottom 10.
37 I don't know how many jobs, whether there is a hundred jobs
38 that fall into the category of the low pay league but...
39
40 Then we have the document, External Survey of Hourly Rates,
41 which is the catering review group. He said that this is
42 completely preview information which would never be
43 available to a researcher normally, and it is only because
44 of the cooperation of the company's, cooperating with each
45 other, which is quite unusual, I should think, that this
46 information is available and we have it available in court
47 today. And all the major companies, he says, that are
48 McDonald's competitors and have directly comparable
49 operations are present there, and the conclusion is
50 McDonald's basic rates are at or below the lower quartile
51 of the market. That is, of their own low paid industry
52 McDonald's are in the bottom 25 percent of that low paid
53 industry, their pay rates.
54
55 He was quite surprised by these figures, because he had
56 been given to believe that McDonald's, probably because he
57 had been reading McDonald's own literature, McDonald's wage
58 rates were higher. And it turns out, of course, that -- I
59 can't remember if it is the one compared to McDonald's wage
60 rates in two years previously or not. We will come on to
