Day 302 - 18 Nov 96 - Page 39
1 control over the whole process. And he says, when you
2 marry that up with the HSE report - that is at line 31 on
3 page 14 - about McDonald's culture tending to place
4 customer service ahead of staff safety in order to maximize
5 sales, link it up with the need to minimise staff costs
6 then staff will come second best twice, to customers and to
7 finely tuned cost control mechanisms.
8
9 I would like to say about Mr. Pearson I got the impression
10 he was a very cautious expert. Some of his things,
11 I thought, were too cautious.
12
13 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Well, they may be none the worse for that.
14
15 MR. MORRIS: I think that contained within these cautious and
16 carefully worded criticisms, are actually quite fundamental
17 criticisms of McDonald's which hit at the heart of their
18 working practices.
19
20 I mean, an example of his caution would be his view on
21 page 16, line 14, that he supports the right of people to
22 put posters up and distribute leaflets and organise
23 unauthorised meetings and collect subscriptions, et cetera,
24 but he says that they should -- provided such activities do
25 not take place during an employee's actual working time,
26 with that proviso he thinks those bans are Draconian, that
27 is the word he used, implies that all the time on the
28 premises, including unpaid break time, is time over which
29 the company has authority to determine the nature of trade
30 union activity. I think this is Draconian and excessive.
31
32 And I would say that people should have the right to do
33 those things whenever they want to, as a basic human right,
34 as long as they are not thereby, you know, sabotaging the
35 production process or something, where everything will
36 break down. But, I mean, that is up to the decision of the
37 person involved.
38
39 Anyway, sometimes those things are more important than the
40 production process. For example, they may need to organise
41 a meeting because someone has been victimised in some way
42 or another and that is much more important than carrying on
43 producing hamburgers until it is resolved. Or health and
44 safety, for example, I mean, that certainly overrides any
45 production concerns when there is a safety matter that
46 needs to be addressed, and it may need a meeting to be
47 organised immediately.
48
49 Then he says on page 17, line 36, in a very cautious way:
50 One might well argue that employees faced with this
51 handbook, this also includes references to McDonald's
52 gearing their handbook towards young people, and some of
53 the kind of -- I think he implies patronizing way, for
54 example, they say we have no objection to people dating one
55 another, crew employees dating one another, as if it is any
56 of their business anyway -- he says: One might well argue
57 that employees faced with this handbook would find it very
58 prescriptive.
59
60 If I may just try to use a neutral approach to this issue,
