Day 125 - 12 May 95 - Page 33
1 Q. Of course, if people are not fast enough on the job, they
2 would not meet your standards and their employment would be
3 terminated?
4 A. No, that is not the case. That is not the case
5 whatsoever. The fellow that I mentioned, Dave Singleton,
6 you know wanted, to be a window person. He did not get to
7 be a window person because he did not exhibit the skills
8 that we felt necessary to be a window person, but he was an
9 excellent production person. But, from the successes that
10 he had in being an excellent production person, he was able
11 to build upon that, build his self-confidence, his
12 self-esteem and reach the point where he was able to do
13 other things and went far beyond what he had hoped to do.
14 I think, is that not true about life? I would hope that
15 would be true about most things in life.
16
17 Q. Let us not talk about one individual. The fact is that
18 there are always going to be more people who do not come at
19 the top, are there not, than the ones that do make the top?
20 A. That is the nature of life; not everybody gets to be
21 Vice President, not everbody gets to be a President.
22
23 Q. I am talking about in a competition.
24
25 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I wonder where we go on this.
26
27 MS. STEEL: It is just that Mr. Beavers has gone on at length
28 about how great it was for this one person. The reality is
29 that -----
30
31 MR. RAMPTON: That is extremely unfair because it was put to him
32 that the Hamburger Olympics, or whatever it was they were
33 called, in effect, were a cynical public relations exercise
34 whose principal consequence was that the crew endangered
35 themselves at work.
36
37 MS. STEEL: No, it was not a public relations exercise,
38 although, obviously, they got some publicity for it. It
39 was about engendering competition to make the employees
40 work faster which is the reality of the situation.
41
42 MR. MORRIS: The reality about competition is that people that
43 do not do as well or do not succeed or do not work fast
44 enough in the McDonald's environment, as we saw in the
45 Operations Manual (and referred to it) about needing to be
46 able to work at fast speed, is that their confidence could
47 be undermined. McDonald's is helping to undermine people's
48 confidence by exploiting them at work and rejecting them
49 when they do not come up to speed.
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Just answer that question "yes" or "no" and
52 leave it there whether that is your experience or not.
53 A. No, absolutely no.
54
55 MS. STEEL: I just wanted to ask one other question about the
56 Olympics. Was this the only Olympics, the one in 1972, or
57 is that something that has continued?
58 A. It ran for a few years. I believe the National
59 Olympics was discontinued. It had happened to be in
60 conjunction with an operator convention that year but,
