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'

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