Day 171 - 11 Oct 95 - Page 30
1 the sum of the point is whether it is exploitation of crew
2 by McDonald's, because that is the sting of the employment
3 part, to pay them the ordinary rate rather than time and a
4 quarter time or time and a half or double time for the
5 extra six hours. Why do I not see the documentation and
6 form my own view about that?
7
8 MR. RAMPTON: By all means. I have no objection in principle,
9 none at all, to your Lordship seeing the documents. I do
10 not believe -- and, as I say, I have looked at a month's
11 worth of documents -- there is nothing in there which, from
12 my point of view as advocate for McDonald's, that even
13 gives me the slightest queasiness or qualm, nothing at
14 all. All you have there are figures; and in most cases
15 people worked a good deal less than 39 hours a week, even
16 the full-timers. There are one or two like Mr. Dixon that
17 go over the top one week out of four. Some people work
18 quite long shifts occasionally.
19
20 I do ask myself how is your Lordship going to be served by
21 having another month, another 100 pages of the same kind of
22 stuff. That is all.
23
24 MR. JUSTICE BELL: If I can argue back at you, from the judge's
25 point of view, the benefit might be that in a situation
26 where one has a number of contests between what your
27 witnesses say is not only the theory but the practice at
28 McDonald's and what at this stage I have to anticipate will
29 be the evidence of defence witnesses as to what actually
30 happened at various places, Bath might be an opportunity to
31 look at some documentation which might be the key one way
32 or the other there, anyway, might it not?
33
34 MR. RAMPTON: I do not see how it possibly could be; and this is
35 where I find that the logic of the thing falls down. If
36 you have Bath in all its glory over, let us say, a month in
37 1939 and a month in 1994, and Mr. Morris and Ms. Steel pick
38 out this that and the other employee, whether named or not,
39 whether identified by full name or by letter, who has
40 worked X hours in a week or in a single day, what I do not
41 follow is, if that person is not him or herself a witness,
42 how that information could conceivably help your Lordship
43 to say: "Well, ah, yes, but a similar person in Colchester
44 also worked 45 hours, and they say it was exploitation;
45 therefore, that is what happened in Bath." It simply does
46 not follow, because there is a myriad of reasons why people
47 work long hours -- or, indeed, short hours, for that
48 matter. Without the direct evidence from the witness
49 concerned about why it happened, the information is quite
50 frankly valueless, in our respectful submission.
51
52 I go so far as to say that, actually, about Mr. Logan's
53 named people, because again they are not going to come and
54 give evidence; any evidence that Mr. Logan gives about the
55 reasons why they did or did not do X or Y hours is almost
56 certain to be hearsay and inadmissible, and without the
57 people in court to say: "I was forced to stay on when
58 I wanted to go home" or "I was sent home when I wanted to
59 stay on", or whatever it may be, or, "They punished me by
60 altering my schedules, reducing them or enlarging", then
