Day 150 - 07 Jul 95 - Page 35
1 inconvenience customers or look bad for us in terms of the
2 perception it might give. So we could do it and give it
3 full attention with three or four people out there and get
4 into all those sort of nooks and crannies that you cannot
5 really do apart from general mopping and clearing tables
6 when the restaurant is open.
7
8 Q. If I could now turn to the question of the labour rate, if
9 you understand. What I am meaning by that is the
10 relationship between labour costs and other costs and
11 profit.
12 A. Yes.
13
14 Q. When you were the Area Supervisor at Colchester, when you
15 were the Store Manager at Leicester, was safety compromised
16 to get a low labour rate?
17 A. No.
18
19 Q. Is it now being compromised, in your experience?
20 A. No.
21
22 Q. At the stores you have dealings with?
23 A. No, it is not.
24
25 Q. Would you know if it were being?
26 A. Yes, because, as I mentioned earlier, part of my
27 responsibility is to visit restaurants and therefore
28 I would see first hand if there was anything going on that
29 would compromise safety.
30
31 Q. Do you experience or have you experienced, particularly at
32 Colchester in the mid-1980s, pressure from your superiors
33 to get the labour rate to a lower level?
34 A. No.
35
36 Q. I mean, is it a matter of concern what the labour rate is
37 at all?
38 A. I think ----
39
40 Q. Would it matter if it was, just for the sake of argument,
41 it was 40 per cent, or something?
42 A. The education or the business advice, if you like, that
43 I was given and subsequently gave to the Restaurant
44 Managers with respect to Colchester was to achieve a
45 balance, which is getting the right number of people on the
46 shift in anticipation of the business, and doing that meant
47 you had to hire the people at the right time to give them
48 to time to get trained up. So it would make no sense -- it
49 would make a financial or profit sense to keep labour low,
50 but then you would not be getting business in the front
51 doors, and so you would be taking an ever bigger slice of
52 an ever diminishing pie, so to speak. So the idea was to
53 balance it up so that sales grew and then, in reflection of
54 that, there were sufficient number of people on to serve
55 that business. So working to any fixed percentage is not
56 going to work.
57
58 Q. In your experience would you say it was, practically
59 speaking, in McDonald's interest to be under-staffed
60 without the right number of staff to do the job, if I can
