Day 153 - 12 Jul 95 - Page 51
1 the customers may not have -- it was not the perfect
2 temperature for the customers to come into the restaurant,
3 and I can see absolutely no reason why we would possibly
4 not want to fix the air conditioning. That is beyond me.
5
6 MR. MORRIS: Can you see any benefits from carrying on,
7 expecting your employees to work in unlawful or illegal
8 temperatures? What was the benefit in that?
9 A. Well, firstly, I do not know whether they were illegal
10 or not.
11
12 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No, I just do not know. If we assume, though
13 I think if you are going to take the point we ought to get
14 to the bottom of it, that there is a certain minimum
15 temperature, I would like to know whether there are any
16 provisos about exceptional circumstances or what is
17 reasonably practicable or anything of that kind.
18
19 MR. MORRIS: You did not measure the temperature at the time?
20 A. I do not remember measuring the temperature at the
21 time, no.
22
23 Q. One benefit though of continuing to carry on selling
24 burgers and getting your staff to carry on working would be
25 that you would keep your profit levels up, would you not?
26 A. If it is put that way, obviously, operating as a
27 business we would want to continue operating, if at all
28 possible. As I remember it, if the temperature had become
29 unbearable or had been too cold, then we would not really
30 have had any option but to shut the restaurant, but it did
31 not get to the situation I felt where it was a situation
32 where it was extremely unpleasant to work in, and that
33 hence, you know, I allowed the crew members on the till to
34 wear jumpers.
35
36 So, even assuming the air conditioning had packed in, the
37 heat from the kitchen equipment would have kept the kitchen
38 area reasonably -- at a reasonable temperature and it would
39 have only been the till people who it may have affected.
40
41 MR. MORRIS: I am not quite sure where we are now.
42
43 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Let us take the five minute break and you can
44 think about it.
45
46 (Short Adjournment)
47
48 MR. MORRIS: I just want to bring up a legal point, which is,
49 the fact that we do not challenge some specific point in
50 the examination-in-chief does not mean to say that we
51 accept it, and I think that has been the state since the
52 beginning of this case, that we are not expected to
53 challenge every single word or it be assumed that we
54 agree.
55
56 Secondly, the fact that we do not put everything from all
57 our witnesses to all McDonald's witnesses, say on
58 employment, means that there should be the slightest doubt
59 that means that for some reason we would not want to pursue
60 the points in our own witness statements. I think that has
