Day 175 - 18 Oct 95 - Page 27


     
     1
     2   Q.   You talked in your next paragraph about crew members
     3        encouraged to be management sneaks, and any information
     4        that managers might find useful was rewarded in favour of
     5        promotion and pay rises.  Have you anything to say further
     6        on that?
     7        A.  Well, there was a very intimidating atmosphere in the
     8        workplace.  People did not really feel comfortable airing
     9        grievances and saying what they liked and they felt they
    10        were being watched by members of staff who quite openly
    11        would go to managers and report things that they had heard,
    12        and it seemed quite obvious that certain people were in a,
    13        sort of, favoured staff category, and one person who was
    14        considered by the staff to be not up to the job was
    15        promoted quite quickly, became a lobby hostess, because of
    16        her friendship with the Manager and for, presumably,
    17        passing on information about what the staff were talking
    18        about.  This was something that was seen quite clearly as
    19        happening in the staff -- by the rest of the staff.
    20
    21   Q.   You have talked about racism at the store where some crew,
    22        well, basically Asian, black and oriental crew -- sorry,
    23        Asian male staff were specified, got jobs of cleaning the
    24        toilets or put on environment/index.html">litter patrol.  Do you say that that
    25        racism had any effect on you, yourself?
    26        A.  Well, I witnessed situations that made me feel
    27        uncomfortable, but I witnessed some staff complaining that
    28        they were always given certain tasks and that they felt it
    29        was because they were black or Asian, and I agreed with
    30        them.  I thought it was because I could not see any other
    31        reason why they were always given those jobs.
    32
    33   Q.   What about you, as a white person?
    34        A.  Well, I very rarely did them.  I very rarely -- until
    35        the activities where we were discussing trying to unionise
    36        came into force, I very rarely did a environment/index.html">litter patrol, but
    37        once we started about unionising I was suddenly doing a lot
    38        of environment/index.html">litter patrols because I saw it as a way of keeping me
    39        out of communication with the rest of the staff.  Before
    40        that time it was a job that was mostly done by the black
    41        and Asian males, and there was quite a lot of arguments
    42        about it.  I can remember lots of incidents where some of
    43        the Asian males complained that they were given the worst
    44        jobs, and they had quite big flare ups over it.
    45
    46   Q.   You talked about staff being abused by customers and that
    47        managers would often allow that, rather than lose a
    48        customer.  How do you know that?
    49        A.  Because I was actually in that situation.  I mean, when
    50        the pub closed every night, we would get the drunken yobs 
    51        and anyone else pouring out of the pubs and coming into 
    52        McDonald's just as we were getting ready to close, and they 
    53        used to come in, abuse us because of the uniform, just
    54        because we were behind the counter; and I can remember very
    55        well an incident where I was sworn at by a customer very
    56        aggressively who lent over the counter at me and tried to
    57        make contact with me, and I refused to serve him.  The
    58        Manager told me to just get on with it, and walked away
    59        from the counter area, so he did not have to be part of
    60        what was going on.  That was the norm; people expected that

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