Day 197 - 07 Dec 95 - Page 07
1 more control of them and improve performance in that area.
2
3 Q. To cut -----
4 A. To get -- basically, those areas were not being
5 controlled enough, control them more.
6
7 Q. On 32 under "Incentives" in the middle of the page it
8 says: "No carrots tangled". Do you have any comment
9 about that?
10 A. What that would relate to would be having crew
11 competitions, crew incentives, to actually push them that
12 little bit further, might be till competitions on a
13 Saturday to get them running about that little bit
14 quicker, that type of thing.
15
16 Q. They are carrots, are they, to be tangled?
17 A. Yes, ways of actually getting people to add that
18 little bit more, that little bit more effort put in, than
19 they were already doing.
20
21 Q. Were the staff working hard at that time?
22 A. The staff always worked hard, but it was just that try
23 to get that little bit more out of people all the time.
24
25 Q. A theme that goes through these PRs -- I am sure it will
26 be accepted by the Plaintiffs -- is that the store was
27 under crewed; is that correct?
28 A. We always had a problem with crew numbers.
29
30 Q. That was all the way through your employment, was it?
31 A. Very rarely I would actually not have to worry about
32 either hiring crew or retraining crew. It was a constant
33 thing that went on all the time.
34
35 Q. So why did you have trouble getting staff then?
36 A. A number of things. One would be the hard work. They
37 were expected to work long hours, work hard. There was
38 always a lot of pressure. It was not a place where you
39 came to work and sat about. Also, coupled with the area
40 we were in, the people we were hiring were either possibly
41 the university or the army, so there was always a constant
42 coming or going of people. So, coupled with that, and the
43 fact the way people were expected to work, it was always
44 very hard to keep up numbers.
45
46 Q. What about older people? What about people in their 30s
47 or 40s or older?
48 A. One or two people were taken on at that age in a
49 maintenance role but, in the main, they would not actually
50 have done the work. It was the younger people, just left
51 school, who had not worked anywhere else, did not have any
52 experience of what was expected and actually went into the
53 system better than people who had worked for other
54 companies. It was usually the younger person because you
55 could actually build them to what you wanted, longer
56 hours, working harder, that type of thing.
57
58 Q. You said something in your statement about wages were
59 appalling. Did that have any effect on recruitment?
60 A. People had to work long hours to earn the money, so
