Day 301 - 15 Nov 96 - Page 25
1 On the one hand, the Plaintiffs may say, for instance,
2 "well, look, these are a handful of employees out of tens
3 of thousands or millions", and on the other hand, you will
4 say, "yes, that is so, but what happened was a result of
5 the system so it is likely to be happening elsewhere as
6 well".
7
8 MR. MORRIS: I think you would have to compare it to the number
9 of people it seems that we would have contacted, so if we
10 contacted 50 people, of which 35 said it was absolutely
11 appalling conditions, that would be a significant
12 comparison. You can't compare the 35 witnesses to one and
13 a half million witnesses.
14
15 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I do not know how many people you have
16 contacted or what.
17
18 MR. MORRIS: It was virtually everybody we contacted.
19
20 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What feelers you put out. I cannot have
21 evidence on that now.
22
23 MR. MORRIS: Right.
24
25 MR. JUSTICE BELL: All I am saying is, there are points going
26 both ways on that. I am not going to indicate what I might
27 make of it, but numbers of employees might be relevant.
28
29 MR. MORRIS: Right. This part of the case is absolutely vast
30 and I have not had the time to -----
31
32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I am not criticising you for it. I rather
33 hope, if I may say so now, that Mr. Rampton may give me
34 figures on it. If not, I can find them myself. They are
35 probably in my notes.
36
37 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, just off the top of my head, I have not
38 done it, I will do it, but off the top of my head I think
39 the figure was 32,000, the latest one, the company's
40 restaurants in this country.
41
42 MR. MORRIS: As far as we are concerned, what we are concerned
43 about in this case is the McDonald's system and that
44 includes all companies, which, in any event, are not
45 independent. They might be formally independent but they
46 are all controlled by the operations manual and the
47 supervisory managerial system.
48
49 I will just quickly refer to Paul Preston, before I come on
50 to Sid Nicholson, who was the most significant witness
51 obviously on this issue. Paul Preston said he did not
52 consider the starting wage of £3.10 an hour for crew
53 members to be low pay, when he was in the witness box, and
54 we would say that is a reflection on his inability to see
55 reality when challenged with it. Of course he refused to
56 give his own salary.
57
58 He said, when he was asked why the company could not pay
59 higher wage to crew members out of the one billion dollars
60 profits it made in the previous year - it is now probably
