Day 310 - 04 Dec 96 - Page 07

     
     1        -- may well be inclined not to go there themselves or to
     2        take their children there.
     3
     4   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Is there anything here?  At the moment it
     5        seems to me that all the matters which are defamatory are
     6        matters which might impede the recruitment of appropriate
     7        candidates for work, or make people reluctant to deal with
     8        either the First or Second Plaintiffs.
     9
    10   MR. RAMPTON:   Beyond that, a company has a trading reputation
    11        but it has a reputation in the eyes of the public who are
    12        its actual and its potential customers, and if a company is
    13        alleged to have been mistreating its workforce, right
    14        thinking members of society, generally, who might otherwise
    15        go to the restaurant and do business with the company,
    16        will, as like as not, on account of that slur on the
    17        company's trading reputation, stop doing business with the
    18        company.  Stay away.  The same might be true of self
    19        respecting banks or suppliers.  "We are not going to have
    20        anything to do with that lot.  They are obviously a bunch
         of crooks; they mistreat their workforce".
    22
    23        I suppose one could say that there really are two, three,
    24        principal areas of a company's activity which constitute
    25        the areas in which it is vulnerable to defamation.  One is
    26        the way in which it treats its workers; another is its
    27        creditworthiness -- that is well established as a separate
    28        category but it does not arise here; the third is the
    29        quality of its goods and services.  Those last two are
    30        defamed, and thoroughly defamed, elsewhere in this
    31        leaflet.  This part of the leaflet is aimed principally at
    32        the manner in which it treats its workforce.
    33
    34        There was an old case, I think it was Metropolitan Omnibus
    35        Company v. Hawkins; it is a mid-19th century case.  I think
    36        it was recited also in the South Hetton Coal case, which
    37        your Lordship has, which in effect says there are some
    38        things which are not defamatory of a company which you
    39        cannot sue for, simply because a company is incapable of
    40        doing those things, like committing adultery and so on and
         so forth.  But, beyond that, any reflection on the
    42        company's normal trading practices is a defamation.
    43
    44   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   Yes.  Boiling the thing down, as one tries
    45        to do at the end of the day, it seems to me that there
    46        might really be three stings here.  The main and general
    47        one that McDonald's -- that is both the First and Second
    48        Plaintiffs -- pays bad wages for bad working conditions.
    49        Secondly, that McDonald's has a policy of getting rid of
    50        pro-union workers and has sacked many of them for 
    51        attempting union organisation; and, thirdly, that because 
    52        it is only interested in recruiting cheap labour it 
    53        exploits those at a disadvantage, including young people,
    54        women and people from ethnic minorities.
    55
    56   MR. RAMPTON:   Yes, and those are all to be found in meanings N
    57        and P.
    58
    59   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   That is what I was going to ask, whether
    60        that was so.