Day 196 - 06 Dec 95 - Page 16

     
     1        was monitored every day, every week, every month.  There
     2        were phone calls every day to see what you were running at,
     3        what you were likely to be running at, making sure you were
     4        monitoring it properly.  It was verging on a sort of
     5        obsession to make sure that it run below what you had
     6        actually budgeted.
     7
     8   Q.   Phone calls every day from whom?
     9        A.  They would come from my immediate Supervisor, Area
    10        Supervisor at the time, that would be either Mark Davies or
    11        Neil Skehel.
    12
    13   Q.   In your answer under 1.2, at which meetings would keeping
    14        labour costs or pressure to keep labour costs down be
    15        brought up?
    16        A.  There would be three main types of meetings.  There
    17        would be the in-store meeting that normally I would conduct
    18        with my assistant Managers where my Supervisor might be
    19        present where it would be discussed.  We would then have
    20        Manager meetings which could be anything from fortnightly
         to monthly where it would be three or four store managers
    22        in a group with their Supervisor, and normally there would
    23        be about one area meeting where we would all go off with
    24        the Area Supervisor, where there would be about 10 or 12
    25        store Managers and it would be discussed then and run
    26        through all the different sections that we would be
    27        expected to keep costs low on and those types of things.
    28
    29   Q.   What do you mean by one to one pressure?
    30        A.  That would be obviously me or my Supervisor or above
    31        where we would actually possibly sit down if there was a
    32        problem with labour and how are we going to get this figure
    33        down, we would sit down on a one to one basis and you would
    34        be advised on ways to do it or told on ways to do it
    35        depending on serious it was.
    36
    37   Q.   "Shown by example", what do you mean by that?
    38        A.  One of the things we do there is say, for example, if I
    39        was trying to tell people in my branch I wanted the labour
    40        kept low, you would run your shifts particularly low so hat
         you could say to them: "Look, I can do it, you can do it."
    42
    43   Q.   Is that before you became Store Manager then?
    44        A.  That would be as a Store Manager or as Assistant
    45        Manager when people above me would have done the same.
    46        That really goes on to before where I said about long
    47        hours, what we would do is the salaried Managers would work
    48        on so that the hourly paid could be go home because we were
    49        not part of the labour percentage because we were fixed
    50        salary, so you would do extra hours so that you would not 
    51        have hourly paid people on the floor or that type of thing. 
    52 
    53   Q.   If you failed to achieve labour costs on one day and you
    54        got a phone call the next day, what would happen?
    55        A.  I would be asked why and if I did not have a good
    56        enough excuse I would be told to get it sorted out in no
    57        uncertain terms.
    58
    59   Q.   What do you mean "no uncertain terms"?
    60        A.  Basically, not threatened in a physical sense, but