name:

Nicholas McGill

section:

Employment - CEA

for:	The Defence

experience:

Crew member at Marble Arch McDonald's store; October 1986 - March 1987

summary:

The witness gives a detailed inside view of working conditions and practices at the Marble Arch branch of McDonald's, outling discrepencies in pay, working conditions, staff facilities, hours worked, the adequacy of the store in terms of food provision aswell as the approach of the management to sales and maximising profits.

I am of the view that McDonalds brain washes its employees.

cv:

Not available for this witness.

Full cv:
(not available for this witness)

full statement:

Introduction

• 1. I was born on 9th December 1963, I worked at the Marble Arch branch of McDonalds from 9th October 1986 until approximately March 1987.

  
  

• 2. I applied for a job at McDonalds after walking past the Marble Arch branch and seeing a sign in the window advertising for staff. I was interviewed by a Manager, whom I was introduced to as Habeeb. I was asked a few questions relating to my past experience and I was then told "You can speak English, you've got the job"

  
  

• 3. Everybody at the store was paid fortnightly. I started on a basic rate of £2.22 per hour, and by the time I finished there I was on £2.37, after one rise of 15p per hour. Unlike a lot of other employees, I spent nearly three months as a "green badge", although I was aware of the fact that I was only meant to be a "green badge" for three weeks. However, at Marble Arch this was not uncommon. I kept on asking for a new badge during that time but they just did not give me one, I also asked for a Performance Review on many occasions, which was a pre-requisite of getting a pay-rise. Eventually, after much badgering by me, I was given a Performance Review, which was carried out by the Assistant Manager, Steve Quinn. He went through a list of categories on a check list, awarding marks for particular characteristics, The Check List was in the form shown in the Crew Handbook on page 19.

  After the review, I got an hourly rise of 15p. Several other staff had a performance review at the same time as me and only got hourly rises of 5p. I do not understand why I got 15p.

  
  

• 4. I was given Performance Reviews every couple of weeks after this and achieved excellent marks, but I never got any stars. Some people worked at the store for years and still did not have all their stars. The system seemed to be completely arbitrary. As far as I can remember, a written test had to be done in order to get stars but I was never really very interested. The only people who were interested in the stars were people who were looking to go into Management.

  The star system was absolutely revolting - it was very patronising, very American, full of hype and brainwashing. It seemed to me that they just wanted us to achieve maximum machine-like efficiency.

  
  

• 5. The highest wage I heard of at the store for regular staff was £3.00 per hour. People earning this money were not Management, but very close to it. There were only a couple of such people and they were both going out with Managers at the branch. There was no real awareness of a legal minimum wage. However, the emlployees all considered themselves very much underpaid.

  The Wages Council Order was not pinned up on the noticeboard in the crew room, or indeed anywhere else in the branch, The only thing up on the walls relating to the law was a copy of the Shops and Factory Act, which was archaic and unreadable, As far as I was aware, the stars were not connected with the salary paid. Merit rises were few and far between, and any rises given were generally the standard company rises once every four months.

  
  

• 6. I worked Monday to Friday from 7.00 a.m. until 4.00 p.m., and I only ever worked in the backroam and on the tills, not on any of the cooking jobs.

  Occasionally, if the store was very short-staffed, I was asked to work the odd extra hour, although this only happened if they were desperate. I generally refused. I occasionally used to ask the management, when they approached me to do extra work, why they did not have stand-by staff available. They just used to laugh at me.

• 7. The management really did not know how to respond when of a phenomenon, so they let me get away with it, although people were regularly dismissed for behaving like that without notice.

However, it was more common where Management wanted to get rid of an employee for them to force the unwanted employee to leave by being particularly unpleasant to that employee.




• 8. The store did not follow the training procedures it was supposed to. A friend of my brother's worked at a McDonalds in Dublin and he was shown all sorts of training videos when he started work, I was not shown any. The Marble Arch store had a training room and all sorts of training facilities but they were never used.

  
  

• 9. The clock used by McDonalds for clocking-on and clocking-off was extremely unusual. Each "hour" was divided into 100 minutes instead of 60. I found this impossible to understand, and could not find anybody in McDonalds who could give me an explanation.

• 10. McDonalds never had any heating on in the crew room (where employees had to go to take their breaks) for the whole time I was there. The Management used to claim that the air conditioning had broken down. I have worked in the building trade for a long time and I did not believe their story for one minute. It was nonsense. My belief was that the Management did not want employees to be comfortable in the room.

  The air conditioning was fully operative in all other parts of the building and in fact because of the positioning of the crew room and the way that the air conditioning system flowed around the building, it was impossible to believe that air could be supplied to certain parts of the building to which it was supplied without it being supplied to the crew room. I had to wear a sweatshirt a and overcoat just in order to be able to sit in the crew room during the break. There was nowhere else to go for the break.

  
  

• 11. I normally got one break of 45 minutes which I would take at 10.00 a.m., after three hours of work, However, if for some reason I missed the break at 10.00 a.m. I did not get another chance to take a break until 2.00 p.m. at the earliest. It might happen that I missed the 10.00 a.m. break because the store was short-staffed and busy. If conditions were hot, it was quite possible that people would dehydrate. People were often told that they could not stop to have a drink, and it was a fairly regular occurrence that people would become dehydrated.

In my experience of the restaurant trade in Ireland, chefs were always allowed to have drinks if required, even at peak times. This is considered to be of great importance in catering work since people who work close to the stoves can very easily dehydrate. The situation could certainly have been remedied if there had been more staff at the store, although there is probably an optimum number of staff who could work in that kitchen at any one time. I was amazed by the general lack of space in the McDonalds kitchen. It should have been much bigger. I worked for five years in hotel maintenance, travelling round various hotels and restuarants in Ireland, repairing and maintaining kitchen equipment. I have therefore seen a large number of kitchens in my time and I believe I am in a very good position to judge how adequate a kitchen is. The size of the McDonalds kitchen was totally inadequate. For the quantity of staff and turnover, it was unbelievably small.




• 12. The staff allocation functioned on the basis that each station in the store - for example, kitchens, lobbies and backroom - required a set number of employees in order to be operative. It was therefore not difficult to see when the store was understaffed at a given moment. They should have had more staff instead of overworkinq people - for example, although there were several grills in the kitchen for the preparation of hamburgers, McDonalds never used all these grills at any one time, even at the busiest moments. They operated on the basis of keeping the bare minimum going but requiring the employees to work extremely fast. I could not say that there was certainly a serious long term understaffing policy, but there was a slight understaffing squeeze.

  
  

• 13. There were roughly 100 employees at the store, but it is hard to say with any specificity. It was a very big store, supposed to be one of the busiest in Europe. The majority of staff - perhaps 608 - were non-white. Of those who were white, the majority were foreigners: a lot of Italians, a few Spanish and so on. The non-whites were Ghanaians, Nigerians, Afro-Caribbeans, Asians and Chinese. The Friday evening shift was known as "the Chinese shift" since most of the staff who worked at that time were Chinese.

  
  

• 14. Most of the people on my shift were over 18 and I certainly did not know of anybody who was under 16. On the evening shifts they may have been younger, but I knew nothing about the other shifts and generally never met people on those shifts.

  
  

• 15. There were budget ratios for absolutely every overhead that could possibly be incurred in the store. Every single expense was measured in terms of its percentage of total sales, even down to items of cleaning materials. I knew that staff costs were not allowed to exceed 15% of turnover: I cannot remember from whom I first heard this, but it was definitely someone in Management- I got on well the lower management and could generally find out anything I wanted to know from them. The Manager Jim Atkinson, used to brag about the various figures for sales and overheads to the Area Manager, and I overheard such conversations frequently. The budget ratios seemed to be of great importance in such discussions.

  
  

During the winter months when I had to go into the yard to unload the trucks, it was often very cold. I also had to go into the walk-in freezers, working there for lengthy periods in temperatures of minus 20 centigrade. Despite repeated requests, the company refused to provide any clothing to make this job less unpleasant. I had to wear my own jacket in order to keep warm and the management refused to buy gloves. Management also refused to buy rubber gloves for people working in the backroom on various duties which involved the use of highly abrasive chemicals and detergents.

• 17. With regard to inspection by outside agencies such as the Health Inspectorate, as far as I am aware there had been major cutbacks in Health Inspectors and such a vast increase in the number of fastfood outlets that the Inspectors could not keep up. There did not seem to be much control. A Manager from McDonalds came over from the USA once to inspect - the staff were told we had to smile and be on our best behaviour. We were not aware of his visit as he came in as a customer, but we were told subsequently that he had been satisfied with what he had seen.

  Representatives from the Head Office in the U.K. used to come in fairly regularly as well. On one occasion "Mr. Big Mac (U.K.)" himself came in to the store. He was a highly patronising American. I was disgusted by the man - he kept putting his arm round the Managers and talking to them in an appalling way.

  
  

• 18. I am of the view that McDonalds brain washes its employees. The Training Manual was extensive, pumping vast amounts of information down the hierarchy. The whole system worked by having large amounts of information regarding procedures constantly pumped downwards in an incessant flow. The system cannot really go wrong at all, it is so mechanised. There is a chain of command from the man at the top right down to the person who cleans the toilets, and everyone is expected to know their procedure. In the crew room, for example, one is expected to read all procedure documents put up on the notice boards regarding things such as how to make Big Macs.

  
  

• 19. No-one ever mentioned a Trade Union while I was there, I have no time for Unions personally, and in the Republic of Ireland, there is enough employee protection by law for Unions to be basically unnecessary. I was surprised when I first came over to England by how little protection employees are given under the law, so I understand why things are different with regard to Unions.

  The foreign employees were not interested in anything like Unions - they just wanted the work. Other employees were not interested either. Unions were just not an issue which seemed at all relevant to anybody at McDonalds. Back in Ireland, I used to work for a hotel group as a kitchen electrician. The whole industry was unionised and everyone down to the most menial employee earned good money.

  
  

• 20. The general Management practice was that where a person was not liked or was perceived not to be pulling his or her weight, that person's life was made a misery and he or she generally left. I believe that this attitude and mentality is completely drilled into the McDonalds Management infrastructure. 21. I do not regret working at McDonalds, but I did not particularly enjoy it. I would describe the McDonalds' style of employment as being similar to rats running round a maze, being prodded with an electric probe in order to correct deviation.

supplementary statement:

24 hour shifts (19)

More than 39 hours in a week (20)

I rarely did overtime. The reason I know that other people did it was because it was common knowledge and that they had told me.

More than 5 hours without a break (29)

Pressure to follow prescribed steps (36)

There were tests for people every so often for them to earn their stars. This would occur with a manager standing or sitting behind the person and watching. There was a test every month.

The managers that did this were Steve Quinn, Mark (I don't know his second name), two managers both called Jenny and the main manager Jim Atkinson.

Smiling (37)

Freezers (43)

Sometimes it would take up to 2 hours to do this. I did this in the Marble Arch outlet. I asked for stock handlers' gloves and overalls or stock jackets. I asked the assistant manager Steve Quinn. He said that they didn't have any such warm clothing or equipment. I asked whether they were going to get any and he said No.

I don't remember anyone particularly getting ill or being injured as a result of this.

Chemicals (44)

I can't remember the names of anyone who got skin rashes. It was reported to mangement but I can't remember to whom.

Target figures (47)

Calculation of revenue every hour (48)

Levels Of takings (49)

New staff and falling sales (53)

Hostility to Trade Unions (57)

Repercussions on complaints (60)

Discrimination against Trade Unionists (62)

date signed:

July 27, 1993

status:

Statement was read out in court under the Civil Evidence Act.

references: Not applicable/available

exhibits: Not applicable/ available

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