Day 199 - 11 Dec 95 - Page 04
1 A. They -- all management.
2
3 Q. Not ----
4 A. I fell into that trap as well, yes. The theory was
5 that if somebody -- the psychology and the training, how to
6 get them motivated, if a member of staff was doing
7 something correctly, you would praise them in public,
8 praise in public, tell off in private. There was very
9 little praising went on but an awful lot of telling off, in
10 my experience.
11
12 Q. "The single rap session which took place in my store during
13 the time that I was there was a good example of this
14 divergence between theory and reality. In theory, I had
15 been told that the 'rap' system was a system by which the
16 employees could air their grievances with Management. In
17 practice, what actually happened was that the employees
18 were most reluctant to go to the session at all. The rap
19 session was conducted by an Area Manager from another
20 area. The idea behind this was supposedly to induce
21 employees to feel that there was some independence in this
22 complaints procedure. However, there was a widespread fear
23 that anything that was said at the rap session would get
24 straight back to the Management of the store with resulting
25 recriminations. In the end, so few people were willing to
26 attend the meeting that the management had to actually pick
27 people and tell them to attend".
28
29 How do you know that that happened?
30 A. Well, in the rap session that took place in our store,
31 we were some people short and the Manager actually told
32 me: "Get some more people along to this". I had to
33 actually recruit, if you like, two or three people extra
34 and more or less coerce them, cajole them and talk them
35 into attending the rap session.
36
37 Q. "At Hamburger University Trainee Managers were told that
38 they were supposed to treat crew how they themselves would
39 want to be treated". Is that what happened in the store,
40 in reality?
41 A. I was going back to my earlier answer, not really, no.
42
43 Q. "Trainee Managers were also given training to enable them
44 to handle the store paper work.
45
46 All the training information used by McDonald's came out of
47 one book, the Training Manual, which was basically the
48 McDonald's bible of all the rules and regulations. It is a
49 very large book, about the size of a telephone directory.
50 McDonald's Managers were supposed to know everything that
51 was in it. Copies of the Manual were very tightly
52 guarded.
53
54 McDonald's made it very clear to all employees, including
55 myself, that the whole organisation was very closed to the
56 press. I was told that, as a general rule, no employees
57 were to talk to the press unless authorised."
58
59 Was there a reason given for this when you were told about
60 that?
