Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 18
1 but it is quite detailed in exactly the kind of
2 information and how it should be distributed and when; is
3 that not the case?
4 A. Yes. We wanted to give the companies a clear road map
5 of what would be required in order to resolve our
6 conclusions that they were, as we spoke and as we wrote,
7 in violation of the law.
8
9 Q. It says it gives a deadline of response to these very
10 detailed -- you would not really describe them as
11 instructions, would you? Would you describe them as
12 instructions? They seem to be pretty clear. Would you
13 say that they could be called instructions? Also at the
14 end it says: "Please give us a response within two
15 weeks".
16 A. I would not call it "instructions" because at that
17 time we could -- our only authority, we could not force
18 any company to do anything; we could just sue them and ask
19 a court to force them to do whatever the court wanted to
20 do. We went into a law suit as any other civil litigant.
21 We frankly had a significantly higher degree of
22 credibility perhaps than the average civil litigant. The
23 courts knew that if we were making allegations we had a
24 basis for them and that we had studied and thought about
25 what we were going to do before we filed a law suit.
26
27 But what these detailed things are were, in fact, our
28 finding as to what at a minimum would satisfy us for the
29 existing violations of the law. We were proposing this.
30 This was our proposal to them to resolve the conflict.
31
32 Q. What was McDonald's response to this letter of June 3rd?
33 A. As I have said, I could not tell you for anything
34 resembling a certainty that their recalcitrance to
35 ingredient brochures began before or after this letter.
36 But, in essence, they were, as I said, the most resistant
37 of the five companies I named.
38
39 Q. You do not have to repeat those.
40 A. It would be a kind of memory trip more than anything
41 anyway. They were the most recalcitrant of those five
42 companies to implement.
43
44 Q. How do you know that?
45 A. They were the ones who said: "No, no, no". When we
46 were saying: "Will you do this?" their response was: "We
47 cannot confirm, we do not know, we have great problems",
48 or words to that effect, and they -----
49
50 Q. When you say "do this", you mean do national distribution;
51 is that correct?
52 A. Give out the brochures on a national basis.
53
54 Q. They were, in fact, doing it in some areas; they were not
55 against it on principle?
56 A. I do not know why they were negating. I know that they
57 were telling us they would not agree at that time to do
58 so. I believe by the end of June and the early part of
59 July we had obtained the agreement informally on the
60 phone, but agreement of the other companies. We
