Judgment day for McDonald's

After a decade, the clash between two unemployed anarchists and the hamburger king is over. But whatever the verdict, Ronald McDonald will be left with a nasty taste, says Danny Penman

Ronald McDonald woke up this morning with a particularly fearsome grimace. It should have been a smile because a new McDonald's restaurant had just opened. Throughout today, like every other day, a new McDonald's restaurant will open every three hours somewhere on the planet. So massive is the burger chain that beef from almost 1 per cent of the world's cattle now passes through its doors to be placed between slices of bread.

All this would make Ronald McDonald beam with pleasure were it not for one small thing - McLibel - the longest trial in history. McLibel, the judgment on which will be handed down today, started out as a seemingly pre-ordained contest between two unemployed environmentalists from north London and the world's most powerful burger chain.

The bizarre trial focused on the contents of a "factsheet" produced by a group of green activists in the mid-1980s. The factsheet accused McDonald's of producing food linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer and of abusing animals, its workers and the environment. McDonald's claims it is libellous. The "McLibel Two", Helen Steel and Dave Morris, say the allegations are true. The allegations and counter-claims have been aired in the High Court over 30 months and have been supported by nearly 40,000 pages of evidence. The seemingly endless trial has explored the inner workings of one of the world's most high profile multinationals. It has seen an explosion in green activism across the country.

When McDonald's issued the writs in 1990, Swampy was doing his GCSEs, Twyford Down was one of southern England's most treasured beauty spots and few people had even heard of the veal trade. When McLibel reached the High Court in June 1994, construction companies were engaged in "the biggest road building programme since the Romans left", a handful of campaigners were struggling to stop the veal calf trade and Shell was planning to dump the Brent Spar in the North Atlantic. And when McDonald's finished its summing-up last December, the road-building programme was in tatters, the veal calf trade had been destroyed and Shell had been humbled by Greenpeace.

As well as mirroring the growth in the green movement, McLibel has become one of its main rallying cries. The company has become "environmental enemy number one", in the eyes of many, for the same reasons it has become such a commercial success.

McDonald's is founded on four core values: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Everything the company does is designed to maximise profit. Every unit of input, whether its the number of steps a burger-flipper takes across the kitchen floor, or the number of dollops of ketchup on a burger, is checked and rechecked.

At McDonald's, predictability marches hand in hand with efficiency. McDonald's food may not taste good but wherever you eat it, it is no better or worse than it is anywhere else. To enhance predictability, McDonald's aims to have total control over everything it does. Only then can the company enforce its rigid, profit enhancing system. One of the company's manuals states that "grill men" have to move left to right, put out six rows of burgers, flip the third row first, then the fourth, fifth and sixth. Only then can they move to the first two rows of burgers.

Ray Kroc, who founded the McDonald's empire, wrote that the french fry was "sacrosanct", its preparation "a ritual to be followed religiously". Or, as one former dean of the Hamburger University, where McDonald's trains its senior staff, put it: "It gets so your blood turns to ketchup."

The McLibel Two and their supporters say that the logic symbolised by multinationals such as McDonald's has imprisoned society in an "iron cage of rationality". This logic forces everyone, subconsciously, continuously, to seek new ways of enhancing efficiency, predictability and control, no matter what the cost to humanity or the environment. They call the process "McDonaldization".

McDonaldization is no longer limited to the burger chain but has been copied by a host of enterprises, from rival fast- food chains to local government. Hotels, shopping malls and fast-food outlets around the world are indistinguishable. There's global television, global brands and global music. The only ethics are free trade, the free movement of capital and freedom of choice, so long as you accept the industrial logic underlying those principles.

Professor George Ritzer, a sociologist from the University of Maryland, warns in his book, The McDonaldization of Society, that the logical, or "rational", system promoted by the burger chain may eventually "become a system that controls all of us".

"McDonaldization is with us now, has been with us for a while and is extending its reach throughout society," he says. That has already resulted in the largest 500 companies controlling 42 per cent of the earth's wealth. Of the biggest 100 economies, 51 are corporations, the rest are countries. Only 27 countries now have a turnover greater than the sales of Shell and Exxon combined.

The World Trade Organisation and a host of other transnational organisations are part of the apparently "rational" systems that are being erected to promote the interests of multinational corporations. The health of the environment and society is not an intrinsic part of their remit. If rational (McDonaldized) systems are leading the world to disaster, as the McLibel Two and their supporters believe, what is the alternative?

The McLibel Two believe that green anarchy offers an alternative to a McDonaldized society. They are careful to draw the distinction between the popular perception of anarchy as chaos and its true meaning - which is "without government".

"It's not idealism," Ms Steel says. "It's just wanting an ideal reality. Most people in this world want a more equal, fair and caring society. That's why we're anarchists - in the true sense of the word. We want a harmonious society in which government and corporations are abolished because they're unnecessary. It's a logical development of people not wanting to be bossed around."

To the jaded ears of big business such views probably sound naive. But they appear naive only because business has been conditioned to accept only one set of values - that of increasing profitability by enhancing efficiency, predictability and control. All else smacks of hopeless idealism. Big business and the politicians prefer to deal with reality, even if it is collapsing around their ears.

The views of Ms Steel and Mr Morris were probably irrelevant to McDonald's before the trial. Since then, they have been forced to take them very seriously. McDonald's supremacy in the marketplace and its legendary PR and marketing machine appears to have faltered when the company reached the High Court. The case was deftly turned into the most exhaustive analysis of a multinational company, its ethics and working practices ever undertaken anywhere in the world.

It proved to be a unique opportunity to cross-examine top executives from a multinational company. Normally campaigners, journalists and the public are fed with pre-packaged sound-bites. But once McDonald's was in the dock, its senior executives had to answer the questions, no matter how uncomfortable they were.

During the trial, the court heard that McDonald's employed seven private detectives from two agencies to monitor London Greenpeace, the organisation to which the McLibel Two belonged. Meetings of less than 10 people were often attended by three or four McDonald's agents. It was also revealed that Special Branch helped McDonald's and supplied it with crucial information on the two defendants.

The court also heard that burgers were sold to the Japanese on the basis that they would make them tall, blonde and pale. But perhaps most damaging for a food company, one ex-store manager told how staff were forced to serve burgers over kitchen floors covered in raw sewage. McDonald's, however, vociferously denied the effluent was sewage.

Early in the trial, McDonald's became so concerned about the adverse publicity that it flew over senior executives from the US for "peace talks" with the McLibel Two. Once again, it failed to understand the opposition.

In a press release shortly before the trial, McDonald's had accused the McLibel Two of lying. That provided the basis for Ms Steel and Mr Morris to sue McDonald's for libel. Their action was heard concurrently with McDonald's. McDonald's had to defend the allegations it made in the press release. That ensured that the company could not just walk away from the trial when the publicity became too bad. It had to stay and fight or admit in court that it had libelled the McLibel Two. On that count at least, the two amateur lawyers had outwitted the $30bn burger chain.

It is difficult to see how McDonald's can dig itself completely out of the hole in which it now finds itself. The company modified its case half way through the trial. It was accepted in court that the McLibel Two had nothing like the equivalent resources to defend themselves, which is a central feature of the European Convention on Human Rights' definition of a fair hearing. Nor were they permitted a jury, McDonald's having successfully argued that parts of the evidence would be too complex. Consequently, in the eyes of many, the judgment, if it goes against Ms Steel and Mr Morris, will be almost meaningless.

But more disastrously for McDonald's, it appears to have given its greatest critics an almost unlimited supply of publicity. This paper, for one, has followed every twist of the trial. Channel 4 has transmitted a three- hour reconstruction of it. BBC1 will screen a McLibel documentary at the end of June. A book has been written about the case.

Since the start of the trial, more than 2 million copies of the offending leaflets have been distributed world-wide. A site on the World Wide Web containing details of the case has been accessed tens of millions of times. It has versions of the "What's Wrong With McDonald's" factsheet in a score of languages. All Internet users need do is to click a button and they can have an inexhaustible supply of the leaflets in the language of their choice.

Ronald McDonald's agony will not cease today. Finally, after the case has gone through the appeals procedure, when the European Court of Human Rights has passed its verdict (some time in the early part of the next century) the public, before handing over their hard cash, will still have to make their own minds up whether the allegations in the factsheet are true.

McDonald's customers will need to assess whether the company respects its workers, animals and the environment and whether its food is linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer. By what they have revealed during the trial, the McLibel Two have made that judgment infinitely easier.