Union Busting

European companies, including the UK retail giant Tesco, are facing criticism from a leading human rights organisation for allegedly exploiting weak labour laws in the US and bullying employees to prevent them from joining unions. Human Rights Watch says European multinationals talk nicely about labour relations at home, but pay scant regard to them overseas.

Managers at Tesco's new mini-market chain in the US, Fresh & Easy, have created an anti-union atmosphere, and that employees who want to organise union activities live in fear for their jobs. when it was recruiting an employee relations director for Fresh & Easy before launching the chain in 2007, the job advert listed "maintaining non-union status and union avoidance activities" among the responsibilities.Tesco employees told Human Rights Watch that managers clearly took an anti-union stance. "It was constantly driven home to us in team-lead meetings that we should tell employees they have no need for the union, that the company will take care of them so they don't need a union," said Shastina Furman, who worked for the company in San Diego. "When the union started passing out flyers outside our store, my manager told us 'You don't want to be part of it. These are not the right people for you.'"
"The managers were always preaching 'no union' to us. Anything union was unmentionable because it could cost you your job." - Fred Baquet, team leader sacked from Fresh & Easy store in San Diego

Another UK company, the security firm Group 4 Securicor (G4S), fired an employee for trying to persuade colleagues to join a union. Richard Dieterle, a security guard for 30 years, who was fired by G4S from his job patrolling a mortgage bank in Minneapolis after he recruited colleagues to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and went with union representatives to ask for a collective bargaining agreement.

T-Mobile had characterised employees' "talking about rights" as dangerous activity to be reported immediately to management and that DHL managers threatened and discriminated against workers who engaged in union activity.

A T-Mobile employee describing how the company reacted when she and other staff distributed pro-trade union flyers to co-workers - "They called the Pennsylvania state troopers on us...It was very intimidating for a lot of people."

"Even self-proclaimed 'progressive' companies take full advantage of weak US laws to stifle freedom of association," said Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights programme at Human Rights Watch.