IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
McDonald's: "Corporate Social Responsibility" as Blueprint for Union-Busting
Posted to the IUF website 08-May-2002Share this article.
McDonald's has now officially entered the "corporate responsibility" contest. "We know we are not perfect", announces company Chairman and CEO Jack Greenberg in the introduction to the McDonald's Social Responsibility Report. Our global business brings with it global responsibilities" � and as proof of the company's global concern they offer 46 pages of global nonsense. Nonsense, because underneath the self-congratulatory hype, parade of charitable contributions ("corporate giving"), dubious awards (it would be interesting to know exactly how McDo Brazil was named "The Best Company to Work For") and repetitive incantations of "commitment", "core values", "mission" etc. the report fails to offer a single verifiable criterion for evaluating McDonald's' industrial relations practices.
On page 2 of the report, we are informed that it is a "template" for measuring "progress in the area of social responsibility." If so, it is a "template" lacking all concrete indicators which might serve its ostensible purpose. It is therefore irrelevant that McDonald's did not conduct an external audit of the report. There is simply nothing to verify, even without the franchised operations (70 percent of global McDonald's units) which the company claims to have neither knowledge of nor responsibility for.
The "People" section of the report, where one would logically expect to find an assessment of the state of collective bargaining and trade union rights, contains no reference to them, despite the fact that "Respect and Recognition" is adduced as a first principle defining company practice in this area. Nowhere do the words "trade union" appear, here or elsewhere in the report. There is simply no mention of the collective rights of the hundreds of thousands of employees around the world who wear the McDonald's uniform.
In the guise of a social responsibility report, McDonald's has produced a manual for union-busting. Rather than rights at work, McDonald's offers employees "principle-centered people leadership". Who needs a union when you have, as an example of the company's commitment, "two-way communication opportunities between management and employees"? Why bother with collective agreements, negotiated job classifications and grievance procedures when you have a "Performance Development System (PDS)" which "enables each employee to play a key role in driving his or her own performance to achieve McDonald's business results"? Collective bargaining is superfluous when "Dialogue is facilitated through regular restaurant employee meetings, informal "rap" sessions that lead to problem-solving action plans, one-on-one performance appraisals, commitment surveys and evaluation action plans, and employee rallies (!) in anticipation of major marketing promotions." Independent, worker-elected union health and safety representatives? Forget it, the company will take care of you. If you don't believe it, look again at the list of prizes they've been awarded.
McDonald's, moreover, is not a company to rest on its past accomplishments. Workers may still feel they have a need for a union, and the company is ready. McDonald's has "developed Human Resources Consulting Centers, designed to provide expertise, consulting, and advice to field HR personnel, staff, and restaurant managers."
IUF members � and potential members � around the world have a great deal of experience with these techniques, as they are applied everywhere workers at McDo join together to seek collective representation at their workplace. Yes, there are unions which have won recognition and collective bargaining agreements with McDonald's, but they have had to fight every step of the way. The company has devoted enormous resources to ensure that McDonald's employees are denied their collective rights and unions are crushed. It is simply ridiculous to claim, as does the report on page 11, that "we do not have systems to collect and aggregate" basic information on what franchisees "do for their community, people and environment". McDonald's knows that franchisees have actually closed units rather than agree to union recognition, as recently happened at several restaurants in Canada. McDonald's knows that the entire labour movement has mobilized in defense of trade union rights in Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, to take but three examples from recent years, when McDonald's announced that it would not be bound by national agreements in the sector. McDonald's knows that a tenacious trade unionist at the McDonald's Russia food processing plant has received death threats. And they know that, for many years, McDonald's Germany has been paying out enormous sums of money to try and convince individual workers to renounce their union membership and resign from works councils.
They are familiar with these facts, because the IUF and its affiliates have informed them. And their company lawyers and public relations consultants know them, because they were presented with overwhelming evidence of union-busting in the UK "McLibel" trial.
McDonald's doesn't need independent verification of this and future reports, because as a "template" it is completely worthless for assessing anything but progress in union busting. In place of public relations fantasies, McDonald's needs to declare a commitment to the right of workers to organize trade unions and bargain collectively as a guiding principle of corporate practice.