IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
PepsiCo: Union-Busting, Trashing Rights�and Buying Danone?
Posted to the IUF website 21-Jul-2005Share this article.
Rumours of PepsiCo's interest in purchasing the French-based food TNC Danone highlight the urgent need for public scrutiny of Pepsi's social policies and industrial relations record. PepsiCo's record shows a consistent policy of aggressive contempt for the rights and dignity of its workers, and indicates the enormous scope of the social damage which would result if this buyout materializes. Danone is constrained by and operates under the same market imperatives governing corporations generally, forces which for trade unions imply the inevitability of conflict and struggle. But it has chosen to do so through responsible relationships with its workforce and the trade unions Danone workers have built to express their collective interests. The same cannot be said of PepsiCo.
While many NGOs and activist groups have been pursuing high profile campaigns around Coca-Cola's record, Coke�s major competitor PepsiCo has been quietly going about its business. Part of that business for a long time has been Pepsi's consistent attempts to bust unions and trample rights around the world.
The relatively high presence of unions in Coca-Cola explains the abundance of union-related news about Coke's activities. Precisely because PepsiCo has more effectively avoided or resisted unions than has its main rival, considerably less is heard of abuses from Pepsi workers, many of whom remain unorganized and voiceless. PepsiCo's record on rights has therefore largely gone unchallenged, giving the company a free ride. Pepsi's predatory circling around Danone requires that we set the record straight.
Despite the difficulty of obtaining news from workers in a company that has avoided unions so well, the IUF has considerable experience of abuses within PepsiCo. In some of these cases, by working together with a forceful local effort by workers and their unions, we have been able to reverse these rights violations and force changes on the company. We believe, however, that these struggles represent only the tip of a rights abuse iceberg which is largely submerged. The iceberg is concealed by the relative weakness of union voices within this global transnational and by the one-sided NGO focus on Coca-Cola. A partial survey of the iceberg tip would include the following:
In Europe, in 1996 the company successfully strong-armed a group of mostly hand-picked workers to sign a management-compliant European Works Council agreement. A union shop steward - one of only two union representatives taking part in the "negotiations" - had to escape from the meeting place at 6:00 AM to report to his members from a distant public telephone because the company had tightly controlled access to communication with the outside world at the isolated Irish meeting venue. "Representatives" to the works council were lodged in suites which they each shared with company human resource representatives.
In the UK in 1997 at the Peterlee snack foods plant PepsiCo "de-recognized" the union, forcing workers to work in a non-union plant.
In Vancouver, Washington State, USA PepsiCo introduced bogus "worker participation" groups at its Frito-Lay plant in the 1990s to weaken union organization. In 1997 the company tried to drive the union out of the plant. When this failed, PepsiCo launched a campaign in 2004 to end the union shop.
From 2002 until 2004 a group of workers fired for their union membership at Pepsi's Guatemala La Mariposa bottling plant camped out in protest in front of the presidential palace in Guatemala City. PepsiCo consistently refused to accept responsibility and take action against its bottler, leaving a flagrant abuse of rights to be dealt with by the local franchise holder who had committed the abuse in the first place.
In Kanpur, India in 2000 PepsiCo's wholly-owned subsidiary M/s PepsiCo India Holdings, Ltd. initiated a vicious series of actions to deny workers the right to trade union representation. Union officers were suspended for carrying out their union functions and workers were locked out and only permitted to return to work after signing individual statements renouncing their union membership.
In Visakhapatnam, India in 2002 Pepsi franchise Pearl Bottling fired or illegally transferred an entire union leadership to avoid union organization and collective bargaining at the plant. Four union office holders were fired and four others illegally transferred to distant places in retaliation for registering a union with the Indian National Trade Union Congress. When the union served a strike notice as a last resort in 2003, management threatened to close the plant rather than allow the union to function.
In June 2005, at PepsiCo's directly-owned bottling plant in Bajpur, Uttaranchai, India, management transferred to distant facilities 7 officials and activists (all of them production workers) within days of the union's application for official registration. When the union responded by declaring a strike, PepsiCo suspended the transferred workers and followed this up by suspending 7 more workers for their activities during the strike.
At PepsiCo's Frito-Lay plant near Warsaw, Poland, eight women workers who were fired or forced to resign at the end of 2004 because of sexual harassment by a supervisor are still being victimized. The supervisor who allegedly committed the ongoing sexual harassment is in jail, but the company is providing his legal support. The victims, however, are still without jobs or financial income from PepsiCo. The company refuses to negotiate or even discuss the case with the union representing workers at the plant. In the sexual harassment case, PepsiCo is openly flouting Polish and EU law and even its own unilateral "code of conduct."
These are some of the cases we know about. More rights violations will doubtless emerge as PepsiCo workers fight back.
A PepsiCo buyout of Danone, a company that respects trade union rights and recognizes and negotiates with unions at every level, would not only be a major step backwards for Danone workers, who would immediately feel the consequences in job losses and management war on their unions and agreements. It would generate added pressure to globalize the company's aggressive anti-union policies and contempt for democratic rights, first in the expanded sectors it would be competing within and then more widely. We are fighting to reverse the slide into global barbarism, and the first line of defense is to win the battle for union recognition as an essential component of defending rights and dignity for all. There is no place for PepsiCo in Danone if we are to win this battle.