The 2007 struggle at Rahim Yar Khan was one of three conflicts (two in Pakistan, one in India) with Unilever which were ultimately resolved in 2009-2010 through direct negotiations with the company under the auspices of the UK’s National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. As a result of that process, Unilever agreed to recognize the IUF and enter into a formal engagement process.

It was within the framework of that engagement that the IUF insisted on the need to fully address all issues at Rahim Yar Khan involving implementation of the 2009 agreement and obstacles posed by local management obstructions. Reinstatement of the 23, all of whom had been employed at the factory for more than 9 months and therefore should have been offered permanent contracts but were instead dismissed, was crucial to resolving these issues.
All 23 are now back at work on permanent contracts, including two workers who were working in Dubai and Saudi Arabia but maintained regular contact with the IUF and have now returned.

The new division, to be called Baking, Cooking & Spreading Co., will not – for now – include spreadable Hellmann’s mayonnaise or Marmite, will only apply to the business in Europe and North America,  is planned to be operational by mid-2015 and will remain 100% Unilever-owned. But sluggish sales and the growing North American preference for butter over margarine inevitably call into question the future of Unilever spreads.

Chief Financial Officer Marc Huët, who has been repeating to investors the need for Unilever “to reduce dependence on foods”, told investors that “spreads are an important part of our heritage, but this will never be a barrier to us taking decisive action.” While it  remains true that, as a company spokesperson was quoted saying in a press report on the spreads announcement, “the cash delivery [from spreads] is important to us”, the division is digestible enough (valued between EUR 5.5 and 8 billion) for a private-equity fund to snap it up in a debt-financed buyout now that leveraged buyouts are again growing in size.

Food and refreshments (beverages and ice cream) last year accounted for some 49% of Unilever revenue (see the IUF report on Selloffs and cash cows). Eliminating spreads would reduce turnover by some 7%. But food – even with spreads – and refreshments last year continued to deliver a higher percentage of profit than the non-food divisions, making them an essential cash engine for acquisitions. A stand-alone spreads division with its own financial accounting would presumably enable a more precise analysis of the profit sources within Unilever, generating new benchmarks and new pressure on workers, who already face very tough bargaining in spreads.

Above all, this latest development, following as it does the string of recent divestments, highlights the need for unions at Unilever to secure succession clauses ensuring that terms, conditions and trade union rights are carried over in any sale. Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan includes sustainable divestments but has no commitment to sustainable employment.

According to the food industry news site just-food, who interviewed Unilever’s food division president Antonie de Saint Affrique, “It’s going to be on given products because they are sustainably-made.”

Not really: on closer examination, the logo says nothing about the actual process by which the product was made: “You’ll have the logo and not the logo in the same country depending on whether the key ingredients are sustainably sourced or not”, de Saint Affrique told the interviewer.

Like all such schemes, the latest “sustainability” gimmick exploits the ambiguity of the label. So, for example “fair trade” sugar crushed in mills in Fiji occupied by the soldiers of a military dictatorship is marketed in the UK as “fairtrade”. Fairtrade International, which bestows the label, defends the practice on the grounds that the farmers who grow the cane have been certified as having met the fair trade criteria. They acknowledge trade union concerns about the Fiji dictatorship, but are not about to create a label designating the product as “grown and harvested under fair trade conditions, crushed in sugar mills under military occupation.”

Another example: the Knorr “Sustainability Partnership” hasn’t yet come to Greece, but the company’s operations in Gastouni, Unilever tells us, are “inspired by the Knorr vision of sustainable farming”. The company says it is working with farmers to reduce water consumption and promote organic mulching to replace plastic, but, 56% of the factory workers who make the consumer product are employed on precarious contracts with no job security  This hardly qualifies as sustainable employment – is the labour behind the product not a “key ingredient”.

As elsewhere in Europe, Greece relies on exploited and abused migrants for the bulk of its agricultural work. Earlier this year, the topic briefly hit the news when a Greek strawberry farmer opened fire on 200 migrant strawberry pickers who demanded their wages after working for six months without pay. In agriculture, no certification scheme based on codes or audits can capture the reality of the situation. Child labour, among other abuses, is endemic throughout agriculture, a symptom of the poverty and degradation to which those who labour to feed the world are almost universally subjected. The IUF has encountered child labour on fairtrade certified tea plantations. The Rainforest Alliance, a key pillar of Unilever’s sustainable sourcing program, has served as a cover for union-busting on plantations (link).

What about the dwindling number of those who still work for Unilever, many of them on precarious agency or temporary contracts? Is their situation “sustainable”? Some 70,000 jobs have been eliminated in Europe alone over the past decade. Harald Wiedenhofer, general secretary of the IUF’s European regional organization EFFAT, commented on Unilever’s latest results that the company’s sustainable living program had proved sustainable for profits but not for employment.

Unilever corporate management has shown itself open to engagement with the IUF and its affiliates on reducing the number of precarious jobs, and there has been progress. However, precarious employment remains rampant within the Unilever system, and sustainable employment has yet to find a mention, let alone a defined function in the company’s varied sustainability schemes. Until that happens, unions have a fundamental obligation to highlight the absence of this key ingredient – and to fight for its inclusion. Nothing is sustainable without sustainable employment and rights at work.