The proposed pay cuts are truly disastrous. Losses for a traditional machine operator would start at some GBP 6,000 annually, or 17% of current base pay. Loss of shift premiums and other allowances and performance benefits for some workers would the income loss to over 29% of current negotiated pay levels. Other employees could lose up to nearly GBP 15,000 of their current pay packet or a total loss of 31%, of which 21% would be from base salary.

Where is sustainable employment in Unilever’s ‘Sustainable Living Plan?’

The loss in pension benefits based on the management proposed change would be similarly catastrophic, coming on top of the 2012 changes to the UK pension scheme. With this new burden, employees face an increasingly uncertain future.

At the very last minute management agreed to modify its demand for an 8-hour/3 shift scheme, which would have some workers performing up to 6 consecutive 8-hour night shifts and 3 weeks without a meaningful break from work. In its place came a 12-hour scheme proposed by the union, but with no time for full discussion of the implications of the new arrangements or any of the company’s other demands.

Abandoning the proposed shift scheme was offered on condition that the union adopt a “neutral” position on the company’s entire proposal, whose pay, terms and conditions had to be accepted as a whole in order to allegedly secure the future of the site.  The union has consistently said it recognizes the need for flexibility and is open to negotiation but has run up against a stone wall. At the end of the extended consultation period, the company challenged the union’s “neutrality” and reverted to the original shift proposal! Unite responded that the union reserves the right to fully inform the members of the contents of the proposals and has no choice but to recommend rejection.

The company’s autocratic refusal to respond constructively to any of the union’s many proposals has been coupled to the insistence on removing some 30 employees – 14% of the current workforce – from the collectively bargained pay scheme by putting them on individual contracts with performance-based pay.

The union proposed to move from the current 39 hours to a 40-hour week, with increased flexibility on banked hours. The union offered a 3-year pay freeze for pre-2009 employees, with some adjustments to lessen pay inequality for the post-2009 employees hired on reduced pay. The company’s response was: “It’s not enough”, despite the cost savings.

The company won’t listen to, let alone bargain over, any of the union’s proposals and commitment to negotiate flexibility. Given the poisonous atmosphere created by management’s aggressive attitude, the company will have no difficulty filling its 40 proposed voluntary redundancies.

Unilever’s steadfast refusal to give meaningful consideration to the bargaining process, their veiled threats about the future of the site, and the unilateral decision to shrink the bargaining unit by putting a sizeable number of employees on individual contracts constitute a concerted attack on basic trade union rights, rights which Unilever claims to respect. Unilever’s insistence on unilaterally reclassifying jobs to eliminate accumulated skills, seniority and experience has already generated conflict and led to a strike in South Africa. The drastic cuts now unilaterally demanded at Purfleet will not be limited to that site.

Unite is planning to ballot for a full recommended rejection and will be preparing an appropriate response if the company continues to reject in practice rights it claims to respect in Unilever policy statements.

They won recognition of their union NOVOPROF but since November 2013 Unilever management has resisted negotiating their wage demands. The union is demanding

• wage indexing for the official inflation rate as required by Russian law;
• a real wage increase that would improve living standards for the workers’ families;
• a signed agreement that wages should be raised annually.

Management has accepted some form of wage indexing but rejects the other demands, and insists that its meetings with NOVOPROF are only for “information and consultation” – not negotiation.

This left the union with no choice but to launch a public campaign. Workers – members and non-members – have signed a union petition in support of wage negotiations and recently reported for work wearing “I support the union’s demands” badges. The union actions have generated considerable attention in the local press and media.

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.