Tesco, the 3rd largest supermarket chain in the world, has announced that it’s moving into the American market. Tesco employs over 100,000 union members in the UK and touts its “partnership” with the retail workers union USDAW. Tesco even encourages workers to join the union when they are hired and gives the union easy access to workers for recruitment purposes.
But according to the Financial Times, things will be different when Tesco opens in the US. Tesco has placed help wanted ads for HR management personnel that read: “….the incumbent has primary responsibility for management of employee relations; maintaining non-union status and union avoidance activities.” Tesco’s first stores will be non-union and the chain aims to stay that way.
What’s more, Tesco’s first stores will open in Los Angeles where the UFCW fought a bitter four month strike only a few years ago. The issue in that strike was the demand for give backs by unionized supermarket chains in the face of Wal-Mart’s planned entry into the local market.
Tesco is following an established pattern by global corporations of leaving any progressive employment practices back home when they travel. US and European companies with relatively good labor practices and unionized workforces have long set up sweatshops or cut deals with suppliers with terrible labor practices around the world. And when non-US based companies locate in the US, they usually adopt union avoidance practices, after all “when in Rome…”. Just look at the automobile industry, where Asian and European auto companies have successfully resisted unionization in the US regardless of home country practices.
In the past US unions have sometimes successfully organized non-US based firms that were initially resistant to unionization. For instance, 3 years ago Swedish retailer H&M, a company that is solidly unionized in Sweden, opened as a non-union firm in the States. UNITE launched an aggressive organizing campaign and with the help of Swedish unions was able to reach an agreement with H&M that led to the unionization of the company’s main warehouse in the New Jersey.
We can expect that the UFCW will launch an organizing drive at Tesco, and that it will reach out to unionized workers in the UK for help. But what would be the basis for cooperation? Why shouldn’t UK workers see the company’s expansion into the profitable US market as an opportunity for them to get a bigger share of the profits? And will the USDAW risk it “partnership” with Tesco on risky solidarity actions?
There are, of course, good reasons why workers in the UK should support their fellow workers in the US.
• It is essential to stop the non-union juggernaut at work in the global economy promoted by global capital. The HR practices—including union avoidance tactics—that firms like Tesco learn and in the US will likely migrate to the UK in time.
• The profits that Tesco makes in the US are much more likely to increase the capacity of the firm to resist the demands of its UK workforce than they are to be distributed in the form of higher wages.
• Finally, there are shared values of solidarity. Trade unionism stands for more than just reciprocity. We don’t cross a picket line even if there is little likelihood of reciprocal behavior in the future because we believe in bonds that go beyond pure self-interest. Pure self-interest is, after-all, one of the dominant values of modern society that we seek to change. Challenging narrow self-interest as the driving force of society should be a core value of a new global labor movement.
These common interests and values would be far more obvious if workers employed by the same firms and industries had a well developed infrastructure and a dense network of communication. But this is not the case. Instead, relationships usually are built only when unions confront immediate challenges that require international campaigns. This lack of pre-campaign relationships puts labor at a tremendous disadvantage and sometimes allows companies to play workers off against each other.
Labor needs to take a tip from the global corporations it confronts. Giant firms dominate key industries and do business around the world, while unions are nationally based with little cross-border contact. When a fight breaks out that requires cross-border solidarity, union relationships must be cobbled together on an ad hoc basis, built essentially on blind faith with no legacy of past cooperation. The kind of pre-existing relationships that would make strategic planning and action a natural response to Tesco’s move do yet not exist.
For a global unionism to be capable of taking on the giant corporations, unions must begin with relationship building long before the battles begin. If we’re going to take on corporations like Tesco, we can’t wait till they attack us to start building trust and sharing information, strategies, tactics -- and our commitment to common values.
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