PART II: Manufacturing Insecurity at Nestle - Food and Allied ...

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PART II Manufacturing Insecurity at Nestlé
Managers and supervisors put more pressure on those workers targeted in the program, creating
a stressful environment that forces them to ‘volunteer’. This kind of force is often politically
motivated. Union leaders, shop stewards and union activists are put under enormous pressure
to ‘volunteer’, imposing penalties and disciplinary actions for minor mistakes, creating a negative
atmosphere, and basically driving them out. By creating the conditions that force union members
and leaders to involuntarily take ‘voluntary early retirement’ management achieves a double
victory – the union is weakened and the road is open to restructuring and cost-cutting. The
newly hired workers replacing voluntary retirees will never have the wages and benefits of the
workers they are replacing, and will be systematically denied the right to union representation
or the benefits and protection offered by a collective agreement bargained with the union.
Whether regular workers genuinely volunteer to take an attractive retirement package or are
forced to take it, there is a common outcome. As we’ve said, they are often replaced with
precarious workers. So as more and more workers retire early, the workforce starts to change
fundamentally – with more casualization, outsourcing and contracting-out and the remaining
regular workers fast becoming a minority.
At Nestlé Philippines early retirement programs, unilateral transfer of union members to “exempt”
categories, and promotion of union members to unjustified so-called “supervisory” positions
(without any real change in job content) have been used to dramatically reduce the number of
permanent workers in sales and clerical work. Early retirees as well as regular retirees (and
members who were unilaterally removed by management from “bargainable” positions) are
replaced with casual and fixed-term contract workers as well as third-party contractors. As a
result the Magnolia Employees Labour Organization (MELO) saw their membership fall from
270 in 1996 to just 90 in 2005. Labour hire agencies are used for almost all positions, both in
production and sales force offices. Workers contracted through labour hiring agencies are assigned
to all types of positions normally filled by regular workers, and a substantial proportion of the
workforce is now contractual. These workers are not allowed to work for more that five (5)
months otherwise they may become regulars because of the provisions of the labor law and
they are never recalled even if they had performed exceptionally well simply because they would
accumulate the number of months (6-month period) required by law to become permanent.
These contractuals are replaced with new workers who had never been hired in any Nestle
worksite. Similarly extensive third-party contracting saw the Southern sales force Union of Nestlé
Employees - Cebu, Davao and Cagayan de Oro Sales Offices (UNPESO) left with only 36 members
as of June 2005.
IUF