13 December, 2010
Roquette Frères is a family-controlled transnational based in Lestrem, France, that in September 2009 signed the ten principles of the UN Global Compact. One year later, the company submitted over 70 regressive contract proposals to the US union, Local 48-G of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Union at a corn wet milling plant in Keokuk, Iowa.
When union members rejected the drastic cuts to their living and work standards on 28 September 2010, Roquette America locked its 240-member workforce in Keokuk off their jobs.
That move has now produced an official protest to George Kell, head of the Global Compact. The recommendation to de-list Roquette from the voluntary body comes from the International Union of Food, Agricultural Workers' Association (IUF), the BCTGM’s Global Union Federation, the ICEM, and the American labour centre, AFL-CIO.
“We believe that Roquette Frères actions undermine the legitimacy of the Global Company,” stated IUF General Secretary Ron Oswald, ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a 3 December letter to Kell. “The company should not be able to claim that it supports the Global Compact when in reality it is systematically violating fundamental human rights.”
(The entire letter can be viewed here.)
The company’s collective bargaining agenda in a proposed four-year renewal agreement is especially egregious. It seeks unlimited rights to employ temporary workers at the corn starch plant in America’s heartland; it wants a two-tier wage scheme in which new hires will receive 47% less than other workers; it desires big increases in worker co-payments on their health care; an end to the company’s defined benefit pension scheme, to be replaced by a pension savings plan; elimination of sick leave, maternity leave, and personal days; and Roquette America is seeking an end to workplace seniority on layoffs and job bidding.
The company also wants a wage freeze for the four years.
A week into the lockout, Roquette hired scab workers to run the plant. It has brought in management personnel from a plant it owns in Gurnee, Illinois, and is using replacement workers from temporary labour agencies and an enterprise in the state of Ohio that specializes in providing contingency workers when staff of a company strike or are locked out.
In a further rebuke to the principles of the Global Compact, earlier this year Roquette’s Keokuk plant was hit with a US$1 million fine as a civil penalty regarding air pollution violations. The penalty was part of a consent order by a local district court judge in agreement with the state of Iowa and Roquette, in which the company admitted wrongdoing.
(The IUF's campaign on Roquette can be viewed here.)
Roquette Frères operates in 12 countries and manufactures different corn starches in Keokuk, including starch derivatives and polyols, or sugar alcohols, from the corn wet milling process for use in food and pharmaceutical grade dextrose, corn syrup, and other products.