American Federation of Labour & Congress of Industrial Organizations
Pressrelease

For Immediate Release Contact: Erich Hahn, 212-265-7000 x233

Unions Worldwide Charge PPR With Violating Internationally-Recognized Corporate Responsibility Standards

Call on Governments to Take Up Complaint Against Pinault-Printemps-Redoute

(Washington, DC, July 22, 2002) A historic array of international unions have charged French multinational Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR) with violating key international corporate responsibility standards at the Brylane clothing warehouse in Indiana. The thousand workers there are forming a union in order to win safety and a voice on the job, yet the company has repeatedly harassed and intimidated the workers.

In a step rarely take, the major trade union federations of France, the Netherlands and the U.S. have joined together in urging their governments to take up the case against the parent company of French retailers Printemps, FNAC and Conforama, and Amsterdam-based fashion house Gucci.

Last week, the three major labor federations of France, the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), and FO (Confédération Générale du Travail -Force Ouvrière), joined by the leading Dutch trade union federation, FNV (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging), and the AFL-CIO, urged their governments to take up a complaint filed by the U.S. union, UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). The complaint charges PPR with violating the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The Brylane employees are forming a union to improve an extremely unsafe workplace. According to the company’s own records, one out of every ten workers at its Indianapolis distribution center suffered a repetitive motion injury a rate of injury nearly 18 times higher than the
industry-wide average for repetitive motion injuries in the year 2000.

John Evans, General-Secretary of TUAC (Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD), which represents the national labor federations of the OECD countries, called for prompt action yesterday to end PPR’s violations of workers’ rights at Brylane. “PPR has the image of a decent company in France and Europe,” said Evans, “yet in Indiana its subsidiary Brylane is adopting the worst kind of repression of basic workers’ rights to organize. It should stop its repression and respect its workers’ right to join a union.”

“PPR’s blatant attempt to use intimidation and harassment to deny its employees in Indiana a voice at work exemplifies the hypocritical behavior of companies that respect workers’ rights at home but cast them aside when they go overseas” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who also serves as president of TUAC. “We applaud the actions taken by our brothers and sister unions in France and Holland, as it is this kind of international cooperation that is needed to hold multinationals like PPR accountable to basic standards of corporate responsibility.”

The case, which was originally filed by UNITE with the U.S. State Department Office of Investment Affairs and has now been submitted to the French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry and the Dutch National Contact Point accuses PPR of violating the OECD Guidelines through a campaign of harassment and intimidation against workers seeking to form a union at its Brylane distribution center in Indianapolis, Indiana. In one incident cited in the complaint, after an employee addressed his co-workers about why he supported forming a union, a PPR manager allegedly offered to get a gun and “shut him up.” The Guidelines, which have been adopted by the governments of the 30 OECD member nations, expressly direct their countries’ multinationals to respect the right of workers to form unions. The call for government inquiry under the OECD Guidelines for Multinationals is just the latest in a series of sharp criticisms of PPR’s corporate practices being brought by the AFL-CIO and other corporate responsibility advocates. Last week, over fifty European and US stock analysts and institutional investors attended a presentation in New York by the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, which detailed serious weaknesses in PPR’s corporate governance practices

(http://www.aflcio.org/publ/press2002/pr0716a.htm). The New York meeting followed the release in May at the PPR annual general meeting of a report by the French corporate responsibility research center CFIE (Centre Français d'Information sur les Enterprises) which also criticized PPR’s governance and also aired reports of illegal “sweatshop” conditions at factories producing apparel for PPR in India, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand.

PPR is a multinational retailing and distribution firm headquartered in Paris, France with facilities in 55 countries, including fifteen members of the OECD. PPR subsidiaries include: Redcats, FNAC and Printemps in France, and Gucci in Italy and the Netherlands. The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) is a voluntary federation of 66 national and international labor unions representing 13 million working women and men from every walk of life.

The Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) is an interface for labor unions with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). TUAC's affiliates consist of more than 56 national trade union centers in the 30 OECD industrialized countries, which together represent some 70 million workers.