Done with due diligence? Barry Callebaut pressures workers to withdraw non-compliance claims in India in return for access to collective bargaining rights
A day after Barry Callebaut terminated the elected trade union representative of the Barry Callebaut Employees Union (BCEU) in Baramati, India, on November 6, 2023, national management offered to sign a collective agreement with the union. But on one condition. BCEU must state that all of the rights violations and abuses by the management that occurred over the past 12 months are untrue. In other words, for union members to exercise their collective bargaining rights, the union must lie. The assumption is that the withdrawal of all the (well-documented) allegations will allow the company to claim it was always in compliance.
After months of pressure and harassment and the victimization of the union’s elected General Secretary – ultimately ending in his unfair termination – union membership fell from 28 to just 18. But the global company still wants the remaining 18 workers to say it was all untrue. In return they will be allowed to have a collective agreement ....
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This raises serious questions about how Barry Callebaut views compliance and how it addresses allegations of rights violations ...
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.... major global food companies that are supplied by Barry Callebaut were asked by unions to investigate and carry out their own human rights due diligence. So they asked Barry Callebaut. That was the extent of it. More rigorous due diligence involved longer conversations with Barry Callebaut. The same replies came back. No one spoke to the union. No one spoke to the workers involved.
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No one asked any questions beyond the answers already given by local management. That in itself is a failure of human rights diligence and sends a warning signal regarding both compliance and corporate governance.
The fact that global companies that buy chocolate ingredients from Barry Callebaut also did not ask these questions suggests that due diligence has simply not been done.