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Unionists from around the world aired their concerns about poor practices in global delivery firm Deutsche Post DHL in front of a top executive from the company this week.

The 72 activists representing 41 unions from 29 countries met at the ITF global delivery network meeting in London, UK, on 19-20 May, which was held in cooperation with fellow global union UNI. There they listened to a presentation from Ria Hendrikx, Deutsche Post DHL executive vice president of human resources guidelines, personnel and labour management, who outlined the difficulties of integrating the more than 100 companies around the world and 500,000 staff that make up Deutsche Post DHL. She said: “In Europe it’s normal to work with social partners. But in other parts of the world it’s not yet very common to have a constructive dialogue with social partners, which doesn’t always make it easy to convince them of the benefits.”

Following her presentation, several unionists highlighted the problems their members were facing. Anna Kenny from Auckland, New Zealand, for example, outlined what had occurred in DHL Global Forwarding: “There is a refusal to extend coverage of a collective agreement to women in administrative roles. It’s 2010 and it’s illegal to discriminate against women like this. These are mostly Polynesian women.” This, she said, reflected very poorly on DHL.

Meanwhile, Lakshmanan Bhaskaran from DHL in India stated how unionised workers, himself included, had been dismissed with no explanation. A number of cases were in the process of being heard in the labour courts, he said.

Hendrikx’s explained that the company had implemented a code of conduct, but reiterated the fact that it was difficult to control whether or not all 500,000 staff around the world complied with this code.

A global agreement would be a key way forward, stated Neil Anderson, UNI head of post and logistics.

Participants also passed a resolution pledging solidarity with UPS workers in Turkey who have been under attack for attempting to join the ITF-affiliated union Türkiye Motorlu Tasit Isçileri Sendikasi.