DHL’s Failure to Abide by International Standards

This independent academic investigation, based on interviews with workers in Chile, Panama and Colombia, has found that German multinational Deutsche Post DHL “grievously and systematically” fails to live up to its own procedures, aspirations and promises set out in its ‘Code of Conduct’, as well as to international labor standards.

The report is based on interviews with DHL workers in Chile, Colombia and Panama, here’s an exert:

• Alentina Pacheco, DHL worker in Chile, was injured at work due to a lack of training. But her manager “demands that as a 48 year old woman I fulill the same targets as a 28 to 30 year old man”.
• José Ignacio in Colombia joined the union, but then saw his son fired from DHL with testimony that DHL faked a customer’s letter calling for his dismissal.
• Miguel García, a DHL Panama pilot, was made to pay for the repair of his aircraft and hotel costs after a forced landing abroad. He was then suspended after he took his case to the Civil Aviation Authority.
• The sacking of 42 DHL Chile workers for calling a strike. “We recognise the existence of a campaign by the company to eliminate the trade union”, said Pablo Millán, DHL Express union.
• Union members threatened with dismissal to stop whistleblowing about the DHL’s conduct, claims DHL wrote union resignation letters for employees.
• Claims that DHL monitors employees’ conversations with hidden microphones, intercepts the phone calls of trade unionists.

This activity clearly breaches the Deutsche Post DHL Code of Conduct that enshrines International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98 on freedom of association, and the rights to organize and to collective bargaining.

“This commitment should make DHL a beacon of good conduct in Latin America”, said the reports author, Dr Victor Figueroa Clark of the London School of Economics. “Sadly, the evidence from the workers I interviewed for my report paints an overwhelmingly different picture. The multiple, frequent and institutional anti-union practices described in this report are difficult to interpret as anything but the result of an anti-union policy originating from the heart of the company in Germany”.