M&S: Doing The Right Thing?

Tory “human rights” advocate Joanna Lumley presently serves as M&S’s high profile ambassador for PlanA, which is the name for their latest highly publicised ethical trading initiative. Yet given the ongoing attacks on the pay and conditions of the employees of M&S’s major suppliers here in Leicester – that is, at the RF Brookes factory in South Wigston – it is questionable as to how committed M&S really are to the promotion of ethical trading.

M&S’s PlanA has this to say about exploitation:

We’re only as strong as the communities in which we trade, so it makes good sense for us to be a fair partner – paying a fair price to suppliers, supporting local communities and ensuring good working conditions for everyone involved in our supply chains.

M&S Chief Executive Marc Bolland informs us that PlanA was launched in 2007 to, amongst other things, address “rising social inequality,” in order to help them become the world’s most sustainable retailer. Marc goes further, and in fact, observes: “we are already working with suppliers on a series of best practice programmes…”

As part of PlanA, M&S acknowledge that they need to engage with all their business partners “to improve ethical” performance. They have thus “developed and distributed a Food Supplier Sustainability Framework” to their suppliers, which covers a whole host of nice sounding principles including “labour standards,” which is clearly the issue of most concern to the workers in their supply chain.

This brings us to the complaints of the factory workers employed by 2 Sisters Food Group, an organisation which employs nearly 20,000 people, and predominantly serves as a private label manufacturer for supermarkets like M&S. You might also know 2 Sisters from a number of other branded products including Buxted, Devonshire Red, Fox’s Biscuits, Goodfella’s Pizza, Matthew Walker Christmas puddings and Green Isle vegetables.

Ongoing industrial disputes involving 2 Sisters include one in Leicester, at the RF Brookes factory in South Wigston, and a more recent one at the Cavaghan & Gray factory in Carlisle. Here 2 Sisters are in many ways emulating the attacks on workers waged by their major contractor, M&S, who in August 2008 sacked one of its workers who had blown the whistle on their (soon to be ditched) plans to slash the redundancy terms of its 60,000 staff by up to 25%.

Either way despite such an inglorious history, M&S Chief Executive Marc Bolland did not blush when in the wake of the RF Brookes strike action he accepted an award from Business in the Community president, HRH The Prince of Wales, for M&S being named Responsible Business of the Year. M&S was however no stranger to such corporate propaganda, as this was the third time the company has picked up the award in recent years.

Bolland of course is highly responsible to business interests, rather than to human interests, through his service on the board of directors of the US-based Manpower Group where he actively encourages business attacks on every workers right to a secure and full-time job: Manpower being one of the largest temporary staffing companies in the world.

To end on a light-hearted note, last year the Financial Times awarded Manpower their Golden Flannel Award for utter gibberish “for describing itself thus: ‘Our $22 billion company creates unique time to value through a comprehensive suite of innovative solutions that help clients win in the Human Age.’”

Show your support for the 2 Sisters workers across the country by joining us at 2 pm at a protest called by the “Right To Work” campaign outside of Marks & Spencer on Gallowtree Gate.