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	Global Framework Agreement August 10, 2004 About Global Compact Article published in French on its web site by NOVETHIC, a subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts July 29, 2003 All the articles for Labor Rights

The Group’s Top Management must bring illegal practice to a stop in subsidiary Gulf Marine Fabricators

Further to taking over of COFLEXIP by TECHNIP, our union was contacted by US union SWAT (AFL-CIO) to take action towards the Top Management of the TECHNIP-COFLEXIP Group to obtain the latter’s compliance with US National Labor Relations Act and to get it to stop to illegally coercing employees to prevent collective bargaining of a contract setting employee’s benefits, salary and working conditions in COFLEXIP yard.

Daniel VALOT committed to compliance in the new TECHNIP-COFLEXIP Group with the right to organize and to collective bargaining defined in the principles set by the International Labor Organization.

Further to violations of the right to implement the legal procedure for getting union recorded by our fellow-employees of TECHNIP-COFLEXIP in the USA and to the lack of answer from the President to our letters, we have been invited to verify on the spot the violations of the US laws governing labor issues and the severe safety problems met on this site.

This unlawful behaviour is highlighted by an article in Le Monde dated April 19, published yesterday and reproduced below.

The Top Management must comply with its commitments and annul the sanctions imposed by the Management of GULF MARINE FABRICATORS against two US employees who expressed support to collective bargaining of a contract in their company.

Gulf Marine Fabricators, a strategic asset

The creation of an integrated Group with the capacity to propose comprehensive a-to-z solutions in the offshore sector is one of the industrial objectives which was indicated as being the reason for the creation of TECHNIP-COFLEXIP: this makes of the two construction yards of Gulf Marine Fabricators in Aransas Pass and Ingleside in Texas a strategic asset:

  due to the exceptional situation of their site,

  due to the wide range of services they can supply for the fabrication or assembly of any type of platform used by the oil companies in this area,

  due to the capacity of Ingleside yard to have ships berth at its deep water quay, and thus to act as assembly yard for Topsides on FPSO’s,

  due to their capacity to act as maintenance or remodelling sites for the ships in the Group’s fleet, and more specifically for the Deep Blue.

Logically, Gulf Marine Fabricators should have a policy regarding the performance of production facilities, safety issues and corporate employee training, in line with the objectives of the Group.

We were sorry to note that reality on the spot is completely different.

Technip-Coflexip and PPR unions called for support by the employees of subsidiaries in the USA

U.S. federation AFL-CIO asked CGT, FO and SUD unions to support its efforts to enforce the organization process in the companies recently taken over by the two French groups.

Further to mergers and acquisitions, union representatives of the French companies discover in foreign subsidiaries, in the USA in particular, a reality they did not quite expect. One after the other, representatives of UGICT-CGT of Technip-Coflexip, specialized in oil-related engineering services, and unions of retail group Pinault-Printemps-La Redoute (PPR), have been called for support by powerful U.S. union federation AFL-CIO, to expose the "hindering actions" to organizing and union acknowledgement in the firms which have become subsidiaries of the two French groups. In December 2001, Saint-Gobain unions had also campaigned to obtain the acknowledgement of a union in the group’s subsidiary Abrasives, in Massachussets.

Returning from a one week trip at the beginning of April to Aransas Pass (Texas), on the Mexican Gulf coast, the delegation of UGICT-CGT of Technip-Coflexip did not expect to have to interpellate the top management of the group to request it to, at least, comply with the rules set by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in the group’s subsidiary Gulf Marine Fabricators. Acquired by Coflexip at the beginning of 2001, this offshore platform steel structure construction and assembly firm has 650 employees, more than 50 % of which being Mexican or Spanish speaking.

According to the statements recorded, working hours are near 70 hours per week ; wages are very low, and working and safety conditions are "as one would have expected to find (them) in a third world country, not in the United States", stresses Claudine Carel, union representative of Technip France. A few months ago, the Swat (Shipyard Workers and Allied Trades), part of the AFL-CIO, initiated an organizing campaign in this company. According to the French delegation, the management has since kept initiating increasingly numerous intimidation actions and threats towards workers. "We believe at Gulf Marine that working together in a union-free environment is the most efficient way to work (...) We do not need a union, it is totally unnecessary", has in particular declared Brinson Miles, president of Gulf Marine Fabricators, during a meeting attended by employees and held on March 15, 2001.

According to the US law, the acknowledgement of a union requires a vote for the union of half the employees, or previous signing-up of union authorization cards. Employers try to block this organizing process, this procedure involving their initiating collective bargaining and their accepting the presence of union activists controlling hiring.

Threats and blackmail

Union representatives did not start calling for the attention of their management towards this subsidiary upon their return from Texas. To date, their request has remained unanswered. But they consider that the situation does not quite fit with the image of the group which Technip-Coflexip wishes to create. The group as a whole has 18 000 employees (including engineers and supervisors) and includes entities located in thirty-five countries.

Unions (CGT, Sud, FO and CNT) of the Prin-temps-Pinault-La Redoute Fnac group have chosen the opportunity offered by a meeting of the European Group Committee on April 17 and 18, held in Paris, to welcome a delegation of the Indianapolis (Indiana) Brylane unit. Brylane is a mail order retailer taken over by Redcats, the mail order retail branch of PPR. They had already made a trip on the spot last Autumn to support the acknowledgement of Unite union (AFL-CIO) in the US subsidiary.

According to the union, the top management of Brylane called for the assistance of a union-busting consultant firm to intimidate the 1 000 employees of this warehouse, mostly hispanic. Threats to terminate the employees, blackmail threatening their jobs and threatening them to be deported from the USA, creation of union support assessment files: all means are said to be used to prevent employees from supporting the union and from participating in the organizing campaign, which is a necessary step for a company to become union.

According to PPR’s CGT union, the Group’s top management has, notwithstanding its repeated demands, rejected any negotiation, granting full responsibility for the management of this dispute to the U.S. managers of Brylane.

Michel Delberghe
Article published in french in LE MONDE, dated 19.04.02, translated by UGICT CGT TECHNIP.