When something goes wrong in a production chain – a wrecked sewing workshop collapses with seamstresses and all, underage or forced laborers are on an assembly line, parcel deliverers work underpaid 16-hour workdays with no legal certainty – headquarters is always shocked and never responsible.
The CEO didn’t know anything. Besides, it has nothing to do with it. Because the work is outsourced to an independent subcontractor, even to a subcontractor, and we are just a cog in a complex chain. It is fascinating to see how men and women who usually like to live big (big office, big salary, big mouth against unions, press or politicians) can make themselves very small in such cases.
The Belgian Public Prosecutor Gianni Reale has been through this for some time and now the CEO of Post NL Belgium has been arrested. He just sat in the cell, the general director Belgium of a listed company. Because it is possible, according to the suspicion, that the parcel delivery model that PostNL uses comes down to trade in illegal employees, evasion of tax obligations and so on.
Oh and woe and anger at the Dutch headquarters of PostNL of course. How dare the Belgians criminalize our wonderful company, arrest our people, imprison them without clean underwear. But they had been warned. Last November, Reale already told in de Volkskrant about his suspicion that abuses in PostNL sorting centers in Wommelgem (unpaid overtime, illegal employment, undeclared work, evasion of tax obligations and labor rights) can be classified as ‘violations at the most serious level’. It carries a prison sentence of three years. That can go up to the highest echelons in the company.’
What he also said: that prosecuting subcontractors has not proved sufficient, that a ‘systematic approach’ is necessary, that it is ‘a lucrative model’ for large parcel companies, and that, as far as he is concerned, ‘PostNL co-organizes the fraud’.
So that’s what ‘systematic approach’ looks like: it’s in.
With this sensational step, a Dutch export product is on trial in Belgium. A business model that is popular with us not only in the parcel industry, but also in meal delivery, journalism, the creative sector, healthcare and construction. It is based on three pillars: playing underpaid bogus self-employed people against each other, washing their hands in innocence and proudly presenting shiny profit figures to the shareholders.
Marieke de Ruiter, who de for this newspaper Verelendung in white delivery vans, recalled in a wonderful report last year how a PostNL purchasing director boasted in a lecture ten years ago that they had thrown ‘the ballast’ of the collective labor agreement overboard in the parcels division. By ‘organizing around the law’, without all those ‘solidarity taxes agreed upon by baby boomers’.
Unfortunately, here in the Netherlands we don’t have a Gianni Reale who storms onto the stage and drags such a patjepeeer to prison by the ear. A lot is allowed here. Here we solve abuses by poldering in endless consultations between trade unions and employers and all kinds of representative bodies. There is now an impressive stack of agreements on minimum rates, compulsory social insurance for all workers, and other workers’ rights and hiring obligations. The practice is grudgingly behind that.
Sometimes the Netherlands could use a little more Belgium.