Fresh & Easy

TESCO is Great Britain’s largest corporation and is second in the world only to Wal- Mart. Company CEO Sir Terry Leahy raised a lot of hope as well as a lot of eyebrows when he announced his company’s ambitious plan to open a brand-new chain in the Southwestern United States.  In 2008, Leahy’s dream became reality when Fresh & Easy, the local name for the new supermarket chain, opened its doors to blaring trumpets and silver confetti. Everyone from local dignitaries and business moguls to a member of the Royal Family were on hand to hear Leahy promise that Fresh & Easy would be good for the communities where they opened stores.

Almost two years after that speech and not a single community has experienced the glorious rewards the company so confidently boasted would befall them. Most insulting of all, TESCO made a deliberate choice not to pay its American employees the same high wages and fair benefit package it offers its British citizens back home. In fact, whereas TESCO provides a whole menu of fringe benefits to its 100% union workforce back in the U.K., they have worked tirelessly to ensure that every last one of its American stores remain non-union.

As this foreign corporation broke its promises in city after city, UFCW locals in California, Arizona and Nevada, with help from our International Union headquartered in Washington, D.C., fought back

A coordinated effort was made to inform the communities where Fresh & Easy does business about four-star treatment of its workers in Britain compared to the second-class treatment it extends to its American employees.