The worker states that he resigned from DHL under the pressure of an ever-increasing workload of more clients and more responsibilities, without any increase in salary. He had, he says, been promised that this excessive workload would stop or at the very least not be increased, and that he would earn a promotion with better pay. He resigned once these promises were proven to be empty: “After nine years and three months, they recently started to rotate me between jobs with the same grade. I received mounting responsibilities without any discussion of my wages,” he says, “they did it in order to demoralise me. And my reaction was to quit the job.”

Other workers have resigned under similar pressure, he alleges, with supervisors’ doling out of assignments and promotion being heavily influenced by favouritism. “It’s common that only the chiefs’ friends are promoted.”

When the workers turned to the idea of a union to hold the supervisors accountable to their promises, their hope of change was shattered, he reports, with a supervisor telling them: “Listen, they are not forming a union… if they form one, it won’t be active here. Otherwise, there would be neither a pay increase nor any job promotions.” Not only did the supervisors announce a union would not get them the work conditions they had wanted, but they expressed outright hostility to the idea.

The workers recounts: “there were proposals to form a union. The logistics director told us that what trade unions do is kill companies and prevent job creation. He said that in Colombia it was not appropriate to form a union because most of the businesses that DHL was trying to enter would shy away if at any time they saw that a union was being formed.” The worker suspects that even direct threats were made to discourage his co-workers from promoting the idea of unionisation.