Labor Relations

Heinz strives to maintain a good working relationship with labor unions. As of October 2008, 65% of Heinz employees in the U.S. and Canada were covered by collective bargaining agreements. Heinz has a history of negotiating fair and competitive contracts that provide family-sustaining jobs and wages. Health and safety also are addressed in the Company’s labor contracts, and the unions play an active role on Health and Safety Committees that help Heinz attain high standards of safety compliance and performance. When labor challenges arise, we work collaboratively with our employees to address those issues.

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Our good relationships with labor unions and employees help to drive safety in the factory. Each factory is scored on reducing its total incident rates, which are based on the number of injuries reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in a year. This encourages hourly employees and unions to foster a continuous improvement mentality.

Most of our plants in the U.S. have labor management committees comprised of local management and union employees. The groups meet monthly to cooperatively improve plant working conditions in a non-adversarial way.

At our Ontario, Oregon, factory, the labor management committee revised its hourly employee incentive program in Fiscal 2009 to tie more closely to factory performance in areas such as productivity, yield and safety. Throughout the process, employees received more detailed information on the scoring metrics used to measure success and worked collaboratively to deliver positive results by implementing ideas to make the plant more productive and their jobs less physically straining. As a result, the plant’s performance improved.

In the UK, a new consultative approach between Heinz management and the newly formed Unite union has resulted in the Kitt Green facility’s 1,400 unionized employees aligning more closely to the organization’s model/structure. This new relationship has delivered significant agreements to major policy and procedural changes, issues that in the past strained the employment relationship. To further improve the application of new agreements, joint training sessions have been executed and attended by both union representatives and facility managers. To build on this more collaborative relationship, a new Management/Union Forum has been established to enable both parties to raise concerns with each other prior to them becoming issues.

During Fiscal Years 2008 and 2009, there was no significant period of work stoppage at any Heinz facility.