Establishing that a parent may owe a duty of care to its subsidiaries' workers moves matters on.This worries some, who fear that multinationals will think twice about incorporating in Britain.
Its chief executive, Manfred Schneider, has sold off peripheral businesses and spun off the loss-making fibres division into a separate subsidiary, requiring workers to take a pay cut.
Meanwhile, Unilever, with Group Danone, has agreed to work with B Lab and others to make the B Corp status workable for multinational companies with numerous lines of businesses, products, subsidiaries and workers in different countries with different wage scales, among other things.
Failure to follow orders or the temerity to raise doubts were grounds for transfer to a subsidiary, where insubordinate workers were forced to wax floors and clean toilets.
Rather, the Bush administration's Labor Department decided that because the legislation did not specifically protect workers at subsidiaries of public companies, those workers remained unprotected.
The Investor Protection Act that passed the House Financial Services Committee last month includes an amendment extending whistle-blower protection to workers at subsidiaries and affiliates of public companies.
These local subsidiaries then commonly source workers through labour supply companies, small firms that hire out labourers to work for other companies.
Toyota, Japan's largest automaker, reported that its car assembly plants had resumed production after a brief stoppage — though four factories operated by Toyota subsidiaries remained closed while workers were evacuated to safer areas.
Since Germany's last recession, in 1993, its companies have greatly increased their return on capital as they have shed unproductive workers and subsidiaries or moved to low-cost locations.
Berkshire and its subsidiaries have about 225,000 workers, the company said this week in regulatory filings, which is 8.6percentt lower than the 246,083 employees it reported in its 2008 annual report.
