Tesco's employment practices in the USA have been under scrutiny since the company's entry into the market in 2007. The report highlights the company's commitment to launching and growing a neighborhood convenience store subsidiary, Fresh & Easy, with an ambition of 1,000 stores. However, the report also notes that the company's policies and principles do not travel well across the Atlantic, and that employees in the USA rely on union-employer collective agreements to provide them with decent pay rates and a living wage, pensions, and affordable health insurance, job security, and protection against unfair dismissal. The report also notes that retail employees and unions in the USA looked forward expectantly to Tesco's arrival, having learned of the company's high standards of employment, underpinned by its own global policies on employment and human rights and evidenced by the ground-breaking partnership agreement between Tesco and the UK's retail union, Usdaw.
