A foreign logistics behemoth — the kind that puts its name on half the delivery vans crawling through EDSA — has a labor problem it would rather call a business decision.

Ten days into a strike, some 473 warehouse hands are still on the picket line, fighting what their union calls a closure dressed up as necessity.

The workers tell their story: they organize, they win certification as the sole bargaining unit for their shop, and within days management walks into the first conciliation conference not to negotiate but to hand out redundancy letters. Separation pay pre-computed. A termination date already circled at the end of August.

Nosy Tarsee learned that the company’s excuse is that a retail client’s contract has lapsed. The union isn’t buying it. The workers say management told them, in a town hall no less, that the same contract ran through 2025. No one at the top has produced paperwork showing otherwise.

What makes the timing hard to swallow is the sequence: certification election, then sudden shutdown.

An old trick, say labor advocates. Cry “closure,” cry “redundancy,” and the union problem disappears along with the warehouse.

There’s a wrinkle. The workers have taken their picket signs down south, to a sister facility in Laguna, on suspicion that operations are simply being shifted there — a runaway shop, in labor parlance, built to keep the business running while the organized workforce gets left behind at the old shop.

The union president, a soft-spoken organizer who led the certification drive, put it plainly: we’re being punished for exercising a constitutional right, and so now we’re exercising another — our right to strike.

The workers also pointed out to Nosy Tarsee an older, unresolved grievance: wage distortions dating back to 2018, ignored for years because there was no recognized union to press the case.

The irony hanging over it all: the company is a signatory to a global framework agreement —with international transport and trade union federations, no less, committing it to respect collective bargaining wherever it operates.

Somebody might want to ask the Manila office how that squares with redundancy letters delivered at a bargaining table.

The Department of Labor has been asked to step in. So far, silence.