Unilever just agreed to protect the jobs and pay of roughly 4,800 European food workers for two years after its $65 billion merger with U.S. spice giant McCormick closes, and the deal is already drawing fire for leaving workers outside Europe with nothing.

The guarantee, revealed in an internal memo seen by Reuters, was quietly negotiated with Unilever's European Works Council, the body that represents nearly 20,000 employees across Europe and Britain. It locks the combined McCormick-Unilever Foods business into existing pay and employment terms until at least mid-2029, assuming the merger closes on schedule in mid-2027.

Why this is unusual

Two years is twice the length of what these deals typically offer. Under both European Union and British law, employee contracts and collective bargaining agreements can be renegotiated just one year after a sale or spin-off. Unilever has gone further, essentially shielding affected workers from the kind of immediate cost-cutting restructuring that often follows a large merger.

That said, the bar for comparison is set by Unilever's own recent history. When the company separated its ice cream business (the unit that owns Magnum and Ben and Jerry's), workers in that division secured a three-year commitment. So the food workers' two-year deal, while better than the legal minimum, lands slightly below the most recent precedent.

The geography problem

The guarantee covers Europe and Britain. Outside those regions, Unilever has agreed to nothing.

Sarah Meyer, assistant general secretary of the IUF, a global union federation whose membership includes thousands of Unilever employees, was direct about what that implies. "We would hope that the two-year guarantee is provided globally as to not send a message that workers outside of Europe are worth less than their European counterparts," she told Reuters.

Meyer also connected this to a pattern. During the ice cream separation, workers outside Europe received no equivalent commitment on terms and conditions. The IUF is publicly pushing to avoid a repeat.

The mechanism here matters. European works councils have legal standing to negotiate directly with company management before major corporate transactions take effect. Workers in many other countries, including in large parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa where Unilever operates, have no equivalent institution with that kind of formal bargaining leverage. The result is a two-tier outcome built not on intent but on legal architecture.

What comes next

The merger itself still has roughly a year of runway before it closes. McCormick, the Maryland-based company behind Old Bay and Frank's RedHot, is buying Unilever's food brands including Knorr stock cubes and Hellmann's mayonnaise. The combined business will be one of the largest food ingredient and condiment companies in the world.

For European workers, the next meaningful date is mid-2029, when the two-year protection expires. What happens after that depends on how the merged company performs and what market pressures look like by then. For workers elsewhere, the pressure now falls on whether Unilever and McCormick choose to extend equivalent terms voluntarily.

The European Works Council's memo, sent to workers last week, acknowledged progress but stopped short of declaring the matter settled. The council had previously warned that prolonged uncertainty could trigger industrial action. That warning appears to have helped move negotiations along.

What this story is really about is not a single memo or a two-year window. It is the widening gap between the formal protections workers can extract through organized bargaining and the ad hoc, geography-dependent outcomes everyone else gets. When a $65 billion deal can produce meaningfully different levels of job security depending solely on where a worker happens to live, that gap is not incidental. It is structural.