Tesco workers protest outside Castlebar store

MORE than 20 Tesco workers have protested outside the company’s Castlebar store over the company’s refusal to agree on an adequate pay increase for 2025 and denying workers their right to be represented by their union.

The workers demonstrated this afternoon as part of an ongoing national campaign to get Tesco to ‘respect the workers’. 

Mandate has negotiated on behalf of Tesco workers with the company since it entered the Irish market in 1997. However, in recent years, Tesco management has refused to collectively bargain and instead imposed pay awards on workers.

“Tesco is a highly profitable company and that’s largely because of the efforts of their staff. That needs to be recognised,” said Eoin Coates, Divisional Organiser for Mandate.

“Tesco sales are up 9.4 per cent in Ireland, their after-tax profits rose by 10 per cent and they paid a dividend of €100 million to the parent company, but wages only went up by 4 per cent in 2024. The company announced a 3 per cent increase for 2025, which is only half the pay claim of 6 per cent that we lodged a number of months ago,” he added.

The union has also condemned Tesco’s refusal to engage in meaningful collective bargaining and its disregard for the pay and benefits claims submitted by Mandate members.

Tesco Ireland has engaged in agreed independently-mediated discussions with staff representatives and their trade unions. These discussions tried to agree on a new model of engagement to provide timely and definitive outcomes where any proposed change would benefit from negotiations.

The retailer has said it continues ‘to remain open to re-engaging with the trade unions in the future should they have constructive proposals on how such a model can be achieved’.