National Express's US troubles will deepen this week when the Teamsters trade union joins an activist shareholder in agitating for change at the transport group's annual general meeting.
A delegation from the Teamsters will confront National Express over alleged blocking of union recruitment efforts in school bus depots. And New York-based Elliott Advisors, the group's largest shareholder, with 17.5%, is still pushing for a strategic overhaul. Elliott was locked in talks with the National Express board, which has resisted Elliott's nomination of a slate of three non-executive directors.
National Express admitted last week that one of Elliott's nominees, former DHL executive Chris Muntwyler, had been shortlisted for a boardroom role. Talks centre on the appointment of two more non-executives with experience in the US or continental Europe.
National Express's fourth-largest shareholder, L&G, became the latest institutional investor to back National Express against Elliott on Friday. However, the Teamsters will ensure that Tuesday's AGM, at which Elliott is urging investors to vote its candidates on to the board, will not pass off peacefully. The union said: "In the UK, National Express accepts union representation, but in the US it has a strong anti-union stance."
The Teamsters claims managers at the group's school bus unit, Durham School Services, have resorted to tactics such as the distribution of memos casting doubt on the benefits of union membership. The role of unions in the US has been a subject of fierce debate ever since the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, ended collective bargaining rights for the majority of the state's public employees.
James Hoffa, general president of the Teamsters, told the Observer: "Middle-class working Americans are under constant attack from big business. This war on workers must stop before every right we have fought so hard to gain is lost."
A National Express spokesman said: "National Express Group's publicly available workplace rights policy expressly protects the rights of employees to join – or not join – a union."