Every morning, tens of thousands of security guards in India report for duty at malls, hospitals, factories and construction sites, wearing the uniform of G4S, the British security giant, now owned by Allied Universal, the largest private security firm in the world. They are promised eight-hour shifts at hiring and decent pay. Instead, guards report unpaid overtime, denial of written contracts and suppression of unionisation.These findings come from a new UNI Global Union report, On Duty and Unprotected, based on interviews with 104 G4S guards across nine cities in four Indian states – Maharashtra, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat – conducted between April and August this year. The pattern is not confined to a few difficult worksites; it recurs in nearly every city and every type of site covered.Many guards said they never saw a written contract, others didn’t understand the language what they signed. Some relied on an identity card, renewed year to year, as their only proof of employment after decades on the job. Others described standing 12 hours with no seating, insufficient breaks to even eat or use the rest room, and working outdoors through extreme heat, cold and hazardous pollution without so much as a hat or a mask.Wages were unfairly docked for taking leave, including sick and bereavement leave. One guard told us that after leaving to attend her father’s funeral, she returned to find she had been replaced.Underneath this sits a deliberate suppression of the one tool that could fix it. Guards who are not unionised told us they want to be; those who are unionised told us the company targets them for it. Management, several said, instructs workers to not exercise their rights to organise union and treats any attempt to do so as grounds for dismissal.Others point to violations of a whole different order: caste-based discrimination in duty assignments; a woman guard harassed by a colleague who then engineered her dismissal after she objected; women guards given no changing facilities of their own; and a guard beaten by a mob who received medical treatment but no pay for the days he missed.The conditions G4S guards describe are an abuse of their basic rights, as workers and as humans. Freedom of association, non-discrimination and a safe working environment are, under the International Labour Organisation’s 1998 Declaration and its 2022 amendment, fundamental rights at work, owed regardless of a country’s laws or level of development.G4S knows this. Its Global Human Rights Policy is built, in theory, on the UN Guiding Principles on business and human rights and lists freedom of association and collective bargaining among the “core rights” most relevant to its business. The same policy commits G4S to comply with legal requirements on wages and employment terms, including for casual and agency staff, and states it will not tolerate discrimination or harassment in any form.The company’s own website goes further, describing an ongoing programme of human rights due diligence and country-level risk reviews meant to catch precisely these kinds of abuses before they take hold.What our researchers found is what that policy and that due-diligence process are supposed to prevent. G4S also signed a global agreement with UNI, committing it to recognise unions and bargain with them in good faith.UNI’s demand is not a new one, and it is not complicated. G4S should live up to the commitments it has already made in writing, its own human rights policy, its stated due-diligence practices and the global agreement it signed with us.That means ending retaliation against guards who organise or speak to a union, issuing every guard a written contract in a language they can understand, paying in full for every hour worked, providing breaks, protective equipment and the safe facilities the law requires.It means treating the caste discrimination and harassment documented here as seriously as any other breach of those commitments, not as separate, lesser matters. We are not asking G4S and Allied Universal for anything beyond what they have already promised, several times over. We are asking them to keep those promises.Rajendra Acharya is the regional secretary for Asia & Pacific at UNI Global Union which represents more than 20 million workers in 150 countries.