The “race to the bottom” is often thought of in terms of cheaper labor attracting jobs from the first world to the third world. But in today’s globalized economy the race to the bottom among third world countries is at least as destructive. A recent book by U.S. labor and women’s historian Dana Frank called Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) describes a powerful example: the Latin American banana industry. (For the book’s discussion of women banana workers’ unionism, see the previous blog.)
Four hundred thousand men and women work on the export-sector banana plantations of Latin America. Three transnational corporations – Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte – control two-thirds of the sales of Latin American bananas. The plantations are scattered around Honduras, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama Columbia, and Ecuador. 37,000 Latin American banana workers are represented by unions – a union density approaching that of the U.S. private sector.
In the 1970s, the Ecuadorian banana unions were destroyed. Since then, Ecuador has led the race to the bottom. It now employs over 250,000 of the region’s 400,000 banana workers – all nonunion. Workers who try to organize are fired, blacklisted, and threatened with assassination. Its banana workers make as little as one-fifth the wages and benefits of other Latin American banana workers. Their work is highly casualized without job security or benefits. That’s why, according to Dana Frank, “the banana transnationals are gradually pulling out of other parts of Latin America and sourcing from Ecuador, or using Ecuador as a pretext to lower standards elsewhere.”
Big Banana has used other techniques to weaken labor. Since the 1950s they have increasingly sold their plantations and bought bananas from subcontractors; Chiquita, for example, sold off its entire operation in Columbia in 2004. Since the late 1990s, the employers have moved from regular jobs to “flexible” work arrangements that provide no job security or standard working hours. And of course, they have used political repression and outright violence against workers throughout their history. (Many will remember the concealed massacre of striking banana workers in Macondo described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; his recent autobiography Living to Tell the Tale reveals that this was based on a real massacre of banana workers that took place in the town where he spent his early childhood and which served as the model for Macondo.)
At the end of the cold war, banana companies bet on a huge expansion of sales in Russia and Eastern Europe – and lost. Faced with overproduction and plummeting prices, they began squeezing workers and threatening to move to Ecuador.
Any group of workers who threatened to resist were likely to find their employer simply pulling up stakes and moving somewhere with a better “labor climate” – just as the fictional banana company abandoned Macondo after the strike in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Banana union leader German Zepeda noted,
“Logically, there was a big problem with the banana labor movement in Latin America. We’d never met. Even at the level of individual countries, we had so many unions and didn’t even know each other.”
Faced with a regional crisis, leaders from banana unions in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica met informally in 1993 to organize support for Costa Rican banana workers’ resistance to intense union busting. They created a new organization called the Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions (COLSIBA). According to Dana Frank, “In all of Latin America, COLSIBA is the only organization that joins unions in the same sector across national lines in an autonomous regional coalition.”
COLSIBA delegates meet several times a year to analyze developments in the global banana industry and organize common responses. “When crises emerge in a given country – a strike, for example, or the Del Monte kidnappings in Guatemala – COLSIBA leaders are quick to travel to the region, launch international press campaigns, and link up with allies.”
In 2001, COLSIBA coordinated an agreement with Chiquita. Half of Chiquita’s workers are unionized, and they make up 90 percent of the unionized banana workers in Latin America. For whatever reasons, since the late ‘90s Chiquita had been positioning itself as the “socially responsible” banana corporation. Through the good offices of the International Union of Food Workers, the global union federation for the food industry, an agreement was negotiated in which Chiquita pledged to respect worker rights. The agreement established COLSIBA as the representative of banana workers throughout much of the region. The agreement applies to anti-union activity by the company at its unionized plantations and protects the right of workers to organize at plantations that Chiquita owns or subcontracts with.
How much protection the agreement will provide in practice is still being tested. But it has already established two facts. Even under extremely adverse conditions, people who work in the same industry or company can create links for cooperation and even joint bargaining across national boundaries. And when they do so, they are likely to be a lot stronger than if they try to take on powerful global corporations one union or even one country at a time.
y.r.
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