Apr 2, 2012
Peruvian workers from across the country have taken to the airwaves, describing their precarious daily reality and advocating for justice in the workplace. In doing so, they are sending a strong message to Peruvian lawmakers and, at the same time, educating other workers.
For workers like Maria Morales, the current debate in the Peruvian Congress over reforms to Agricultural Sector Promotion Law 27360—which governs all workers in the industry and was launched as a “temporary measure” in 2000 to foster the growth of new exports—is one of many milestones in a much longer advocacy process. Morales and her co-workers have helped spark a broader conversation about the law by broadcasting their stories on community radio, calling on Peruvian lawmakers to support “agro-exportation without exploitation.”
Law 27360 has become, in effect, a permanent mandate and a major obstacle to improving the standard of living for hundreds of thousands of rural Peruvians. The law codifies substandard protections for agro-export workers, including a compensation package below the minimum wage, half the normal vacation days, and fewer protections from arbitrary dismissal. This means workers like Morales toil 12–18 hours a day in the fields planting and harvesting asparagus, peppers, and other produce for export to the United States. They earn an average of just $8 per day, can be fired for becoming pregnant or organizing a union, and can be hired on short-term, continuously renewable contracts, keeping them in a constant state of fear that they will lose their job if they complain.
In contrast, the large agribusiness firms that dominate this sector have grown enormously profitable, earning $3.6 billion from January to October 2011 alone. In the 10-plus years since the law was established, the agro-export sector has grown 400 percent.
Faced with this reality, the Solidarity Center in Peru, in cooperation with Peru’s four main union confederations, held a series of regional and national workshops that helped workers identify their key message within the broader issue and carefully shape that message to have the greatest effect possible in the public arena. The participants interviewed one another, provided constructive feedback, and assisted one another in recording their testimonies based on what they had experienced in their own workplace. Although workers from a number of different sectors attended the workshop, all participants pledged their solidarity with Peru’s agro-export workers in light of the special conditions afforded to employers by Law 27360. The result was a series of four radio spots.
The testimonies of Morales and her peers have been broadcast to more than 60 education and community radio stations through the National Radio Coordinating Body, a Peruvian radio station network. Recognizing that any successful advocacy campaign derives its power locally, the Solidarity Center coordinated with the four main trade union confederations to distribute the radio spots via their media networks and on their websites, and to provide audio copies to union activists from the agro-export sector for them to share with their local radio stations.
Many agro-industry workers spend their workdays listening to the radio. The impact of hearing a colleague speak about common issues and a shared daily reality is powerful and empowering, workers say.
Meanwhile, the Peruvian Congress is debating an amendment to Law 27360 that would provide nearly 300,000 of Peru’s agricultural workers with the same minimum wage, vacation, bonuses, and severance compensation that other private sector workers enjoy. While not a full victory, at least it is a step in the right direction.
Mar 30, 2012
In Kyrgyzstan, as all over the world, the nature of work is changing, and protecting worker rights is more and more challenging. Although the law provides for the formation of unions, legal enforcement of worker and union rights is weak, and employers do not always respect statutory law and collective bargaining agreements. The Legal Advisory Center (LAC), established on March 12 at Kyrgyz National University, Bishkek, offers information about work-related issues and educates workers about their rights on the job.
LAC, supported by the Solidarity Center with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, provides free consultations for workers and employers by junior professors and law students at the university. Since its inauguration, LAC has offered legal advice to more than 40 workers, mostly from the informal economy, such as market vendors, construction workers, and service employees. In addition, LAC’s legal experts have given on-site consultations for workers at restaurants and construction sites.
For the past two years, the university’s Law Institute, in cooperation with the Solidarity Center, has organized numerous conferences, seminars, and workshops aimed at addressing questions related to proposed labor law reform in Kyrgyzstan. LAC formalizes and continues this work.
The opening ceremony was attended by representatives of the parliament, judiciary, government ministries, trade unions, businesses, and international organizations. Stanislaw Cieniuch, the Solidarity Center’s country program director in Kyrgyzstan, highlighted the importance of the center to workers in all economic sectors.
“Workers have come to us with a wide variety of concerns,” said Cieniuch. “For example, our legal experts have advised a woman who wanted to know whether she had to continue paying into the social security system after changing her citizenship (she does), as well as a teacher who learned that she was entitled to severance pay after her school was downsized. The teacher told her colleagues who had also been laid off, and they received on average two months’ wages. These people are very grateful for the service that the LAC provides.”
Mar 23, 2012
In Colombia’s coal mines, troubling health and safety risks combined with serious environmental and social justice issues create conditions reminiscent of mining in the early 20th century in the United States. The dangers mine workers—and local communities—face are real and frightening, say four mining safety and health experts from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
The UMWA experts recently returned from a union exchange to Colombia. They were: Ron Airhart, executive assistant to Secretary-Treasurer Daniel Kane; Tim Baker, assistant to the secretary-treasurer; Ron Bowersox, international safety inspector; and Dale Lydic, president of UMWA Local 2193 in Clymer, PA. In Colombia, they met with their union counterparts, conducted site visits, and held discussions with local community groups and government officials.
“Coal mines are what ours would have been in the 1920s,” said Airhart. “There are no safety standards. There are no mining laws.” Consequently, he explained, mine inspection systems are all but non-existent.
The most obvious health and safety risks for mine workers, UMWA exchange participants said, were exhaustion, spinal fatigue, and lack of dust control. Spinal injuries are common. Long shifts added to multi-hour commutes on rough rural roads cause many mine workers—especially heavy equipment operators—to suffer spinal breakdown.
“You put 20 hours on that backbone up and down with no rest, and you have a lot of spinal injuries,” said Airhart.
Worker exhaustion is of particular concern as fatigue is a known risk factor in workplace accidents and fatalities.
Participants reported that in Colombia, underground and strip coal mines are mostly in remote areas, cordoned off with razor wire and heavily guarded. Workers are not allowed to live inside mine compounds and are transported by bus to and from far-off villages. At the Cerrajón open-pit coal mine, for example, many workers combine a 12-hour shift with an eight- to 10-hour roundtrip bus commute to their villages. With only four to five hours’ rest at home, workers are exhausted.
Cerrajón—which UMWA representatives visited—is considered one of the best mines in the country in terms of hours, wages, and conditions. However, the distinction between mine worker and management is stark. Company personnel live inside a guarded compound and are provided with schools, homes, swimming pools, and a golf course. Workers have no access to company amenities.
Union members said their employer’s response to worker exhaustion is to use technology rather than cut shift hours. This company plans to install lasers to flash into heavy-equipment operators’ eyes when slowed blinking is detected.
Measures to monitor and prevent dust inhalation at open-pit coal mines were observed to be absent or inadequate. UMWA participants said that the levels of dust they personally observed at one large-scale strip mine would cause most workers to develop breathing issues and likely a high percentage of workers would develop black lung disease.
Working for Change
The Colombian union federations Sintramienergética and Sintracarbón represent nearly 10,000 workers in Colombia`s coal mines. Both labor federations are struggling to push reluctant employers to adopt better safety standards and practices, as well as to educate and empower their own members to demand better working conditions.
Members of Sintracarbón told the visiting UMWA representatives that inspections do not always clear up problems. Mine inspectors make site visits by invitation only and are ordered off mine property regularly. Meanwhile, many Colombian mine inspectors are attorneys with knowledge of labor laws but no background in mining.
“My son is an attorney,” said Baker, who visited Colombia in 2008 as part of the same exchange program, “but I sure don’t want him inspecting any of the mines I go into.”
Sintracarbón members reported a few improvements at the Cerrajón mine, many in response to requests following a 2010 exchange in which six Colombian union members attended a program at the Mine Safety and Health Administration Academy in Beckley, West Virginia. Recently Cerrajón hired one resident doctor. In addition, Sintracarbón convinced management to relocate 367 injured workers to light-duty positions while recovering from injuries.
While improvements are welcome, the absence of regulations and third-party enforcement means the changes are not binding.
Data collection on mine health and safety is inadequate. According to a staff member visited by UMWA exchange participants, the Colombian government does not know how many mines operate in the country and so does not collect data on injury rates or deaths in the mining industry.
The ability of Colombian mining unions to negotiate health and safety measures with management is undercut by the fact that large mine operators are replacing permanent workers with contract workers. Contract workers have no work security, no training, no workplace rights, and no collective representation. At Cerrajón, for example, only 4,600 of 11,000 workers are permanent workers.
An Uphill Battle
Apart from health and safety concerns, UMWA participants reported serious environmental and social justice issues.
Community groups reported to UMWA visitors that a multinational mine operator plans to relocate 18 miles of river to access 500 million tons of recoverable coal under their villages. Villagers are afraid of losing their land, livelihoods, and access to clean drinking water.
“We met with seven different community groups, and they told us stories that would just break your heart,” said Airhart. “The coal operators came in the middle of the night, took their village, and just moved the whole town.
The scale and extent of strip coal mining projects in Colombia surprised the UMWA participants, especially given that there are apparently no enforceable requirements for mining companies to return the land to its original condition, they said.
Strip coal mining is trending upward in Colombia. Cerrajón, which currently produces 34 million tons of coal per year, plans to increase production to 60 million tons a year by 2014, according to mine management.
Baker was struck by the difference between coal mining in the United States and in Colombia.
“You see these folks, and you realize that they have a long hard fight to go through,” Baker said. “And the shame of it is, is they’re going to have to fight the same hard fight we had to fight 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
Several follow-up activities will result from the exchange. The UMWA’s medical expert on black lung disease and head of the Black Lung Association will contact Sintracarbón’s medical consultant to exchange information on the illness. UMWA’s administrator of occupational health and safety will research the new sensor devices to determine whether they will cause eye damage. Bowersox plans to provide Cerrejón’s safety director with information on personal dust monitoring devices. Finally, UMWA will work toward bringing more Sintracarbón union members to the Beckley Academy for mine safety training.
The exchange was implemented by the Solidarity Center with funding provided by the U.S. Department of State.
Feb 21, 2012
Four years after 400 workers at a bottle manufacturing plant in Mexico were fired for trying to form a union, their wives released a documentary about their lives that recounts a bitter-sweet experience of worker struggle, family survival, and community empowerment and their ongoing case through the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the federal labor authorities.
Just days after workers at the San Luis Potosi bottling plant, owned by Grupo Modelo, overthrew a longtime “protection” union, voted for true democratic union representation, and negotiated a 19 percent salary increase, the leaders and most outspoken supporters of the new union, Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la Empresa Industria Vidriera de Potosi (SUTEIVP), were fired and told they would never work again in their town. Thousands of livelihoods were on the line as families and their communities buckled under the stress of unemployment, discrimination, and intimidation.
Today, the 40 workers and their family members who have been able to hold out without accepting severance or other forms of buy-out from the company are optimistic that victory is in sight. Their cases are advancing at a torturously slow pace through the federal labor system, but the International Labor Organization recently called for an immediate legal resolution, and the factory has received a reinstatement order from the Labor Board in favor of one worker.
On January 26, the fourth anniversary of the firings, SUTEIVP launched a video produced by the wives of the men who had been fired. The day began as leaders and activists from Mexico’s largest independent and democratic unions traveled hundreds of miles to join SUTEIVP members in a rally outside the factory and ended in a gala presentation of the video, “The Other Face of the Resistance: Women’s Role in the San Luis Potosi Glass Makers’ Struggle.”
SUTEIVP leaders read a statement of support from United Steelworkers Union President Leo Gerrard. After that came speeches by Mexican unions representing teachers, municipal employees, tire workers, oil industry engineers, electricians, and power station and railway workers. The Solidarity Center’s country program director for Mexico, Lorraine Clewer, encouraged Grupo Modelo to do the right thing and break with protection unionism. Finally, the SUTEIVP leaders addressed the workers behind the heavily guarded perimeter fences of the bottle factory, letting them know that they are not alone in their struggle against workplace corruption and fear.
At the shift change, busloads of workers stopped to watch the rally, which transformed into a caravan of strength and solidarity as participants marched to the city center. Then at 5:30 p.m., the wives of the fired activists welcomed hundreds of guests from San Luis Potosi´s university, feminist, environmental, and other community groups to the premiere of their self-directed video. Supporters acknowledged in discussion afterward that by making visible the firings’ impact on women’s lives, livelihoods, and relationships, and by illustrating the positive transformation that the women and their families had gone through in order to get beyond surviving to fighting for their right to have a public voice in a male-dominated, classist society, the documentary provided a much needed example of female empowerment that should open doors for new alliances and new victories for working families in San Luis Potosi and other sites of conflict in Mexico.
Concepción López Pardo, the unofficial spokesperson for the wives, who admits she had never raised her voice to defend herself in public before her husband was fired, told the audience as she brushed away tears, “My son was hit by a pickup truck recently. As I rode to the hospital in the ambulance with him, I thought ‘why us?’ My husband said that he’d go and get his severance pay in order to pay the bills, but I said no. I’d rather sell our house than our dignity. I won’t accept any crumbs that the factory will throw to us.”
Another wife, Rosa Rodríguez, described a woman who offered to give the men free haircuts. until they had their jobs back and could afford to pay. “There are so many other stories like this that we could tell,” she said.
Feb 21, 2012
Trade unionists around the world are mobilizing this week, calling on the Mexican government to stop its attack on workers and implement steps to allow for workers to organize independent democratic trade unions of their choosing. In Washington, DC, union members and worker and human rights activists will rally at noon on Thursday, February 23, in front of the Mexican Embassy, located at 1911 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Last year, more than 50,000 union members, students, and human rights activists from some 40 countries participated in the Global Days of Action. For six days, union members came together in an unprecedented show of solidarity. They wrote thousands of letters to the Mexican government, organized more than 50 meetings at Mexican embassies throughout the world, and held massive demonstrations, inside and outside Mexico. Their urgent message: STOP the attack on workers. We demand trade union rights in Mexico, NOW!
The impact of these global actions was felt around the world. On February 24, just weeks after the Global Days of Action launched, political prisoner Juan Linares of the National Miners’ and Metalworkers’ Union of Mexico was released from jail after being unjustly imprisoned for more than two years.
Building on the 2011 actions, independent unions in Mexico, together with their respective global union partners, have come together as a movement of force, challenging retrogressive labor legislation, confronting Mexico’s scandalous “protection contract” system, and exposing corporate and political corruption.
Despite an escalation in action and outcry from unions in Mexico and at theinternational level, workers continue to be denied fundamental rights, independent unions face violent and political attack, and corporate impunity is at an all-time high.
During the week of February 19–25, 2012, in honor of the Pasta de Conchos miners who died in a mine blast on February 19, 2006, members of the international labor movement are again asked to take action.
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