Workers' rights a tough sell to Guatemala's plantation owners

By Stephen Franklin

Chicago Tribune

April 22, 2001

They were held for hours by armed thugs. Their leader was kidnapped and brought to the Guatemala City union hall, where he and others were forced to go on a local radio station and cancel a demonstration by banana workers.

Then, after being forced to resign their union jobs, the union officials were ordered out of town with their families. If they stayed, they were told, they would be killed.

Guatemala unions and human-rights groups howled. So did the United Nations. So did American unions. And so did the United States, saying it might suspend Guatemala's special trade benefits--nothing to be ignored by a poverty-stricken country such as Guatemala.

After nearly two years and endless complaints about stalled investigations and delayed court dates, the besieged workers finally got a taste of justice--their captors were found guilty and sentenced to prison. But because the convicted have the option of buying their way out of prison, the union leaders are still dismayed.

Such lack of justice is not just Guatemala's problem. It is a global problem. How do you enforce workers' rights in countries where they have none? How do you get governments to respect laws that they never taken seriously before, and companies to respect workers thrown about like widgets on the factory floor?

How do you bring justice to workers stuck out of sight in steamy sweatshops, churning out goods for global companies hungry for dirt-cheap wages?

One answer is that governments and human-rights agencies must show greater vigilance. Another is that consumers must reject the products made by overworked, underpaid 14-year-olds. Others think the world needs more treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement, which puts workers' rights on a par with trade rights.

The cruel truth is that such idealism often falls on its face in much of the world, and that is what has happened in Guatemala.

"We can look at victories here and there, but there are no fundamental changes in Guatemala or elsewhere in Central America," said Steve Coats, head of the U.S./Labor Education Project in the Americas, a small Chicago-based group.

Setting standards

Take the experience of Starbucks Coffee Co.

In 1995 the world's leading retailer of specialty coffee agreed to lay down a code of conduct for treating coffee workers on the plantations from which it buys its coffee. It picked Guatemala as the test site for such a system.

The giant company had stunned the coffee industry when it responded to the low-level campaign for such a system, which had been led by Coats' group.

Six years later nothing has happened in Guatemala.

The company has not been able to get the middlemen, who buy its coffee, to identify the plantations.

"If they won't cooperate, it is very difficult to do it," said Orin Smith, Starbucks' CEO and president. "We are exploring other ways of doing that," he added, but would not offer any details.

Study of conditions

Learning how workers are treated on Guatemala's coffee plantations seems to be quite difficult.

Last year a group of Guatemalan and foreign professionals, who had set up an organization to examine working conditions for Guatemalan workers, decided to look into the situation facing coffee workers.

They approached the organization that represents Guatemala's 61,000 growers, but the group said it did not have the power to tell farmers to open their doors.

Without the growers' approval, the researchers did not try to visit the plantations, explaining that they feared for their own safety from the security forces and others who guard many plantations, so they talked to workers outside the plantations.

They found that on most plantations workers did not receive overtime payments or legally mandated benefits. Nearly half of the workers said the plantations hire children younger than 14, which is against local law.

"We are worried that the coffee industry has not shown a clear commitment to the rule of law in Guatemala," said David Smith, a missionary worker from the U.S., who also heads the organization that carried out the study.

The problem with Guatemala's labor laws, as one diplomat here suggested, is that "nobody enforces them." That is the reason, the diplomat suggested, why unions have not been able to gain a foothold in the garment factories owned by foreigners. Anytime there is an organizing drive, the workers are fired without any fear of the government stepping in, he said.

The idea that the battle on behalf of Third World workers is a losing one does not go down well with people like Charles Kernigan, executive director of the New York-based National Committee for Worker and Human Rights.

"I refuse to accept the idea that we can't help," Kernigan said as he was preparing to leave for a new anti-sweatshop effort in Bangladesh. "You can win these campaigns. They can be won everywhere."

In the case of the Guatemalan banana workers, who were held hostage in October 1999, justice did indeed come their way.

A Guatemalan court last month handed prison sentences of up to 3 1/2 years to 22 men who had illegally detained and coerced the union members. But the court also said that the men could pay fines in lieu of going to jail.

Getting out of Guatemala

The day after the ruling, five union leaders, who had testified in court and had been in hiding during the trial after receiving death threats, fled to the U.S. They were driven to the Guatemala City airport under heavy protection.

Upon their departure, they vowed to seek asylum in the U.S. and to not return home any time soon. They explained that they did not intend to become martyrs in Guatemala.