On the morning of Monday, November 13, 2000, Marcella Pérez Rodríguez opened her front door to find a written death threat for her husband, who had just left for a court date in the capital city of Guatemala. The note read: “Listen, Otto Rolando Sacuqui, we’re giving you five days to leave the country if you don’t want to die. If you don’t go within five days, you and your family will pay the consequences. [Signed] The Gladiators. Rest In Peace Otto Rolando Sacuqui.”
Otto is the head of a union of coffee workers at Finca María de Lourdes, in the Costa Cuca coffee growing region of Guatemala. A month before receiving the death threat, Otto, Marcella and their seven children were illegally thrown out of their house on the plantation where Otto’s family has lived for generations. While they were being thrown out of their house, all of the union’s paperwork that Otto kept in his home was stolen, along with $318 in union funds. The death threat and eviction are only the latest chapter in a story of unionization and repression at María de Lourdes which goes back eight years.
In 1992, María de Lourdes workers were earning barely half the legal minimum wage. After unsuccessful informal discussions with the plantation owner, the workers decided to unionize. Out of 150 workers, 125 immediately joined the union. In response, the plantation owner raised wages to the legal minimum, but also fired 31 workers. The union went to court, and nine months later won reinstatement and back pay for all 31 workers. Two years later, in 1994, the owner fired 21 more workers, and another 34 in 1997. Unable to defeat the union directly, the owner had supervisors and other management personnel pretend to be workers who then tried—unsuccessfully—to have the union’s legal status dismissed. The owner has denied the union members’ children access to the local school and refused to sell union members cornmeal for tortillas, the staple of the Guatemalan diet.[1] In their struggle to win justice and a union contract, a majority of the 55 fired union members continue to live on the plantation, refusing to leave.
As of today, they have still not been reinstated, despite the fact that the courts have ruled in their favor many times. Mysteriously, the plantation owner disappears every time local authorities attempt to serve the judge’s orders. A warrant for the owner’s arrest, for refusing to comply with the judge’s rulings, also goes unenforced. The workers applied for legal strike sanction from the government, but were thwarted by the legal prohibition against strikes during the harvest season.
The case of María de Lourdes is no exception. Union movements have arisen at over a dozen coffee plantations near Quezaltenango, the second largest city in Guatemala. They are taking place against a backdrop of fundamental changes in the coffee industry, grinding poverty and iron-fisted, anti-union policies by both employers and the government. For many coffee workers, unionization is a struggle just to achieve the legal minimums supposedly guaranteed by Guatemalan law.
Coffee production employs around 2.2 million workers out of the total Guatemalan population of 11 million. Traditionally, most coffee workers lived full-time on the coffee plantations where they worked. In recent decades, however, owners have thrown coffee workers off the plantations, replacing them with temporary workers. According to a UN report, 87.5% of rural workers had temporary or migratory jobs in 1992.[2]
Coffee exports are the largest source of income for Guatemala. Although international coffee prices have fallen in recent years, analysts estimate earnings of more than $850 million for the year 2000. Still, plantation owners continue to cut labor costs. Guatemalan workers cannot legally unionize until they have worked continuously for the same employer for three months. That is also when they become eligible for social security programs such as retirement and disability benefits. Unless they work for the same employer for six months, they have no right to either of two annual bonuses required by law, both of which are equal to two months’ pay. To avoid these legal requirements, owners rarely hire workers for more than 90 consecutive days.
At the same time, work assignments in the coffee industry have changed. Historically, workers were paid a daily wage. Today they are paid a piece rate. According to several coffee workers, the standard pay for cleaning one cuerda (24.5 square yards) of land is $1. Cleaning two cuerdas a day is possible, but a lot of work. This means that an average daily wage for a coffee worker is $1.75 per day, significantly below the daily legal minimum of $2.75. Women and children are often paid half that amount.[3] The coffee harvest is the time when coffee workers hope to earn the highest wages of the year. Again, they are paid a piece rate. A typical wage is $2.50 per 100 pounds of coffee. A good day’s work is 150 pounds, resulting in a wage of about $3.80 per day. The harvest lasts between three to four months per year.
Changes in the organization of work have had enormous implications for coffee workers. Under the current system, coffee workers rely on the owner for everything—employment, housing, medical care, education for their children, food, etc. As a result, when coffee workers are kicked off the plantation, they rarely have the resources to start over. Expelled coffee workers are forced into town to find work and housing, resulting in a near collapse of the urban infrastructure in many coffee-growing regions of Guatemala. The population of Columba, for example, a town about an hour away from Quezaltenango, has grown from 16,000 in 1994 to 35,000 today. New residents are forced into squalid slums, living in one-room shacks made of wood, plastic sheeting and sheet metal, with no plumbing or electricity. Crime is rampant.
The poverty statistics for Guatemala are daunting: 76% of rural Guatemalans live in poverty (defined as income of less than $2 per day). Of that number, 39% live in extreme poverty (defined as income of less than $1 per day). In the country as a whole, 40% of workers are employed in the informal sector and only 25.6% participate in the social security system.
As of 1997, only 2.9% of Guatemalan workers were unionized. The weakness of Guatemalan labor reflects a history of intense anti-union repression, including firings, threats, kidnappings and murders of union activists. At its height in 1954, the Guatemalan Labor Movement covered 10.7% of the workforce. But following a military coup that ousted democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, unions suffered a dramatic reversal. Threats and intimidation, along with government decrees limiting union rights, caused union membership and activity to plummet. Unionism revived in the 1970s, along with other popular social movements. In 1972, there were only four officially recognized labor conflicts, compared with 229 in 1978. Guatemalan workers were responding, in part, to an inflationary crisis occurring around the world. During the 1970s, the cost of living in Guatemala rose 102%, while wages only grew 39%. A devastating earthquake in 1976, which killed thousands of people and crippled the Guatemalan infrastructure, further spurred social activism. A national strike wave in 1980 lasted several weeks and won increases in the legal minimum wage.
The response by the Guatemalan elite to a revived labor movement was brutal and effective. Between 1974 and 1978, 124 union leaders were murdered in a wave of assassinations that eliminated an entire generation of union activists. The repression was part of an attack on all social movements such as unions, peasant organizations, student groups and women’s organizations.
Despite this difficult history, coffee workers have still dared to unionize. In September 1996, a majority of the 57 workers at a plantation called Finca Asunción, located near Quezaltenango, organized a union. They were responding to poor housing conditions, wages below the legal minimum and having to travel four hours a day to another plantation without getting paid for travel time.
In October 1996, immediately after filing for union recognition, all four members of the union steering committee were fired. Over the next two years, the rest of the union supporters had their hours progressively reduced to the point that, today, only three union members still have work on the plantation. The workers have filed charges with the Ministry of Labor protesting their illegal terminations, demanding reinstatement, full back pay and a union contact. Throughout their struggle, the workers have continued to live on the plantation, refusing to leave.
Since 1996, the owner has used various tactics in an effort to defeat the union. In December 1998, he accused the union of being connected to armed guerrillas—after the Peace Accords had been signed. Early one morning, over 300 military personnel and police occupied the community, searching for guns and other proof of guerrilla activity. There was nothing to be found.
The owner also tried to avoid his legal obligation to the union by dividing the plantation into three parts, and then selling them to his wife and two daughters. Despite this maneuver, the Guatemalan courts ruled that the owner was still legally obligated to recognize the union.
The owner has tried to deny union members access to water and firewood from the plantation. He ordered dozens of fruit trees, which had been planted years ago by the workers’ grandparents, chopped down because union members were eating the fruit. He boarded up the plantation church because he said it was being used for union meetings. He has denied the union members’ children access to the school on the plantation, causing an increase in illiteracy in the community. The owner has made a standing offer that any worker who quits the union will be automatically put back to work, and their children will be allowed to go to school. He has also blacklisted the union supporters by sending their names to other employers in the area. As a result, union members are forced to travel long distances to find work or to work under false names in local plantations. If their true identity is discovered, they are immediately fired.
On the legal front, the workers at Finca Asunción have actually won their court case. In early 2000, a judge in Quezaltenango ordered the reinstatement of all fired workers with back pay. Unfortunately, the judge’s decision has never been enforced. Similar to Finca María de Lourdes, whenever the court sends representatives to deliver the reinstatement order, the owner mysteriously disappears.
In October 1992, Mario Acabel Peres and a majority of his 65 co-workers organized a union on a plantation called Finca Violeta, a plantation near Quezaltenango where their families had lived for generations. In 1992, Mario and his family of nine lived in a one-room bamboo shack with a leaky roof. He and his coworkers’ demands were straightforward. They wanted decent housing, a doctor to visit their plantation at least once a month and a school for their children that went beyond the third grade. They wanted steps taken against an abusive supervisor who threatened them with physical violence if he wasn’t satisfied with their work, they wanted to get paid the legal minimum wage and they wanted women to be paid the same as men. They also wanted their employer to pay a new annual bonus approved by the Guatemalan government in 1991. The workers at Violeta heard that workers on another plantation had organized a union, so they followed suit. They also sought help from the local Catholic Church. They were put in touch with a national Guatemalan union that offered legal advice and support.
In February 1993, four months after helping start the union, Mario was fired. The owner accused him of drunkenness and missing work, even though Mario doesn’t drink alcohol. As in other cases, Mario and the other union leaders were blacklisted in the region.
Since that time, Mario and a diminishing number of fellow unionists—many have left the plantation in desperation or quit the union to repair their relationship with the owner—have been unable to find work in the area. The unionists have survived on donations from the Catholic Church, national unions, odd jobs here and there, and what food they can scrape from the land. The legal charges they filed against the owner in 1992, demanding reinstatement, back pay and a union contract, go unresolved.
Today, there are eight unionists left at Violeta, still demanding justice. Over the years, Mario has had the army surround his house twice. During one of Mario’s many trips to the city for a court date, his wife had to fend off the owner’s effort to remove the roof from their house. Recently, the owner has started removing the water system that provides water to their house. In October 2000, one of the supervisors threatened Mario with death.
There are virtually no industrial unions in Guatemala. Currently, there are 1,351 labor organizations in the country, of which 473 are active. (Under Guatemalan labor law, unions can be legal but inactive.) There are also three major union federations and several smaller ones. However, there are almost no national unions that attempt to organize all the workers in a particular industry. Rather, with few exceptions, workers are organized into small, company-based unions that remain isolated from other workers in their industry, even those that are unionized.
For instance, the union at Finca Asunción is called the Union of Workers at Finca Asunción and Other Business That Form Part of the Same Economic Entity. The workers at María Lourdes call their union the Union of Finca María de Lourdes, Located in the Municipality of Genova, Costa Cuca, Quezaltenango. The Asunción workers were briefly affiliated with one national federation, while the workers at María de Lourdes are affiliated with another. In addition to the lack of national organization, coffee workers face an additional obstacle: Because they are temporarily employed, most of them do not have the legal right to unionize under Guatemalan law.
This lack of organization of coffee workers also makes code-of-conduct campaigns, like the one aimed at Starbucks, more difficult to win. Without organized coffee workers on the ground to confirm or deny claims of improvements on the plantations, codes of conduct have limited effect. Monitoring efforts from the outside cannot be as effective as organized workers acting as partners with international supporters.
Recognizing these difficulties, workers in the Costa Cuca region of Quezaltenango have decided to launch a new organization which will reach out to all coffee workers, regardless of what plantation they work on and whether they are permanently or temporarily employed. With support from the Church and its rural worker project, workers from several plantations met in November in Columba, Quezaltenango, to elect a steering committee and plan a regional coffee workers’ association. The association includes not only unions, but also rank-and-file committees of coffee workers and catechists from the Church fighting for job improvements and demanding land reform.
Many of the workers at the founding meeting had dreamed of such an organization for years. Some were moved to tears to see it actually happen. Union workers from Finca Asunción were there, as were representatives from Finca María de Lourdes. Their goal is that coffee workers in Guatemala will be able, not only to defend union leaders like Otto Rolando Sacuqui, who are threatened with death just for demanding fairness on the job, but also to bring justice to the entire Guatemalan coffee industry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Laslett is a union organizer who has been active in the U.S. labor movement for 14 years, working with the Teamsters, SEIU and AFSCME. He spent two months in Guatemala conducting research for this article.
NOTES
1. Many plantations are in isolated rural areas, a long way from the nearest market. Therefore, workers often rely on the owner to have cornmeal and other food supplies for sale on the plantation. Not being allowed to buy food on the plantation forces union members to make long trips into town to go shopping.
2. “Guatemala: la fuerza incluyente del desarrollo humano,” Informe de Desarrollo 2000, Sistema de Naciones Unidas en Guatemala.
3. The Guatemalan Labor Code explicitly identifies the man’s wage as the primary source of family income and labels the earnings of women and children as supplementary. Many employers use this language to justify paying women and children far less than men. Currently, at the coffee plantation Santa Anita, owned and run by former guerrillas, women are paid the same wage as men. They have been strongly criticized by surrounding plantation owners for this.
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