The wars are over in Central America, but peace in the region has not brought economic prosperity. Real wages have declined and unemployment has skyrocketed since the early 1990s. Structural-adjustment programs imposed by international lending agencies have not only heightened poverty, but have led governments, through their labor ministries, to discourage union-organizing drives.[1] Meanwhile, U.S. firms are increasingly taking advantage of the region’s cheap labor either through direct employment or through subcontracting work to regional firms. In this context, mainstream unions and Central America solidarity groups in the United States have joined forces to provide tactical training and on-the-ground support for labor-organizing efforts in Central America, especially in cases in which U.S. companies are involved.
Developing effective solidarity efforts in the ever-expanding global chain of production is not easy. Collaboration between U.S. activists, who can apply various types of pressure on corporations in the United States, and local labor activists and unions in Central America is sometimes difficult to foster. But the new attitude and new leadership of the U.S. labor movement, particularly in the AFL-CIO, signals a hopeful start.
For the AFL-CIO to play a supportive role in Central America, it will have to overcome its recent history in the region, particularly the role of its past foreign-policy wing, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). Representative of the AFL-CIO’s historical hard-line anti-Communist stance, AIFLD’s Central American offices were notorious for their efforts to disrupt and weaken the progressive union movement. With millions of dollars provided by the U.S. government (primarily U.S. AID and the U.S. Information Agency), AIFLD backed the 1954 coup in Guatemala, and in the 1970s and 1980s it supported anti-Sandinista unions in Nicaragua and actively attempted to dismantle militant unions in El Salvador.[2] In Central America, until recently, the federation has been associated more with counterinsurgency than with solidarity.
But in 1995, in the first contested AFL-CIO election in 50 years, a reform slate came to power, bringing a new vision of international relations to the federation. New Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka, president of the United Mine Workers, articulated the new position at a 1996 conference, saying “the AFL-CIO is not concerned with exporting ideology but exporting and importing labor solidarity.”[3] AIFLD as an organization no longer exists. It was restructured and renamed last June to become the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), and its regional institutes are now known as “solidarity centers.” With new staff on the ground in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and soon to be in place in Honduras, the regional representatives are now attempting to strengthen weakened and divided unions as well as build international ties.
Given the divisive role AIFLD played in the region, the importance of the new solidarity centers should not be underestimated. “One of the most important changes for labor solidarity,” says Steve Coats of the U.S.-Guatemala Labor Education Project (US-GLEP), “is the end of the Cold War and the leadership changes in the AFL-CIO, especially in the International Affairs Division, and the reconstitution of AIFLD. There could be severe retrenching, but right now there are a lot of positive trends.”[4]
Stanley Gacek, once an AIFLD critic, is now the Assistant Director of the International Affairs Department. “Our primary role now is to encourage unity,” he says. “We work with whomever is legitimate and democratic, which means maintaining our relationships but also working with partners who might have been shunned in the past.”[5] In Central America, this means that the Solidarity Center has begun to work with center-left unions in each country, with an eye toward worker unity rather than political jockeying.
Within the AFL-CIO, one of the most active supporters of cross-border organizing is the principal representative of U.S. clothing and textile workers, United Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Since the turn of the century, union organizers in the clothing and textile industries have “followed the work,” as the flexible production practices among corporations—and the resulting “mobile shops”—have attempted to escape the influence of unionization. Now that so much of the work has moved to Central America, UNITE has been forced much further afield than ever before. Thousands of U.S. companies have been contracting with producers in Central American free-trade zones, prompted by low wages, unenforced labor regulations and easy access to the U.S. market. More than half a million workers in the garment industry in Central America are working in nonunion shops.[6]
UNITE’s “Organizing Project” has worked with local unions to develop more effective organizing models. The model taught by the Project emphasizes a long-term, grassroots approach. Local organizers spend months in clandestine campaigns building support for the union. Home visits and networks of union supporters throughout the factory are key. These campaigns aim to build membership to the level, usually set at 25% of the workforce, that would force management to negotiate collective-bargaining agreements. Working through the textile-worker international trade secretariat in Brussels, UNITE is supporting campaigns in Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. UNITE staffer Alan Howard says that while it would be inappropriate for the U.S. union to directly organize a Central American work force, UNITE has adopted “a mentoring role.”[7] For example, during the negotiations in Guatemala between Philips Van Heusen (PVH) and a local union, a UNITE union engineer helped local unionists analyze the company’s complicated piece-rate payment system, ensuring that workers could effectively bargain for a fair wage package.
Organizing campaigns, however, are long and arduous. In Central America, the legacy of fear after decades of civil war remains strong. A lack of basic services, such as public transportation, telephones and electricity in the neighborhoods where many workers live, make building a union even more difficult. “There are no immediate results. It’s hard to erase the repression of the 1980s. Many people are afraid,” says a Guatemalan union organizer who received UNITE’s training. “They are unhappy with working conditions, the long hours, unpaid overtime, no breaks. We go to workers’ homes, and explain the benefits of a union, but even this takes a long time.”[8]
Organizers are learning investigative skills as well. Tracing the international contracts and ownership of many overseas factories is very difficult, and workers often do not even know who pays their wage and where the clothes they sew end up. But workers and union organizers can provide key information for tracing the clothing on the international production chain from the factory to the store. Some workers have smuggled tags providing the factory and country origins of goods being sold under U.S. brand names—vital information for campaigns involving consumer awareness in the United States.
Guatemala’s PVH organizing drive was also greatly helped by a broad process of international independent monitoring. When the Guatemalan Labor Ministry refused to acknowledge that the union had reached the required 25% membership for collective bargaining, Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigated and found that not only had the union reached required membership, but also that plant management had engaged in systematic discrimination against union members. These findings forced PVH to the negotiating table. Despite the unique leverage provided by the presence of the company’s CEO, Bruce Klatsky, on HRW’s board of directors, activists believe that this model can be repeated in other plants. Media attention can be an effective tool in consumer campaigns to force corporations to the negotiating table, and then pressure them to respect union agreements.
The broad-based monitoring campaign in Guatemala has received a boost from a group of religious and human rights leaders who recently created a monitoring mechanism called the Verification Commission. Over the past year, they have met to discuss the most effective role for independent monitoring. “Monitoring can provide leverage to force compliance with labor standards,” says labor lawyer Frank LaRue, a founding member of the Commission, “but for it to be effective there have to be concrete mechanisms.”[9] And those mechanisms generally involve the organization of U.S. consumers. Among other projects, the Commission has been involved in negotiations with Starbucks to ensure minimum standards for workers on coffee plantations. Given the mobility of the growing number of small manufacturing plants, such pressure may be the only means to ensure that companies do not simply close shop and re-open down the street—or across the ocean—in an attempt to escape union pressures.
Another link in the labor-solidarity chain has been forged by solidarity activists who were supportive of the insurgencies of the 1970s and 1980s and who have continued to work in the region after the end of the wars. Created to combat U.S. intervention, the older solidarity groups have turned their focus to the global economy and the impact of trade and economic policies abroad. “When the low-intensity shooting wars started to end in Central America, and they were replaced by high-intensity economic wars, we decided we needed a new approach,” says Trim Bissell, who runs the Campaign for Labor Rights (CLR), a project begun by the Nicaragua Network. “We needed something that would unify the progressive movement and build on the in-country contacts already established by different groups to mobilize activists on a local level.”[10] With an initial budget of $5,000 in 1996, CLR now reaches over 2,700 people through a rapidly expanding e-mail list and helps coordinate outreach for over 20 different organizations addressing labor violations world wide.
Using the public-education strategies developed during the wars, groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and Witness for Peace (WFP) have brought union leaders to tour the United States to inform audiences about organizing campaigns in the region. Long-term WFP volunteers are now called “development educators,” and lead educational tours to the region with titles such as “Free Trade and Human Rights: The Struggle Continues,” “Structures of Economic Violence” and “Women, Work and Poverty.” The idea is to redirect the focus of education and concern from military repression to the more insidious effects of neoliberal economic policies for a majority of the region’s population. Witness for Peace has begun to investigate wages and working conditions in the Nicaraguan tobacco industry, and CISPES has been working to support the activities of El Salvador’s major telecommunications union, which is in the middle of a struggle against wholesale layoffs with the soon-to-be-privatized telephone company.
Organizing drives in Nicaragua have led to the legal recognition of several unions in the free-trade zones in the past year. These efforts are being supported by a coalition of U.S.-based grassroots groups, including Quest for Peace, Nicaragua Network and TecNica, who are assisting the efforts of the Garment and Textile Federation of the Sandinista Workers Central in the maquila sector. Funding will support an office, a lawyer and another full-time organizer. “It’s been hard to coordinate campaigns because sometimes the union had no phone—they couldn’t pay their phone bill,” says Kathy Hoyt of the Nicaragua Network. “Having this kind of basic support is crucial to cross-border organizing.”[11]
Given the large number of women workers in the maquila industry—in some areas over 90% of the maquila work force is female—many Central American unions have begun organizing around gender issues.[12] The precarious economic situation of single-women workers, the history of mass firings following organizing attempts and the patriarchal structures of many unions have led some women’s groups to argue for a rethinking of the logic of union campaigns in the maquilas. The Network in Solidarity with Women Workers in the Maquilas, a region-wide coalition of women’s groups based in Nicaragua, works with consciousness-raising groups, outside the traditional union model. The groups work around issues of women’s health and safety at work as well as in the community. They also help women develop a stronger sense of identity in order to confront exploitation at the workplace.
“Organizing women workers can be very delicate, because machismo is so entrenched. It is crucial to consider the impact of gender on organizing work,” says Irene González, head of the women’s commission of the progressive Guatemalan labor federation Unsitragua. “We are looking for organizing alternatives to educate workers,” she says, “which may not begin as unionizing campaigns but will end with the creation of unions, because they are the only groups legally capable of defending workers’ rights.”[13] Indeed, cooperation among women’s groups, unions and human rights groups has become more common in the region and has added gender-based perspectives to organizing efforts.
More than any other organization, the New York-based National Labor Committee has broadened the network of solidarity in support of Central American workers. Founded in 1981, the Committee worked domestically to protest AFL-CIO foreign policy, eventually gaining the support of 26 of the AFL-CIO’s 94 national affiliates. Originally focusing its international work on the support of embattled trade unionists during the height of the wars in Central America, the Committee has since turned its attention to the routine violation of workers’ rights in the region. The group’s high-profile campaigns have exposed horrible working conditions and extremely low wages in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Extensive press coverage of teenage workers sewing clothes for the U.S. market led to the creation of the White House Apparel Industry Partnership, charged with setting standards for the garment industry. The group has also galvanized public-education campaigns around sweatshop abuses with marches, a national petition drive and the Holiday Season of Conscience, which urges Christmas shoppers to investigate the origins of their purchases.
The Committee’s charismatic director, Charlie Kernaghan, is proud of the media attention his organization has created throughout the United States. “There is more consumer awareness here and more pressure on U.S. corporations than anywhere else in the world,” he says, but “there is often a breakdown on the ground. We can move campaigns much further in the United States than we can in Central America.”[14]
In 1995, for example, the group organized a corporate campaign targeting the Gap, one of the largest retail chains working in Central America, to protest working conditions and the firing of independent union members at a Salvadoran manufacturer called Mandarin, with whom the Gap had a subcontracting relationship. An agreement with Gap management established the Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador (GMIES), made up of human rights activists, trade unionists and labor analysts.[15] The international attention has helped improve working conditions in the factory, and a management-approved union has established a factory-based grocery cooperative and a credit program. But the independent union, whose members were fired en masse in 1995, has not recovered. Since the firings, the independent union, called SETMI, has had difficulty maintaining the legal requirement of 35 members.[16]
This ambiguous state of affairs highlights the limits of what international solidarity can accomplish. Cross-border solidarity notwithstanding, without a strong, independent union on site it is not easy to improve working conditions. Unless SETMI can expand its membership, it cannot have much effect on the day-to-day running of the Mandarin shop.[17] Also, despite its attempts to work with other factories in the country’s free trade zones, the GMIES only monitors Mandarin. The country’s factory owners refuse to open their production sites to independent monitoring unless they are forced to do so.[18]
The efforts of El Salvador’s labor and human rights activists and the support of the international solidarity movement have led to other campaigns, such as the Cispes-sponsored tour of the United States by maquila worker Ana María Romero and trade unionist Wilmer Erroa Argueta. Both Romero and Erroa testified before the U.S. Congress on working conditions and labor repression in the maquila sector in El Salvador. Romero was a union member at a maquila factory called GABO. The union had been organized in 1994 but was subsequently destroyed through mass firings and worker repression. As a result of the tour and the CISPES campaign, Romero was vilified by the Salvadoran government and the local media as a “bad Salvadoran” who wanted to destroy the nation’s economy. CISPES was targeted as a radical protectionist group that wanted to send garment production back to the United States. The Salvadoran government, in concert with national and transnational companies doing business in the country, argued that the single purpose of the CISPES campaign was to rob Salvadorans of their means of subsistence. Many of the same arguments have been leveled against the National Labor Committee, GMIES and the SETMI workers.
Nationalism works both ways, and building cross-border work also has meant overcoming the protectionist bent of some U.S. union locals through campaigns of worker education. Education is the key tool in organizing consumer solidarity as well. One example of the new attempts at public education is the current UNITE Stop Sweatshops campaign, focusing on raising consumer awareness about workers’ rights both in the United States and abroad. “UNITE realized that if it didn’t do something about the public’s lack of understanding and address the root of the problem, we would not be effective,” says Howard. Mounting effective solidarity “is not something the union could do alone.”[19]
Despite the problems, links with U.S.-based groups are helping workers in Central America foster an awareness of the politics and economics of globalization. Indeed, the links have allowed workers North and South to become more aware of their own position in transnational production practices. It remains for that knowledge to become the basis for more effective linkages among workers to combat exploitation and uphold their rights in the underdeveloped countries and the United States alike.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ethel Brooks is a Doctoral Candidate in the Politics Department of New York University. Winifred Tate is graduate student in the Anthropology Department of New York University. Research for this article was funded in part by grants from the Eleanor B. Leacock Fund, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University.
NOTES
1. See Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Structural Adjustment in Nicaragua: Tearing the Economic and Social Fabric (Washington: The Development Gap/Online, 1997); also see Carlos M. Vilas’ discussion of Latin American labor markets in this issue of NACLA Report on the Americas, p. 15.
2. See Tom Barry and Deb Preusch, AIFLD in Central America: Agents as Organizers (Albuquerque: The Resource Center, 1990); also see Robert Armstrong, Hank Frundt, Hobart Spalding and Sean Sweeny, Working Against Us: The American Institute for Free Labor Development and the International Policy of the AFL-CIO (New York: NACLA, 1988).
3. Richard Trumka, Remarks at AFL-CIO Headquarters, Washington, D.C., 1996.
4. Winifred Tate, telephone interview with Stephen Coats, March 4, 1997.
5. Winifred Tate, interview with Stanley Gacek, Washington, D.C., March 14, 1997.
6. See “Duke Requires Anti-Sweatshop Pledge,” The Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1997.
7. Winifred Tate, interview with Alan Howard, New York, N.Y., April 16, 1997.
8. Winifred Tate, interview in Guatemala City, July 28, 1997.
9. Winifred Tate, interview with Frank LaRue, Guatemala City, August 5, 1997.
10. Winifred Tate, telephone interview with Trim Bissell, May 6, 1997.
11. Winifred Tate, interview with Kathryn Hoyt, Washington, D.C., April 18, 1997.
12. Estimates are imprecise due to high labor turnover in the maquilas. They range from 65% to 95% in Central America.
13. Winifred Tate, interview with Irene González, August 8, 1997.
14. The National Labor Committee recently opened an office in El Salvador, to keep up with the union movement and the labor situation on the ground. They have hired Sergio Chavez, a former unionist and labor specialist, to coordinate with them on local labor situations. The seems to be an attempt to avert some of the problems of communication that arose in their campaigns in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
15. Gap also hired its own monitor in El Salvador, Gene Palumbo, a journalist present at the negotiations, who informs the company about the Mandarin situation and the implementation of the Gap code of conduct.
16. Mark Sebastian Anner, La Maquila y El Monitoreo Independiente en El Salvador (El Salvador: Grupo de Monitoreo Independiente, 1998.)
17. According to the Labor Code of El Salvador, a factory union can be incorporated with the affiliation of 35 members, but cannot engage in collective bargaining until its membership reaches 51% of those employed at a given site.
18. Ethel Brooks, interview with Carolina Quinteros, San Salvador, June 1998.
19. Winifred Tate, interview with Alan Howard, New York, N.Y., April 16, 1997.
