31 March 2008

This is the story of how a group of workers in a banana plantation owned by the Costa Rican subsidiary of Fresh Del Monte overcame the tactics of intimidation and repression practised by most fruit companies in that country.

Supermarket buyers are assured by auditors that the company complies with international labour standards by allowing its employees the freedom to join any organisation of their choosing. However, on the ground in Costa Rica, behind the smoke-screen of permanent workers' committees, 'direct agreements' and voluntary social certification is the harsh reality of a company that, like many others, funds a permanent anti-union campaign.

A decade ago, following a successful national campaign in 1997 by Banana Link and the World Development Movement together with the union SITRAP in Costa Rica, Del Monte had, for a year or so, respected an agreement on trade union rights that it had signed under pressure. During 1998, almost a thousand workers on the 24 Del Monte plantations joined the union, when given assurances that they were not going to be sacked for doing so. However, when the company realised that 15 years of constant anti-union messages had not succeeded in putting off their employees, they closed down the experiment. In September 1999, the company sacked its whole workforce and got rid of virtually all union members by simply offering to take back all those prepared to accept a 40% cut in wages and the loss of benefits! The psychological battle for workers' hearts and minds began again.

For most of the last decade therefore, ex-Del Monte worker Didier Leiton  and his colleagues at the SITRAP trade union agreed that actively recruiting and openly declaring new union members to Del  Monte was like «feeding the lions». The company would simply pick them off anybody who dared to join one by one and find ways of either sacking them (according to the letter of the law, of course), or else ensuring that there were never more than a handful in any one plantation, so that the 'disease' did not spread.

In May 2007, the union decided to accept the pressure from a group of workers in Duacari 4 plantation to join openly and declare their membership to the company. In total disrespect of internationally agreed workers' rights and national laws, Del Monte, through its foremen and plantation level management, intensified its campaign to spread fear by telling workers the plantation would close because of the union, that those who joined would be sacked and black-listed along with their family members, and that the union would cause the wholesale collapse of the local economy as the unions had done in 1984 in the Pacific South . Workers who did join the union were offered the standard redundancy package.

One worker however, a union member called Melanio Aragon Calderon, was not only resistant to the company's campaign, but was elected by his fellow workers to the plantation's so-called 'Permanent Committee'.

The Permanent Workers' Committee is a key part of the 'smoke-screen' that the companies use to keep the union out . Three worker representatives are elected by an assembly of all those directly employed in a given workplace. Their job, on paper, is to negotiate a labour contract with the company. The problem is that the only advisers and trainers allowed in the 'negotiation' of piece rates, terms and conditions with management are from an institution linked to a very conservative wing of the Catholic Church called the John XXII Social School. The doctrine of the School is about 'peaceful labour relations' and is known as Solidarismo and which exist to try and ensure that independent trade unions do not form and flourish. The services of the School's promoters are exclusively paid for by the companies.

However, when a union member slips through the net, as it were, and gets elected to the Committee, the normal tactic is to ignore any proposals coming from the Committee and get the person voted off, by hook or by crook. Even when there are no union members in the Committee, the companies do not consider it their job to listen to proposals coming from workers, especially if they cost money. The job of Committee members for the companies is to put their signatures on the so-called 'direct agreement' governing wage rates and conditions; certainly not to raise grievances. In general, members of the Committee are manipulated by the company management with no opportunity for dissent or discussion.

So, when Melanio Aragon was first elected to the Duacari 4 Permanent Committee, then, in January 2008, to the SITRAP Executive Committee with responsibility for education, Del Monte multiplied its efforts to get him off the Permanent Committee. Didier Leiton takes up the story:

"Melanio is now considered to be a threat to Del Monte's interests. The whole campaign has now come down on his shoulders: the plantation will close and people will be sacked and black-listed because of Melanio Aragon. They put out the word that he had to be removed immediately from the Committee. Then a group of foremen started gathering signatures calling for the John XIII School promoter to come and call an Assembly. This person is the only one permitted by the company to organise an Assembly.

"On 29th February, a highly placed Del Monte manager, Marcos Vinicio, with overall responsibility for 11 plantations, used a meeting of the Duacari 4 Solidarista association to tell a big gathering of workers that they must not be taken in by a few hotheads and they knew what had happened when the companies abandoned the Pacific South in the 1980s and when a few workers at some US tyre factory had gone an strike... Large numbers were left without a livelihood."

The union was also doing its work to counter the disinformation and fear tactics of the company. On 13th March, on the morning of the Workers' Assembly to vote in a new Committee, the workers were in for a surprise:

"The Assembly was scheduled to start at 5am, but the John XXIII School promoter William Rodriguez did not appear. Apparently he was hidden in a storehouse whilst the manager was buying time talking to the Assembly about other matters. It emerged he was trying to fill in time until the packhouse workers arrived at 6am. Normal practice, though, was for field workers to elect their representatives and the packhouse their own. It seems the company was convinced the majority of packhouse workers would vote out Melanio. The rumour was that even a significant number of field workers would vote him off.

"But, when people realised that the company was buying time in this way, some raised their voices and protested that this was out of order. The School promoter appeared and was forced to accept a vote amongst the assembled field workers – whether or not they should have to wait for the packhouse workers. A big majority was in favour of not waiting. However, the School promoter refused to accept the vote and practically forced people to wait the others.

"The Assembly finally started at 6.30am. As usual in such a situation, the company had primed those it wanted to speak and come out with the usual scare-mongering about the union. But people were already wound up by the earlier events. A group who supported Melanio did not let these people speak and argued that an election should be held there and then. Things had got very heated and the Solidarismo promoter did not know what to do. One of the SITRAP members proposed that those who supported the company's candidate should stand on one side and those who supported Melanio on the other. Out of the 115 or so workers present, some 100 were in favour of Melanio. The company's manouevre had come to nought."

Social audits on trial

SITRAP members in Duacari 4 and the neghbouring Duacari 3 have some serious problems with the way in which audits to the SA 8000 social accountability standard are conducted. Workers who are union members are not taken into account and auditors are not checking for the absence of trade union freedom in these plantations.

"In order to express our concerns in more detail, we called a meeting with Senora Monica Lois, who does SA 8000 audits. On 15th March, she and a colleague Kenyi Mora came to meet workers from the two plantations at Melanio's house in Duacari 4.

"When we told the two auditors that we did not believe that the company should be certified as complying with SA 8000 because of its strong anti-union policy, Monica Lois simply asked us not to use this meeting to repeat what had already been said by the union. Workers gave her a whole series of very well-founded examples of how the company violated trade union freedom, but also how there were cases of non-payment of the legal minimum wage, excessively long working days etc etc.

"Monica Lois then stated that the freedom to join a trade union was only one of nine criteria to look for in the audits, and that it was not her job to de-certify companies; what they do is report a non-compliance if they find any anomalies and then do a re-audit six months later, and so on. In any one workplace they only interview 5% of the workforce, including the Permanent Committee members.

"Monica Lois has a very clear anti-union attitude and her complicity with the company is very visible. She stressed how this meeting was 'external' to the official audit, in the same way as they might meet with NGOs or unions. She said the information provided by the workers would be taken into account in the official audit which takes place in April 2008.

She also said that the Europeans are 'very good at demanding respect for workers' rights, but are very bad when it comes to paying a decent price for the fruit they consume'."

Information provided by Didier Leiton Valverde, SITRAP Organisation Secretary, Guapiles, March 19th 2008