Guest Blog: Trade union repression in the Costa Rican bananera

Costa Rican bananas are widely, cheaply available in European and North American supermarkets. A core food basket item, some large supermarket chains now sell bananas at a loss to entice custom. A small number of large multinational fruit producer-exporters control around 40% of this market, and all claim to produce commodities under socially and environmentally sound conditions through their participation in various private supply chain governance programmes. In the summer of 2022, I travelled to Costa Rica to conduct my PhD research, which explored workers’ lived experience of private governance initiatives, and whether they felt they were benefiting from them.

All workers interviewed had worked on plantations either wholly-owned by or sole supplier to multinationals. All plantations were covered by at least one ethical code of conduct, and many were covered by multiple private governance initiatives. This includes programmes with household recognition, such as Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade, as well as other certifications such as SCS Sustainably Grown and SA8000, and other more direct agreements with workers’ representative organisations. All of these contain supposed provisions for the protection of workers’ Freedom of Association rights on banana plantations. There are also provisions in Costa Rica’s national regulatory framework. Despite this, my fieldwork suggests these rights remain precarious on Costa Rican bananeras.

There have been public reports of the systemic repression of trade unions in the banana sector in Costa Rica since the early 2000s. My recent fieldwork and that of Zaglul Ruiz suggested that these continue today; many workers and trade union officials complained about the undermining of Freedom of Association rights, hampering their ability to push for gains. For instance, it was reported by trade union leaders that waves of repression intensify when unionising workers are reaching a density of 33% on individual plantations, at which point plantation management are required by law to engage in collective negotiations – something they hope to avoid in a country with the highest minimum wage level in Latin America and a high cost of living.[1]

Institutional and individual strategies

The strategies for trade union repression are varied and multiscalar. Supranational trade union federation leaders claimed that their interactions with multinational banana companies were highly unsatisfactory.[2] Even in cases where multinationals had specific channels for trade union engagement, supranational union leaders felt their grievances went unheard and unremediated.[3] At the local level, trade unions and workers reported that plantation managers failed to engage directly or productively with independent trade unions.[4] Plantations favoured engagement with non-independent forms of worker representation, including company-adjacent Solidarista Associations and worker-management Permanent Committees on plantations. Illustratively, I observed two trade unions standing outside the gates of a plantation to share information leaflets with workers as they exited – plantations, they told me, would call the police if trade union leaders set foot on the property.[5] Large industry players have also relocated production to non-unionised facilities at various times and points in the chain, seen as part of a wider strategy to undermine union organising.

This lack of institutional recognition of and engagement with independent trade unions on the bananera frustrates and circumscribes collective bargaining efforts and other advocacy. The 33% threshold needed to trigger bargaining was met on a group of plantations and a historic collective agreement was signed, the only one in recent years, but implementation is reported to be lacking.[6] Beyond formal channels, my research suggested that forms of trade union repression occur at the individualised level. Research participants on various plantations owned by or supplying multinational companies claimed that this manifests as discrimination, targeting and harsh treatment of union members, including being forced to perform the dirtiest and most physically demanding tasks and given least favourable contractual terms.[7] Managers were reported to hand out unjustified warnings and seek ways of removing unionised workers.[8] This culture of discrimination created a hostile environment for union members, discouraging further organising.

Relatedly, dismissals were reported to be widespread, often doled out without sound justification or reasoning.[9] Some workers were later rehired on the proviso they do not re-affiliate themselves. Very short-term contracts are becoming more widely used[10] in the sector to diminish employer responsibility to workers and flexibilise the workforce despite there being no pronounced differences in seasonal labour demand.[11] This makes dismissal an increasingly viable strategy to deal with problematic workers, who are simply let go at the expiration of their contract.[12] Some workers found themselves blacklisted after dismissal by their employer, unable to find work at times even on competing plantations in the area.[13] Some workers reported cases of blacklisting ex-union affiliates family members,[14] extending retribution into the wider community. Given the limited alternative employment opportunities available to people in banana producing regions, and often low levels of formal education, blacklisting can result in severe, long-term financial hardship and precarity.[15]

A ‘Costa Rican’ problem or a ‘global supply chain’ problem?

Trade union repression both at the institutional and individual level is central to labour control in the sector. It disciplines the workforces and puts a lid on other gains, including wages progression. But what is driving these practices that undermine industry-adopted standards, as well as the Costa Rican labour code and the ILO core conventions? To understand this, we need to look both at the local political and industrial relations of Costa Rica in combination with the shifting power relations of the banana supply chain in recent decades.

In the late 1980s, production in the sector expanded rapidly to meet newly “anticipated markets” in the liberalising post-Soviet world that never materialised. This resulted in a banana glut and falling global prices. This put downward pressure on major producer-exporters, who responded in part by repressing then-powerful trade unions in some locations. More recently, supermarkets in Europe have grown in power, with the rise of discounters setting rock-bottom sectoral benchmark prices for bananas with which other supermarkets must compete. Meanwhile, the producer-exporters themselves compete fiercely for contracts with these large supermarkets in the global market. This squeezes producer-exporters and their suppliers to maintain low input costs, further reducing both their ability and willingness to engage with unions whose demands may result in increased labour and related costs – which sits in tension with corporate responsibility commitments.

These global industry dynamics interact with dynamics of localised labour control. Guatemalan and Honduran unions have also been targeted on a systemic basis, including through direct acts of violence amid many other human rights violations. However, Costa Rica is deemed to lack positive examples of union-company relations in banana production,[16] unlike neighbouring countries. Therefore, each national context exhibits a specific coalition of factors that constitute the control and agency of workers in specific times and places. Costa Rica is deemed to have a culture of hostility towards trade unions, despite its reputation as a bastion for human rights in the region. This is sponsored and maintained by the Costa Rican state and the Catholic church’s support of non-union forms of worker representation. The state also fails to adequately monitor and enforce collective rights, and recent legislation circumscribes possibilities for legal industrial action.

These combined global and local dynamics have coalesced to reduce union coverage in the sector from around 90% in 1982 to an estimated 2-5% today.[17] This has not only has undermined collective progress on rights and wages, but has resulted in the targeting of individual workers, putting them at risk of destitution.

Various companies in the industry were invited to participate in this research, but none accepted.