Agriculture provides the backbone of Guatemala’s economy, contributing 25 per cent of GDP, employing over half the labour force and providing two thirds of exports, mostly coffee, sugar, bananas and beef.
Currently, 80% of the banana production and a quarter of its exports are carried out by Guatemalan national companies. From the late 1990s, the banana industry underwent a major expansion in the Southern Pacific coastal plain, enabling the country to overtake Colombia and Costa Rica and establish itself as the world’s third largest exporter.Izabal, in the North of the country on the Caribbean coast now produces only 20% of total banana exports. There are at least 30,000 direct jobs in the industry.
Guatemala currently provides around 40% of all bananas etering the North American market.
Area
42,042 sq miles
Population
Increase 17,263,239 (2018)
GDP
Total – $145.249 billion (2018) Per capita – $8,413 (2018)
Total Land Area
108,890 hectares
Banana Production Area
80,161 hectares
Total Banana Production
3.8 million metric tonnes (2017)
ITUC Global Rights Index
Rating 5 (no guarantee of rights)
SITRABI Banana Link Partner
SITRABI, the Izabal Banana Workers’ Union, is the oldest private sector union in Guatemala and represents over 3000 workers in Del Monte and their supplier farms on the Caribbean coast. Every three years the union negotiates wages and social benefits with Del Monte subsidiary Bandegua. SITRABI has good relations with other local unions in other multinational and national plantations.
Our work in Guatemala
Guatemala has been described as the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists by the International Trade Union Confederation. Since 2007, a total of 68 trade union leaders and representatives have been murdered, and a high number of attempted murders, kidnappings, break-ins, and death threats have been reported, along with torture.
The real challenge is that banana workers’ relatively decent wages and conditions in the North are being undercut by a huge expansion of cheap, non-union bananas in the South. With the British TUC Aid and Banana Link, SITRABI has been able to start the awareness-raising process with workers in the South and establish dialogue with one of the main companies operating there.
Noé Ramirez Portela, General Secretary of SITRABI until 2019, talks in the video on the right about the challenges and dangers of organising in Guatemala below.
Training & Organising Guatemalan Banana Workers
TUC Aid Project
TUC Aid has supported a project entitled “Training and organising Guatemalan banana workers” since 2013.
The majority of banana plantation and packhouse workers in the Izabal province of North East Guatemala are members of SITRABI, COSISBA or smaller affiliated sister unions. These 5500 or so workers enjoy collective bargaining with their employers: Fresh Del Monte Produce subsidiary Bandegua, Chiquita subsidiary Cobigua, and Guatemalan-owned fruit companies under contract to Del Monte.
Those working for Del Monte in particular enjoy relatively decent wages, terms and conditions after 40 years of gradual improvements achieved through the negotiation of 3 year-long CBAs. Although workers in the other companies earn well above the minimum wage, they have not been able to secure the same level of benefits as their colleagues employed by the other companies. Nearly 1000 workers in the Izabal banana industry are still unorganised.
The Urgency of Reversing the Race to The Bottom
The unionised workers of the ‘North’ face, however, the very real risk of losing their jobs and livelihoods in the short- to medium-term, in a region with no other major employers.
The costs of producing a box of bananas in Izabal is around $1.50 more than the the same box in the large extensions of recently planted export bananas in the provinces along the Pacific coastal plain in the South. Attempts to organise trade unions in this region have been violently repressed, including the murder of a union leader in 2008.
Guatemala now exports nearly four times as much from the completely unorganised plantations of the South as it does from Izabal.
The rapid expansion has taken place on highly productive volcanic soils, using a very badly paid and exploited workforce and in a part of the country where government services are often absent and organised crime operates with total impunity.
The critical challenge for SITRABI and the sister unions is to ensure that the 25,000 or so workers in the Pacific South workers have access to education and training that enables them to organise without fear.
This can only happen if there is serious and concerted international trade union solidarity, as is being shown by TUC Aid and the US-based Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO.
The Achievements of The Project Have Been:
To empower men and women shop stewards from the Izabal plantations in the North East and men and women workers from the Pacific South plantations through a systematic programme of training.
To promote unionisation in the Pacific South of Guatemala through education, advocacy, social dialogue and communication linked to a process of national and international alliance-building.
In 2018, negotiations started towards a first framework agreement between SITRABI, a small sister union in Izabal and the country’s second largest banana company, Grupo Agroamérica/BANASA.
Trade unions make a big difference for Guatemalan banana workers
Guatemala is currently the third largest exporting country of bananas in the world, and by far the largest exporter of bananas to North America, with two exporting areas: one on the southern Pacific coast, which is non-unionised and represents 85 percent of employment in the sector, and the other in the north where nearly all workers employed in banana plantations are unionised. Northern Guatemala is also home to one of the stronger unions in region, Sitrabi, which represents Del Monte workers, whilst other unions represent Chiquita workers in the same Caribbean coastal area.
The report, based upon a survey of over 200 workers (34% women), as well as extensive interviews, an examination of trade data, and a review of relevant prior research, found:
Non-unionised workers earn less than half the hourly pay of unionised workers and work 12 hours per week more. Labour conditions are also more precarious for workers working for nationally-owned enterprises relative to enterprises directly owned by the big banana multinational brands.
Non-union workers are 81 percent more likely to face verbal abuse than union workers. One of the most notable findings of the report being that 58 percent of women in non-union banana packing plants face sexual harassment at work compared to eight percent of women at unionised packing plants.
All of the above labour rights violations take place at enterprises that are inspected by private certification programmes, including Global G.A.P. and Rainforest Alliance. At 25.5 percent of unionised workplaces and 85.9 percent of non-union workplaces, management tells workers what to say to the certification inspectors before the inspectors arrive.
Taking Action to End the Violence and Impunity in Guatemala
Violence against banana union leaders in Guatemala escalated following the murder of SITRABI union leader, Marco Tulio Ramirez, in September 2007. In the following five years, a total of 68 unionists have been murdered and none of the perpetrators of these crimes have been brought to justice.
In 2014, more than 6000 people responded to a request from Banana Link, the TUC and the International Labor Rights Forum urged people to send emails to the new Attorney General to ensure that the process of investigation into the crimes against trade unionists was not dropped. Following this campaign action SITRABI met with the UN Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) who agreed a dialogue process starting with 10 of the 68 cases of unionists murdered since 2007. However, to date, nobody has been brought to trial for these killings and successive governments have failed to deliver on promises.
Guatemala Resources
Guatemala working conditions criticised
Guatemala’s Banana Wars
In this interview, Noè Ramírez of banana workers’ union SITRABI speaks about the violation of labour rights in Guatemala and the murder of trade union activists. Noè’s brother, Marco Tulio Ramírez, also a SITRABI union leader, was murdered in October 2007. He describes efforts to improve workers’ rights and condition at plantations on the south coast of Guatemala, where they are hoping to replicate SITRABI’s successes in Izabal.
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