Our Work in Guatemala

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.