Labor is Not a Commodity

Dole Food Company Goes Public: The Importance of Socially Responsible Investing

By Jeremy Silva, Intern, International Labor Rights Forum

Dole Food Company Inc. released a $500 million initial public equity offering (IPO) today.  By becoming a public company, Dole will be required to make its corporate governance more transparent and accessible to the public by providing institutional investors and individual shareholders with the opportunity to become stakeholders in Dole’s policies and practices worldwide.  For concerned investors, Dole’s IPO represents an unprecedented opportunity to review and revise the more questionable policies of the company.  This blog is the fourth blog in this series of exposing Dole and its history of labor rights violations.  You can read the other blogs here, here and here.

ILRF has taken this opportunity to engage with investors, NGOs, and unions to send a letter to Dole expressing our concerns related to its labor rights violations.  The letter was sent to Dole yesterday and included over 35 organizations including International Labor Rights Forum, CREA: Center for Reflection, Education and Action, Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility, Harrington Investments, and Domini Social Investments, Trillium Asset Management, and Green America.  You can read the press release here.  An except of the letter is below:

"We would like to take this opportunity to raise some of our human rights and labor rights concerns in relation to Dole’s supply chain practices in hopes of contributing to the future long-term success of Dole as a responsible corporate actor.  In addition to our concern for those individuals affected by Dole’s activities, we are also concerned that alleged breaches of workers’ rights throughout Dole’s corporate supply chain may impact long term shareholder value.

"While Dole claims adherence to high social standards, we are concerned by credible reports such as “The Sour Taste of Pineapple: How an Expanding Export Industry Undermines Workers and Their Communities” and “A Valentine’s Day Report: Worker Justice and Basic Rights on Flower Plantations in Colombia and Ecuador” by the International Labor Rights Forum claiming that Dole has pursued management practices that subject many of Dole’s workers throughout its global supply chain to sub-standard working conditions."

How much should you value a corporation’s respect for freedom of speech?

By Brian Campbell, Director of Policy and Legal Programs, International Labor Rights Forum

For a company like Dole, where part of the appeal for investors this week is the brand image that drives its Dole’s sales, the company’s corporate culture and the values management infuses in its daily decision-making can be a barometer of the future value. For a company like Dole, which requires significant amount of land and ultimately leaves a huge footprint in the areas where it produces its fresh and packaged produce, management practices also influences how local communities benefit from the company’s large presence. Thus, it bears asking, do Dole’s management practices promote strong relationships with its workers and the communities in which they live?

Dole argues that it does. In filings before the US Trade Representative in support of reduced tariffs for its products, Dole argued that it has garnered the respect of the people of Polomolok, Mindanao, a company town that has grown up around the Dole 20,000 hectare pineapple plantation over the past several decades. Dole runs the local hospital, distributes wheelchairs, and raises money for local anti-poverty and health-related causes. Because it dominates the economic landscape in an impoverished region of Mindanao, Dole enjoys tremendous political support.

Oscar Serihijos would disagree. Mr. Serohijos, a long-time employee and union officer at Dole Philippines subsidiary, faces up to four years in jail and a criminal conviction because Dole is accusing him of spreading false rumors. Charged by Dole with the crime of defamation, Mr. Serohijos has lost his job, faces a lengthy and costly legal defense that may end up with him in jail and the loss of his right to vote because a news magazine article raised health and safety concerns about the disposal of chemicals that Dole uses.

ILO Completes High-level Mission to the Philippines to Examine Freedom of Association Violations

Brian Campbell, ILRF Director of Legal and Policy Programs

            Last week, the ILO completed its High-level Mission to the Philippines to examine violations of freedom of association faced by Filipino workers. The Mission was sent to gather information to complete the ILO’s review of complaints filed by Philippine trade unions of widespread and systematic violations of freedom of association. The Mission will now return to Geneva to sort through the information gathered over the course of the week long set of meetings with representatives from the Philippine government, the employers, and trade unions. The ILO’s Committee on Applications of Standards and the Committee on Freedom of Association will review the Mission’s findings and recommendations to issue final reports sometime in early 2009.

ILO Mission to the Philippines to probe labor violations launched today.

Brett Eisenbrown, Intern, International Labor Rights Forum

The International Labor Organization (ILO) will begin its first high level mission to the Philippines today to investigate charges that the Philippine Government, under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has violated ILO Convention 87 on Freedom of Association, and ILO Convention 98 on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining.  You can learn more about the ILO and ILO conventions here.

The ILO mission will be in the Philippines from September 22nd to 29th when, according to Lito Ustarez, of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) and the National Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU), it will investigate the killing of 92 labor union leaders since 2001. They will meet with families of victims and survivors of unexplained killings, enforced disappearances and labor-related harassment, and they will inspect two major manufacturing plants in Central and Southern Luzon.

Update from the Philippines

Eva Seidelman, Programs/Administrative Assistant, International Labor Rights Forum

2009 has already been an exciting year for ILRF's work to uphold trade union rights in the Philippines!

ILRF has been working throughout the year to demand justice for social and labor activists as the Filipino government and military continue their assault on human rights and union rights. Attorney Brian Campbell has continued to put pressure on the US government to uphold labor conditionality simultaneously through military appropriations allocated to the Philippines and through the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) trade preference program.

In 2007, the US Congress voted for the first time to attach human rights conditions to the military aid our government is providing the Philippine government. Partly as a result of this high level of scrutiny by the US Congress, there was a dramatic decline in the extra-judicial killings of social and labor activists in 2008. Unfortunately, though the number of extra-judicial killings has declined significantly over the past year, widespread human and labor rights abuses continue as the perpetrators enjoy impunity.

Imprisoned labor lawyer in the Philippines released!

By Brian Campbell, International Labor Rights Forum

Atty. Remigio Saladero, chief legal counsel for the KMU in the Philippines, will be released today by  order of the Philippines Regional Trial Court in Calapan City. Atty. Saladero’s family and friends are on their way to Mindoro now to get him.  Atty. Saladero had been held in jail along with six co-defendants, all community and labor organizers, since last October when the Philippine government charged him and dozens of other community and political organizers, labor leaders, and human rights advocates with murder alleging that they all ambushed a police patrol in March 2006.

Just two days ago, military intelligence units, along with local police, arrested another KMU labor organizer in Southern Tagalog, Leonardo Arceta, alleging that he was with Atty. Saladero and the six other defendants when the ambush took place. Mr. Arceta has complained of being tortured while in custody of the police. Many of the other named in the criminal complaint have been unable to return home to their families since they discovered their names listed on the complaint, fearing arrest and torture.

Workers' Rights Snubbed at MCC Board Meeting -- Colombia and Philippines Selected as Compact Eligible

By Brian Campbell, International Labor Rights Forum

In a tremendous snub to workers' rights, and a set back to workers' rights advocates in Colombia and the Philippines, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) selected Colombia and the Philippines to be compact eligible. As one last gift from the Bush Administration, the Colombian government and the Philippine government are now eligible to receive US government grants worth up to $800 million or more. The Board made this decision despite unassailable evidence of widespread workers' rights violations in both the Philippines and Colombia over the past few years, and in the face of a Congressional mandate to ensure that every MCC eligible country "demonstrate a commitment" to respect workers' rights.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, 39 trade unionists were killed in 2007. While this number is down from the 72, killed in 2006, apparently, killings are on the rise again this year, where 41 trade unionists have been killed as of September 2008. Trade unionists in Colombia face abductions, arrests, death threats, and other harassment. In Cali, the local government was working with the Department of National Security gathering information on trade unionists and subjecting them to surveillance and harassment. Colombian trade unions have lodged no less than six complaints before the ILO Committee on Freedom of Association seeking aid from the international community to help protect their members' rights.

Blind Justice Gone Awry in the Philippines: "Please, no questions asked."

By Brian Campbell, International Labor Rights Forum

CLICK HERE TO TAKE ACTION TO STOP INTIMIDATION OF UNIONISTS IN THE PHILIPPINES!

Labor lawyer Remigio Saladero’s arrest at the end of October by joint elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) has spread a blanket of fear across Southern Tagolog’s progressive activist community leaving them wondering, when will I be next?  In all, around 70 activists, many of who work as community organizers for political parties, labor unions, churches and non-governmental organizations, have been charged for murder and attempted murder along with Mr. Saladero for allegedly taking up arms against the government and attacking police forces in an ambush in Mindoro province in March 2006. Since Mr. Saladero was arrested in late October,  five more of the Southern Tagolog activists have been arrested and currently wait in jail in Calapan City for their day in court, eager  to contest the allegations levied at them by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Those activists who have been named as defendants, but not yet arrested, like Emmanuel Asuncion of the Workers’ Assistance Center, try to go on with their normal lives, knowing too well that at any time they too could receive a visit from the military or police and be dragged off to a another province to face murder charges.

Prominent among the activists pursued by the military and charged by the prosecutor in the Mindoro case are at least 15 labor leaders and organizers who have been working for years helping to organize workers in the Philippine export processing zones across CALABARZON (see the list below). Labor rights activists and trade union leaders working with the Workers’ Assistance Center in Cavite, transportation unions, Nestle workers’ union, Toyota workers’ union, Honda workers’ union, and many others are all facing the murder charges levied by a government that is increasingly taking draconian measures to make organizing unions difficult and striking illegal, especially if the military decides it doesn’t like a particular union’s brand of militant unionism.

Does the MCC Care About Internationally Recognized Workers’ Rights?

By Brian Campbell, ILRF Attorney, and Lise Johnson, ILRF intern

The Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) Board of Directors will meet tomorrow to determine which countries are eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars in US government grants from the Millennium Challenge Account, a foreign assistance program established in 2004 with the goal of reducing poverty by promoting sustainable economic growth. This year, the MCC faces a difficult decision whether to again select the Philippines as a potential partner country and whether to continue negotiations with the Philippine government that began this past summer. While much of the Board’s discussion about the Philippines will no doubt be focused on the increasing government corruption in the Philippines, the Board should consider one other significant trend in the Philippines, the systematic undermining of workers’ rights by the Philippine government; all in the name of economic growth.