Labor is Not a Commodity

Historic Strike of Brick Kiln Workers in Andhra Pradesh, India

By A Krishna and Sudhir Katiyar, Solidarity Committee for Brick Kiln Laborers in Andhra Pradesh

Every year thousands of workers from West Odisha migrate to work in inta bhattis of Ranga Reddy district. There are nearly 5000 workers form Odisha working in 100 inta bhattis in villages around Dundigal of Kutbullapur mandal. The workers are recruited against a nominal advance. They are paid only 180-200 Rupees (US$3.55 - $3.95) per 1000 bricks. The statutory minimum wage in AP for brick making is 340 - 367 Rupees (US$6.71 - $7.24) per 1000 bricks depending upon quality of brick. Thus they are paid less than half the minimum wages.

This year the workers demanded that they be paid minimum wages. A memorandum was submitted to the Labor Commissioner office on 5th March demanding payment of minimum wages. A meeting was held on 18th March where it was decided to stop work to put pressure on owners to pay minimum wages. The workers have stopped working on 19th March demanding payment of minimum wages. They want to go back to their villages if they are not paid minimum wages. After this the owners have let loose a reign of terror. The Union people doing organising were called to police station where a mob of owners demandd that they be arrested. Police questioned the union organizers and advised them not to go back to the village Dundigal as they could not guarantee the security. The owners ganged up and did not let the union vehice enter the village.

Also, on 20th March the strike continued.A huge gathering of brick kiln workers took place near village Dundigal. However the Union activists could not address the gathering owing to the mob of owners that surrounded the meeting. The police also tried to disperse the workers and even threatened lathi charge. Three Union workers got holed up in village Dundigal and could be rescued with police help only late in the evening after much pressure was brought upon the police.

The owners are threatening workers with violence. In Maladri inta bhatti, the workers Sukru and his wife were badly beaten up and forced to resume work on 19th March. Workers have also been beaten up in Ekteshwar and Narsimha bhattis. The owners are even going to the extent of cutting off electricity and drinking water supply.

The concerned citizens of Hyderabad have formed a Solidarity Committee to support workers struggle. The Committee met the District Collector and the District Commissioner of Labor asking for their intervention. A meeting is now scheduled on 21st March between the Labor Department and the owners to impress upon the owners that they have to pay minimum wages. However the Labor Commissioner is already beginning to obfuscate the issue by saying that he has to interpret minimum wages. The District Collector has ordered the Deputy Collector to make rounds of bhattis and ensure that minimum wages are paid and violence is stopped.

Iris Munguía Receives SOLIDAR Silver Rose Award

Edited translation of Iris Munguia's acceptance speech for the prestigious SOLIDAR Silver Rose Award, reposted from Banana Link

Childhood on Banana Plantations

I was born on 13 December. My father was a banana plantation worker and my mother was a housewife, just as the majority of women at that time in my country, Honduras. So I spent my childhood, my adolescence and my youth ‐ a large part of my life ‐ on the banana plantations.

An Interview with Iris Munguia in Honduras, November 2011, by Banana Link.

Life

My full name is Iris Yolanda Munguía, I graduated as a bookkeeper and public accountant. Alongside studying and working, I looked after the family – a practice which implies a great amount of sacrifice in Honduras. Some women cope with this better than
others.

I am a single mother with four children; two boys and two girls. I have been a banana worker myself on the Chiquita plantations for 33 years of which I was the union leader for the last 32 years.

Work as a Union Leader

Getting to this point in my life hasn’t been easy. I experienced some very challenging situations before I became responsible for the Coordination of Women’s Work for the Coordinating Body of Banana and Agroindustrial Workers Unions (COSIBAH) in Honduras, suffering the macho attitudes of my male colleagues who have always had access to power and who have little trust in women in leadership positions. I went through various processes of formation and training, studying, reading, learning how to talk and to listen to others, to be analytical and critical and to look for means to understand men, women and myself.

For everyone, beginning to be empowered as a leader is difficult, especially in the case of a woman working with male leaders. And today I still smile when I hear the words, “Iris is going to speak to us now”... because the most satisfying thing about working with women is to realise that you can actually contribute to making women’s lives better.

Home-Based Women Workers Rally in Karachi, Pakistan

By Zehra Khan, Home-Based Women Workers' Federation

Thousands of working class women marched with red flags through the streets of busy Sadder area in Karachi to press for their demands to be accepted as workers and covered under social security schemes and for regulations to protect women health workers.  The rally was organized by Home Based Women Workers' Federation (HBWWF) and Lady Health Workers' Association (LHWA) to commemorate the 101st International Women's Day (IWD) on March 8th.
 
The rally started at Regal Chowk and culminated at Karachi Press Club. Rally participants carried placards and banners demonstrating their demands and chanted slogans to highlight their struggles.
 
At the end of the rally, addressing the gathering of women workers, leaders said that March 8th would be remembered as day of struggle and to recognize the sacrifices of working women who light the flame of movement to liberate women globally from all kinds of discrimination and injustice. The speakers pledged to continue their movement despite any circumstances they may face to achieve the equal rights and elimination of all laws, customs and traditions which call them second class citizens and lesser human beings. Women have been deprived of their basic rights in the name of religion and reactionary traditions rooted in feudalism, while the capitalist system has treated women as cheap labor and a market commodity.

The speakers explained that nearly 12 million women contribute to the Pakistani economy through their production as home-based workers in different industrial and commercial sectors including garments, leather, embroidery, sports goods, shoe making, glass bangles and many other sectors without their role being recognized by the country's labour laws. Since Pakistan laws don't recognize them as workers they are not covered under state-run social security schemes covering health insurance, education, and pensions.  They also said that ILO Convention 177 on Home Work asks the government to recognize home-based women workers as workers under the law and to formulate national policy for the progress and well-being of the most oppressed and vulnerable sector of workers -- the home-based women workers.

Guidance for Consumers on Valentine's Day

By Katie Bergman, Free2Work

Flowers, jewelry, and chocolate: collectively, these are the modern-day linchpin of Valentine’s Day.  Yet lurking in the shadows of these industries is a myriad of highly-contentious labour issues.  In order to produce larger quantities of products at a lower price, many companies knowingly or unknowingly use supply chains in which child or forced labour, poor environmental practices, and appalling working conditions exist.  Unfortunately, many consumers are unaware of the breaches of human rights that occur during the trajectory of production, before a diamond necklace or box of chocolates reaches its final destination on some store shelf.

This February 14, the National Retail Federation anticipates that U.S. consumers will spend $17.6 billion on gifts for their significant others.  But how much of this will be spent on ethically-sourced products?  

In the U.S., an estimated $1.9 billion will be spent on flowers alone for Valentine’s Day 2012—but most of these dollars will go to products harvested by workers under exploitive working conditions.  Would we still purchase flowers if we knew that they were produced at the expense of a sexually harassed flower worker in Ecuador?  Or by a Kenyan labourer who was paid less than a dollar for a 12-hour day of work?  Or by a flower worker in Columbia exposed to 127 different pesticides on a regular basis, including ones known to be extremely toxic or carcinogenic? 

Like flower sales, jewelry purchases fuel labour-related injustices where regard is not paid to how the products are sourced.  Of the $4.1 billion that shoppers are projected to spend on jewelry for Valentine’s Day 2012, a percentage of these sales will be propagating child labour.  For example, Surat, India—which cuts and polishes 92% of all diamonds in the global trade—relies heavily upon the labour of children under the age of ten. 

Turning Valentine’s Day into International Flower Workers' Day

By Eric Gottwald, International Labor Rights Forum

Sixty percent of flowers sold in the United States come from Colombia, where nearly 100,000 workers earn poverty wages in spite of working grueling 16 to 18 hour days. When flower workers, the majority of whom are women, try to organize to improve their working conditions they inevitably face government-sanctioned retaliation, firings, sexual harassment, and even beatings.  With the recent passage of U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Colombian flower exporters stand to gain tens of millions of dollars on the backs of these exploited workers.  

That's why the International Labor Rights Forum and the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project are asking consumers to help turn Valentine’s Day into International Flower Workers' Day by taking action to support flower workers. Already, just this morning, over 1000 consumers have sent letters to the Colombian Labor Minister demanding that the government fulfill its promise to hold Colombian flower companies accountable for labor rights abuses.

Inspired by Visit to Alta Gracia

By Tiffany Finck-Hanes

Strength. Power. Unity. Workers at Alta Gracia, a living-wage union-made apparel factory embody these words. After years of working under exploitative factory conditions in the Free Trade Zone in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic, workers organized to create Alta Gracia, a model factory where they receive more than three times the local minimum wage and are able to adequately support their families with healthy food, shelter, health care and education.

In the beginning of January I was fortunate to travel to Villa Altagracia on a trade justice delegation with the Fair World Project. Not only did we visit the factory Alta Gracia, we also spent quality time with many of the workers, their children and other members of the community. While hiking to a the local river, dancing bachata or sharing a meal, I learned about years of discrimination and abuse that many of the workers have experienced and the sacrifices they made to organize and create Alta Gracia. Yenni, one of the original organizers of Alta Gracia explained, “I decided I needed to put myself one hundred percent into the fight. I was willing to give up privileges because if people were going to make things better for all workers, it was something I had to do.”

The New Face behind Unionized (and Feminist) Bananas in Latin America

By Lupita Aguila Arteaga, STITCH

More and more women in the global labor rights movement continue to impress us all with their resilience and passionate fight for gender equality in our unions and organizations. In the last few years, women in the banana unions across Latin America have upped the ante. Bananeras, as they are dearly called, have achieved victories we can only dream of in the U.S., including clauses in their union contract that allows them to take a paid day off for a mammogram and/or a pap smear, union-wide campaigns with workshops against domestic violence, as well as union-led campaigns against HIV/AIDS with a focus on reproductive justice and accessibility to healthcare for all women in their communities. Not to mention the fact that ALL local banana unions have a women’s committee. 

Well, let’s add another triumph for women everywhere: newly-elected by the Coordination of Latin American Banana Unions, Iris Munguia, General Coordinator of more than 45,000 workers in eight countries across the region! Iris was named coordinator of COLSIBA during its XI Conference in August 2011. She is the first woman to be elected to lead COLSIBA since its founding in 1993. The fact that Iris was elected for this important position illustrates the great progress that unions in Latin America have made regarding the representation of women.

Labor, Sweatshops and CAFTA in Nicaragua

By Steve Watrous 

As I walked through the big room of a clothing factory in Managua’s free trade zone, where about 800 workers were busy sewing and ironing black Wrangler jeans, the heat was horrible for a visitor from the north. I saw the notices that the employees were supposed to wear dust masks, but they mostly weren’t, and neither was I until a kind woman offered me one.

The dilemma is that once you put on the mask, those ceiling fans no longer cool half your face, and that factory seems ten degrees hotter. Fortunately, the dust was light enough that I could clearly see the far corner of the room, maybe 300 feet away.

This building used to contain Chentex, a viciously anti-union company that made clothing for Kohl’s Department Stores and other U.S. vendors. About 11 years ago fair traders in Milwaukee and many other cities made a fuss about Kohl’s Nicaraguan sweatshops. When I last visited Nicaragua, 10 years ago, Chentex had defeated the unionizing effort.

The U.S. – Colombia FTA: a bad deal for workers and labor rights

By Eric Gottwald, International Labor Rights Forum

After five years of struggle, the U.S. Congress passed the U.S. trade promotion agreement with Colombia on October 12^th.  The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has opposed the passage of any FTA with Colombia until the Colombian government demonstrates the political will and capacity to make meaningful, lasting improvements to its dismal record on enforcing internationally-recognized, fundamental labor rights.  

For over a decade, Colombia has been the world’s most dangerous country to be a trade unionist. According to the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, roughly 4,000 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered in the past 20 years.  Fifty one Colombian unionists were murdered in 2010, more than the rest of the world combined.  Shockingly, virtually no one is prosecuted or convicted for these crimes, with an impunity rate of approximately 96 percent.

In 2009, the ILRF submitted written comments to the United States Trade Representative outlining a set of labor rights benchmarks that the Colombian government should meet before the U.S. considers the passage of any FTA, including:

•  Demonstrate a dramatic and sustained reduction (and eventual elimination) of violence and threats against trade unionists and other human rights defenders.
•  Demonstrate a dramatic increase in the rates of investigation and successful prosecution of those who commit acts of violence against trade unionists, including exploring alleged links between paramilitary groups, multinational corporations, and Colombian security forces.    
• Enact labor law reforms to bring Colombia in compliance with the 8 ILO Core Conventions it has ratified and close the loopholes in Colombian law that allow employers to use “labor cooperatives,” temporary contracting, and other schemes that undermine Colombian workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.  

And You Thought Tobacco Only Harmed the Smoker

Allison Richina, Intern, International Labor Rights Forum

Women for Justice in Africa (WOJA) in consultation with Marty Otañez, professor of political ecology, Anthropology Department, University of Colorado Denver and in collaboration with the International Labor Rights Forum, organized “Working Our Rights Away: Women and Child Laborers on Tobacco Farms in Kenya Speak Out,” and “Visualizing Health and Gender Equity: Views from Tobacco Fields in Kenya,” two workshops that were both located in New York, this past February. The two workshops examined the role of children and pregnant women as laborers on tobacco farms. The harsh conditions of pregnant women and children under the ages of fifteen are revealed through personal interviews and extensive research on Kenyan tobacco farms. WOJA and Otañez complied some of this information for an online video. The video hopes to deliver clear and thorough evidence of the realities of the pregnant women who are forced to work in tobacco fields. 

 

What is it like to be a pregnant woman farming tobacco in Kenya? LARGE from Marty Otañez on Vimeo.