Banana growers flout labor standards

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Apr. 25 (IPS)— Ecuador’s banana producers flout international labor standards by allowing children as young as eight years old to work under hazardous conditions and by effectively preventing adult workers from forming unions, an international rights watchdog said Thursday.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a 140-page report based on a three week investigation last May of the banana-growing areas along Ecuador’s Pacific coast, called on the Quito government to vigorously enforce existing child labor laws and amend its Labor Code to ensure that banana workers are free to organize.

The report, ‘Tainted Harvest: Child Labor and Obstacles to Organizing on Ecuador’s Banana Plantations,’ also urges banana exporting corporations, both Ecuador and US-based, to monitor labor conditions on the banana plantations and provide incentives for local plantation operators to comply with international labor standards.

“The Ecuadorian bananas on your table may have been produced under appalling conditions,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of HRW’s Americas Division. “Banana companies have a duty to uphold workers’ rights. Ecuador is obligated under international law to do so.’’

Ecuador is the world’s largest banana exporter, accounting for about 28 percent of all bananas that are produced for export, according to the report. In the year 2000, 24 percent of the banannas imported by the US and 17 percent of the bananas imported by the European Union (EU) were produced in Ecuador.

Only one percent of Ecuador’s banana workers are affiliated with a union, HRW said — the lowest rate among Central American banana exporters.

In contrast to other Latin American banana-producing countries where multinational corporations directly own about 60 percent of the banana plantations, the world’s three largest banana multinationals - Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte - own virtually no land in Ecuador due to a far-reaching agrarian reform program dating back to the 1960s.

Instead, the three US-based companies, like their Ecuadorian counterparts, Noboa and Rey Banano del Pacifico (Reybanpac), buy bananas mainly by contracting with third-party producers, ranging from small, family-owned and -operated plantations of as little as one hectare to large plantations of several hundred hectares.

Almost all of the plantations are concentrated in three provinces along the Pacific coast where the tropical climate and rich soil make conditions ideal for growing and harvesting bananas year round.

Child labor on these plantations, according to the report, results primarily from the low wages and lack of benefits paid to adult workers.

The legal minimum wage for a banana worker working a five-day week is $117 per month, or $5.85 a day, plus the costs of affiliating workers with Ecuador’s Social Security Institute, which provides them with health insurance. But the average wage of 20 adult workers interviewed by HRW came to only $5.44 a day, and the vast majority of workers said they were uninsured.

Moreover, the labor ministry estimates the cost of the basic market basket of food plus other essentials at 288 dollars a month.

“Therefore, in the banana industry, the wages of two working and fully paid adults may not be sufficient to provide for their family, in which case, the added salary of a child may be sought to supplement the family’s income,’’ the report said. As a result, child labor is widespread.

Of the 45 children interviewed by HRW during its investigation, 41 of them had begun working in the banana plantations between the ages of eight and 13, and most started at ten or 11.

Most made only $3.50 a day, or less than two-thirds of the adult rate. Seventy percent of the children said they had worked on plantations that almost exclusively supply Dole, by far the biggest US exporter in Ecuador.

All of the children described workdays of 12 hours on average and dangerous working conditions. They reported being exposed to pesticides and fungicides in both the plantations and packing plants, most often without any protective gear.

“When the planes pass, we cover ourselves with our shirts,’’ said one 14-year-old working on a plantation in Balao, about 100 km south of Guayaquil “We just continue working...we can smell the pesticides.’’

The children reported a variety of symptoms consistent with pesticide exposure, including headaches, fever, dizziness, red eyes, stomach aches, nausea, vomiting, trembling and shaking, itching, burning nostrils, fatigue, and aching bones.

Children were also made to work with sharp tools, such as knives, machetes, and short curved blades, while four boys interviewed by HRW reported harnessing themselves with hooks to move as many as 400 kg of banana stalks more than one km from field to packing plant.

Girls, including three pre-adolescents, reported being sexually harassed on the job.

HRW found that less than 40 percent of the children it interviewed were still attending school at age 14.

Under Ecuadorian law, employers must obtain authorization to hire any child under 14 years old, but this provision is not being enforced by the relevant authorities, according to HRW, which cited an “almost complete breakdown of the government bureaucracy responsible for enforcing child Labor laws’’ in the banana sector.

A similar lack of regulation, combined with weak laws, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for adult workers to organize to improve their conditions or pay.

Employers who fire workers for union activity are not obliged to reinstate them. Instead, in the few examples in which the state acts, employers may opt to pay a fine of less than $400.

In addition, employers circumvent labor laws by using subcontractors to recruit the workers and by hiring “permanent temporary’’ workers — who receive consecutive short term contracts for their labor — to ensure that they are not entitled to protections that ordinarily come with full-time work, including the right to organize.

“Most workers on these plantations can’t organize to protest their working conditions,’’ according to Vivanco. “Either they suffer in silence or they risk being fired.’’

Despite their own labor and environmental codes of conduct and auditing procedures, the exporting corporations queried by HRW rejected any obligation to demand that the third-party plantations from which they buy bananas abide by international labor standards or stated that their relationships with producers were “business proprietary information.’’

LABOR BRIEFS

Colombian unionists victims of violence
Last year, 160 Colombian labor activists were killed and 78 “disappeared,” according to a report form the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The report adds that in the same period, 30 attacks on trade unionists were reported as well as numerous death threats, and many labor activists were forced to flee their homes and even Colombia.

The report blames the right-wing United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary groups for “the majority of these violent deaths.”

This year, 58 unionists have been murdered in Colombia. (IPS)

Thousands protest labor law
changes in Poland
Tens of thousands of Solidarity trade union activists marched through Warsaw, Poland on Fri., Apr. 26 to protest government plans to liberalize Poland’s labor code. Estimates put the crowd size between 30 and 50 thousand.

The proposed overhaul is a cornerstone of a government program that would relax rules on overtime, sick leave, temporary work, and the hiring and firing of workers. With Polish unemployment already running at 18 percent, unions fear businesses would take advantage of the proposed legislation to fire workers en masse. (Financial Times)