Labor Alerts: a service of Campaign for Labor
Rights
Posted July 18, 2002
In this alert:
[Information in this Alert from STITCH, US/Leap, New York Times]
After a national letter-writing campaign, Costco, one of the largest
U.S. purchasers of Noboa's Bonita bananas, reported that they had
contacted the Noboa Corporation as requested in thousands of letters
from around the world. Thanks to all who have contacted Costco urging
that it intervene with Noboa!
Despite a powerful and growing international campaign against the
Noboa Corporation (owner of Bonita bananas) its chief owner, Alvaro
Noboa, has still not agreed to negotiate with workers on his plantations.
Nearly two months after admitting to hiring armed thugs that violently
attacked striking workers on the Los Alamos plantations in Ecuador,
workers report that the Noboa Corporation has not only refused to
reach any settlement with their unions, but has also begun to form
a company-friendly negotiating committee, similar to a company union,
in an effort to block negotiations. The union reports that the "company
union" has members who don't even work on the Los Alamos plantations.
The government of Ecuador has convened "tribunals of arbitration
and reconciliation," a tri-partite body comprised of labor, management
and government representatives to resolve labor disputes. For the
first time in recent history, these tribunals have been ruling in
favor of the workers.
The negotiations tribunals focus primarily on a settlement regarding
the attacks of banana workers on the Los Alamos plantations by 400
armed thugs on May 16th where dozens of workers were injured due to
gunshot wounds and many more battered, terrorized, and thrown out
of their homes. The unions' demands include reinstatement of all workers
(including those fired that prompted the strike that began May 6th),
payment of benefits (mainly healthcare) as owed to the workers under
the law, and payment of lost wages during the strike and suspension.
This agreement is hoped to be the starting place for contract negotiations.
US/LEAP, a close ally of Campaign for Labor Rights based in Chicago,
organized a delegation of congressional staffers to visit the Alamos
plantations shortly after the May attacks. Most banana industry representatives
they met with tried to tell the delegation that the incident at the
Los Alamos plantations was an isolated event. Delegation members raised
the recent report issued by Human Rights Watch that documents child
labor and long-standing neglect for the right to freedom of association
in the Ecuadorian banana industry as proof of a systematic and industry-wide
problem indicative of the "race to the bottom" of the banana industry.
The banana sector in Ecuador is seen as leading this "race to the
bottom," and the Noboa situation acts as a test case for worker rights
in the industry throughout the region.
In a May 31 meeting with the delegation, Alvaro Noboa (owner of
the Noboa Corporation and a leading Presidential candidate for Ecuador's
October elections) and his lawyers acknowledged that the company had
brought in the armed thugs. But they belittled the violence as "minimal"
and said it was necessary because the workers were destroying or about
to destroy his property. No evidence has been provided to support
this claim, which has been dismissed by the Minister of Labor. Noboa
also described the workers as illegally occupying his land, but since
the strike has never been declared illegal, the workers are not considered
to have been engaged in an illegal occupation. Moreover, eviction
procedure under Ecuadorian law does not include violence against workers
in the middle of the night!
Contact Noboa. Urge Mr. Alvaro Noboa to stop his effort to deny
workers their basic rights, to fire those responsible for the attacks,
and to negotiate with the unions in good faith, as required by law.
Mr. Alvaro Noboa Ponton, Noboa Corporation. Fax: 011-593-42-444-093,
email: banoboa@bonita.com
, or mail:
Grupo Noboa Inc.
555 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
**NOTE: Please send a copy of your letter to us: clr@clrlabor.org,
so we can report back to you, the union, and others around the world
on how many letter have been sent to Noboa.
New York Times, July 13, 2002
By JUAN FORERO
PUERTO INCA, Ecuador - At Los Alamos plantation, it would appear
that no expense was spared to produce the Bonita brand Cavendish bananas
sold in the United States. The modern 3,000-acre hacienda in this
steamy corner of Ecuador, one of the most efficient in Latin America,
employs some 1,300 workers to tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art
irrigation system.
The owner is Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador's richest man and a worldly bon
vivant. He has become the leading candidate for president with the
help of a slick marketing campaign that has cast him as a populist
friend of the poor. "I love the workers at Los Alamos," Mr. Noboa
told local reporters in May, when he announced his candidacy. But
in interviews, a dozen children and many adults spoke of child laborers
at Los Alamos, among them a spindly-armed 10-year-old, Esteban Menendez.
"I come here after school and I work here all day," Esteban said.
"I have to work to help my father, to help him make money."
The presence of children on the plantation of a man who may win
Ecuador's presidential election in October is one of the more glaring
examples of how enduring the use of child labor remains in Latin America,
where some 42 million children from ages 5 to 14 have been estimated
to be working in recent years.
The problem has been made more durable still by the competition
that comes with a consolidated global market. Pressures on businesses
to be efficient and profitable are often passed on to the world's
most vulnerable population, its poorest children. Growers and exporters
here, who supply 25 percent of the bananas eaten in the United States,
say the product earns them about 30 percent less today than a decade
ago, often prompting them to turn a blind eye to labor codes. Child
labor is common on plantations, large and small.
Meanwhile, grim economic realities leave families more than ready
to send their boys, and sometimes girls, out to work, even if it means
pulling them out of school and placing them in fields or factories
where they are exposed to hazardous conditions for little or no pay.
For two years, Esteban and his family say, the boy has bounded up
15-foot banana plants, tying insecticide-laced cords between them
to stabilize trunks that might otherwise collapse under the weight
of the produce that is behind Mr. Noboa's fortune of over $1 billion.
He works for nothing to help his father, who tends 98 acres, avoid
having his pay docked. "That is the life of my sons, working in the
bananas at such a young age," said Esteban's mother, Benita Menendez,
36, who has had three sons working at Mr. Noboa's plantation, only
one of them an adult. "I did not want them to work when they were
little, but this is the reality."
Ecuador's problem is less severe than that of other countries in
the region. Even so, the International Labor Organization estimated
that 69,000 children ages 10 to 14, and an additional 325,000 young
people ages 15 to 19, were working here in 1999. Only a significant
increase in wages, at best a distant prospect in a country where the
average worker earns $5.74 a day, will keep families from sending
their children out into the fields, labor advocates here and in the
United States say. But while rights activists regard such labor as
unacceptable, many parents like Mr. and Mrs. Menendez see it as a
necessity.
When several plantations, fearing unwanted attention, dismissed
their child workers after a damning 114-page report in April by Human
Rights Watch, the action was taken as a disaster by families across
the lush banana belt of southern Ecuador - the world's largest banana
exporter and an increasingly important source for American corporations
like Dole and Del Monte, according to the report. "They fired all
the children, but the work they did helped us," complained Marfa Narvarez,
31, whose two sons, Nestor and Luis Boa, 12 and 13, were dismissed
from a big hacienda where they earned $3 a day. "The situation is
such that we all have to pitch in."
At Los Alamos, which supplies the world's fourth-largest banana
company, labor conditions have become increasingly contentious. Employees'
efforts to organize for better wages and working conditions led to
a violent standoff this year - a dispute that simmers today in the
form of an intermittent strike by some families, including Esteban's
own. The workers unionized in March. The company responded by dismissing
more than 120 of them. When the workers occupied part of the hacienda,
guards armed with shotguns, some wearing hoods, arrived at 2 a.m.
on May 16, according to workers, and fired on some who had refused
to move from the entrance gate, wounding two. The guards, workers
said, then entered the grounds and burst into barracks where other
workers were sleeping and forced them out.
The next afternoon, workers again gathered at the gate, where they
parked a bus across the road to block delivery trucks. The guards
confronted them again, this time wounding seven more - including Esteban's
father, BernabT Menendez - and a policeman. "It was an attack on innocent
people," said Jan Nimmo, a Scottish labor advocate who was with the
workers that day and videotaped the afternoon confrontation at the
gate. Mr. Noboa's lawyer, Rafael Pino, attributed the violence to
the workers, saying the guards had been sent in to protect property
that was being vandalized. "At no moment were there shots from our
side," he said. But the violence prompted the United States Embassy
to ask the government to ensure the safety of the striking workers.
An American delegation that included two members of Congressional
staffs visited Los Alamos workers in June.
"This is sort of the underbelly of globalization," said Representative
George Miller, a California Democrat who sent an aide to Ecuador.
"We ask for labor protections and we ask for environmental protections,"
Mr. Miller said, "and we're told we can't have them, and when the
citizens of that country try to get those protections, they're met
with force from the company to keep that from happening."
After the confrontation at Los Alamos, a Chicago-based labor rights
group, the U.S./Labor Education in the Americas Project, began pressing
Costco, a distributor of Bonita bananas, to lean on Mr. Noboa to improve
labor conditions. Under pressure, his banana company has promised
to improve medical services, provide masks, gloves and other equipment
and settle complaints about unpaid overtime wages. But it has refused
to recognize the workers' unions,
Labor Ministry officials said. Mr. Noboa, who divides much of his
time between Guayaquil and New York, declined to be interviewed, and
campaign aides did not return phone calls and e-mail messages seeking
comment. But his lawyer, Mr. Pino, said children under 14, who are
tightly restricted from working under Ecuador's labor laws, did not
work at Los Alamos. "Impossible," he said in an interview. "To violate
the law cannot be done, and it is not the company policy either."
Though no one knows exactly how many children work oapar When several
plantations, fearn the large plantations across Ecuador, Sergio Seminario,
an analyst and former president of the Association of Banana Exporters,
estimated 6,000, with thousands more working on small family farms.
The Labor Ministry has long been aware of the problem in the industry,
which accounts for 20 percent of Ecuador's exports. But Alberto Montalvo,
the highest-ranking ministry official in this region, said it was
difficult to root out. "We all believe in human rights and labor rights,"
he said. "It is all very beautiful, but we also have to recognize
that all the members of families have to work to pay for basic needs."
The existence of child labor on plantations is a product of simple
arithmetic. Workers receive so little in part because the wholesalers
and retailers abroad reap most of the profits, particularly with the
recent consolidation of huge retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Costco
and Carrefour.
Each 43-pound box of bananas purchased here by exporters for $2
or $3 goes for $25 in the United States or Europe. The Ecuadorian
grower makes 12 cents on the dollar, according to the National Association
of Banana Growers. "These big chains say, `We will buy your bananas
off the boat, but at our price,' " Mr. Seminario said. "So the exporter
has learned that to sell to those chains he must sell at their price."
If the growers are squeezed, the banana workers feel the pain. Their
work force is almost entirely nonunion, and workers are often deliberately
shifted from one payroll to another by growers who set up multiple
companies on paper to avoid paying benefits and higher wages. The
workers and their children here said difficult conditions had long
been the norm at Los Alamos. The families who live here in Puerto
Inca cram themselves into crude cinder-block houses with tin roofs.
Indoor plumbing is rare. The main earners among several families said
they received $6 to $7 a day - within Ecuador's minimum wage of $128
a month - but were often expected to work six or seven days a week,
failing to earn the overtime pay set by law.
The monthly minimum they earn falls far short of the $220 the government
says a poor family of four needs to meet basic needs, so children
go to work. "With my husband's salary, we did not have enough for
school, not enough for food," said Patricia Cespedes, explaining why
she had pulled her nephew out of school at age 11 and sent him to
work at Mr. Noboa's hacienda. The boy, Maximo Gimez, whom Ms. Cespedes
has raised since his mother's death, is now 14 and a veteran field
hand. Esteban goes to school in addition to working.
But many families say they earn so little that they must choose
which of their children to educate and which to send into the factories
and fields. Such economic necessity keeps 55 percent of Ecuadorian
children from attending secondary school, the World Bank says. Mr.
Noboa remains a frequent visitor to New York, where, according to
his spokesman, Pablo Martinez, he mingles with the Rockefellers and
other luminaries. When his son was christened at St. Patrick's Cathedral
last year, an event shown on Ecuadorian television, Robert Kennedy
Jr. served as the godfather.
But Mr. Noboa's great hope is to reach the presidency, which he
failed to win in 1998. Mr. Noboa has portrayed himself as an outsider
whose policies will improve life for most Ecuadorians. He has made
no extensive public remarks about the dispute with the workers at
Los Alamos. In fact, the poor labor conditions and the existence of
child workers have made barely a political ripple here. An investigation
of the shootings at Los Alamos has not led to any arrests, nor has
it shed light on what happened.
Noboa's aides say the troubles on his hacienda are politically motivated
efforts to embarrass him in the midst of a presidential campaign.
"If he wasn't running for president and wasn't the richest man in
Ecuador, this wouldn't be happening," Mr. Martfnez said.
