GUATEMALA-LABOUR: Union Recognition Marks Breakthrough in Maquila Sector

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 25 1997 (IPS) - Labour activists here are hailing the recognition of a Guatemalan union by a major U.S. shirt manufacturer as a breakthrough in the fight for corporate responsibility and stronger unions in overseas assembly plants.

This recognition sets a new standard for companies and goes beyond the codes of conduct now used by a growing number of corporations to assure consumers that their goods are made by workers who can organise without fear of losing their jobs, or worse.

“This case represents a significant step towards implementation of a new level of corporate responsibility,” says Stephen Coats, director of the Chicago-based U.S.-Guatemala Labor Education Project. “By recognising the union on its own, Phillips- Van Heusen (PVH) has underlined the need for serious codes of conduct in countries which don’t enforce their own labour law,” he added.

In a March 14 statement, Bruce Klatsky, PVH’s chief executive, pledged to negotiate a labour contract with the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Camisas Modernas, S.A. (STECAMOSA), which had battled seven years to gain recognition. The decision marked a reversal for PVH, which is registered in Guatemala as Camisas Modernas.

Klatsky’s statement followed his receipt of a 59-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the STECAMOSA effort. The report details evidence that PVH’s managers had consistently discriminated against workers who joined the union.

It helped that Klatsky, who has directed PVH for four years, is a member of the Human Rights Watch board of directors and a very public spokesman in favour of protecting human rights. In his statement, he pledged that any PVH personnel found to have engaged in such discrimination “will be dealt with appropriately.”

The announcement coincided with another breakthrough for Central American unions which have been trying to organise the region’s growing maquiladora sector. In Nicaragua Friday, Fortex, a Taiwanese-owned company with a plant of 2,000 workers in Managua’s Las Mercedes free trade zone, signed a contract with a local union, the first ever to be negotiated in the zone.

The agreement was reached with the help of the Nicaraguan Labour Ministry which formally recognised the union in January, and with the help of the U.S. group Witness for Peace, whose grassroots network sponsored a tour of more than 50 U.S. cities last October for workers who organised the plant. Witness for Peace had also sent hundreds of faxes to Nicaragua to press for an accord.

“This could be a harbinger of things to come in free trade zones across Central America,” said Steve Bennett, a Witness activist.

Unlike the Nicaraguan case, STECAMOSA never received recognition from the Guatemalan labour ministry.

The maquiladora sector in Guatemala employs some 80,000 workers, none of whom is protected by a collective bargaining agreement with an employer, according to the Human Rights Watch report, ‘Freedom of Association in a Maquila in Guatemala’. In most cases, successful unionisation has been blocked by illegal mass dismissals of union supporters or factory closures, the report says.

The two PVH plants, which have since been combined into one, have long been considered as “the jewels of the Guatemalan maquila industry,” according to Kurt Peterson, author of a book on the industry. Conditions for the roughly 700 workers employed there have been among the best in the industry.

Despite that record, the company has always opposed unionisation. It sponsored the creation of a company union in the early 1990s, and at least one manager is alleged to have made threats against the lives of organisers — threats that were credible, given the history of labour violence in Guatemala.

Under Guatemalan law, once a union’s members number more than a quarter of the workforce, management must negotiate a collective agreement on job conditions. STECAMOSA claimed to have achieved çàthat target last September and petitioned to begin collective bargaining.

The application became bogged down by a dispute between the company and the union over membership lists, says the report, which was based mainly on a study of employment records, interviews, and Labour Ministry and union documents by a two- person Human Rights Watch delegation who spent nine days in Guatemala in January.

Despite provisions in Guatemalan law requiring the Labour Ministry to intervene to encourage bargaining, it kept its distance from the dispute, according to the report which accused the ministry of “shirking its obligations.” Human Rights Watch determined that the union had actually exceeded the number of members it needed to require a collective agreement.

In reviewing the files, Human Rights Watch found no mass dismissals or targeted intimidation of the kind which had traditionally been used in the industry. Instead, it found that union members at the PVH plants had “faced discriminatory treatment that included pressures to withdraw from the union or resign from the company.”

Most maquila workers receive an absolute minimum pay of about 2.50 dollars (17.60 quetzals) a day which is not considered a living wage. They are thus dependent on supplementary income earned on a piece-rate basis, according to the report, which found that management’s broad discretion in determining who gets that work was a major weapon against union members.

In some cases, workers might find their supplementary work reduced by as much as 75 percent once they joined a union. The report says that union members might also be assigned to faulty equipment whose repair was often delayed.

The group found that the company used generous severance payments to induce union members to resign.

“What we’ve shown is that even if corporations don’t illegally dismiss workers who want to join a union, they may still be posing major obstacles that make union membership untenable,” according to Mike McCormick, who worked on the Human Rights Watch report. “Companies which have codes of conduct and labour ministries have to check into these practices to see what is happening,” he added.

The report stresses that the report’s findings have far broader implications than just Guatemala. “This report highlights the need for greater safeguards of international standards on freedom of association in overseas assembly plants, particularly where national mechanisms for the protection of labour rights are flawed,” according to Human Rights Watch’s Associate Counsel, Richard Dicker.

In addition to its international relevance, Coats says the clandestine way STECAMOSA organised the plant may set an important precedent for unions elsewhere in Central America. Instead of publicising their demands for an agreement from the outset, he says the union “worked to establish a strong base of support within the workforce first.” The union which successfully organised the Fortex plant in Managua pursued a similar strategy.

“These new tactics open the possibility of a major increase in organising in Central America,” according to Coats.