Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

TRADE: Report Damns El Salvador Labour Rights on Eve of U.S. Deal

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 4 2003 (IPS) - Workers’ rights guarantees in a proposed Central American trade pact must be strengthened, according to Human Rights Watch, which says it has documented systematic abuses by businesses of labour rights in El Salvador.

HRW’s report comes on the eve of a critical round of trade talks between the United States and five Central American countries on the proposed U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

In the 110-page report released here Thursday, the New York-based group charged that the government of El Salvador, the region’s second largest country, largely ignores and in some cases even facilitates the abuses, suggesting that labour rights provisions to be included in CAFTA must be strengthened to be credible.

“Employers in El Salvador know that if they violate workers’ rights, there is little or no consequence and the government might even help them carry out these abuses,” said Carol Pier, the report’s main author. “CAFTA must include strong tools to prevent this, but the current proposal falls far short,” she added in a statement.

The report, based in part on an 18-day fact-finding mission to San Salvador and Santa Ana earlier this year, is certain to be cited by foes of any CAFTA agreement that comes before Congress next year.

The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush hopes to conclude a deal at next week’s meeting here of trade ministers from the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica.

CAFTA is designed to give Central American countries similar trade and investment preferences to those extended to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to Chile under a bilateral trade accord approved by Congress earlier this year.

While specific details of the proposed CAFTA have not been released, the administration has rejected demands by environmental activists and labour unions that it exclude countries whose laws do not incorporate core labour rights, including the right to organise, or that do not enforce those rights.

Instead, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has insisted that Washington will not go beyond the sanctions included in the Chile agreement, which provides that nominal fines might be levied against a country if it fails to enforce its own labour and environmental laws in a “sustained or recurring” manner, whether or not those laws meet minimum international standards.

With such weak enforcement provisions, activists have sworn to defeat the accord, and Democrats in Congress, who are more likely to oppose a trade pact in a presidential election year in any event, are already lining up behind them.

Most analysts here believe the administration faces an uphill fight if it tries to get a package through Congress before next year’s elections. Not only are Democrats likely to be more unified than usual, but a number of Republicans from states or districts that are heavily tied to local textile manufacturers are certain to oppose it.

The administration will try to make it more attractive by wrapping up a free trade deal with the Dominican Republic, which has strong support among some key Democrats, and attaching it to CAFTA before submitting the whole package to Congress by next April..

But Jim Berger, editor of the ‘Washington Trade Daily’ newsletter, thinks it’s unlikely to pass before next November’s election. “The lines are clearly drawn: the Democrats are really going to fight it,” he said.

Their position is certain to be strengthened by the HRW report, titled ‘Deliberate Indifference: El Salvador’s Failure to Protect Workers’ Rights’.

It details specific cases in El Salvador’s private and public sectors, both in manufacturing and service industries, which demonstrate a consistent pattern of abuses by employers, including delaying salary payments, failing to pay overtime, denying mandatory bonuses and vacation payments, and even pocketing workers’ social security contributions that prevent them from receiving free health care.

The most pervasive abuse, the report says, is the effective denial by employers of the right of workers to organise a union despite the fact that freedom of association is guaranteed under the country’s basic laws.

Employers routinely fire union members and leaders, suspend union activists, pressure workers to renounce their membership in unions, and deny union “troublemakers,” as a result of which only about five percent of El Salvador’s workforce is organised.

If workers seek redress under the law, they face a very difficult fight. Businesses, for example, are not required to hire back illegally fired union activists; they might, and mostly do, opt to pay a nominal fine.

“Employers have come to see labour rights standards as optional, treating violations as something that can be cured, if need be, with these small payments, a cost of doing business,” according to the report.

“For workers, the result is a chill on union activity, heightened job insecurity and, at times, loss of access to affordable health care and other benefits to which they are legally entitled.”

Employers can also legally discriminate against trade unionists in hiring and suspension decisions, while the ministry of labour not only strictly enforces what the International Labour Organisations (ILO) has called “excessive formalities” in registering unions, but “regularly ignores employer’s anti-union conduct designed to thwart organising drives.”

Even if the ministry were favourably disposed toward seriously enforcing worker rights, adds the report, it lacks the resources to do so. Of a workforce of roughly 2.6 million people, the government employs only 37 labour inspectors, it says.

Even these few often fail to follow legally mandated inspection procedures, according to HRW. Often they carry out inspections without talking to workers; they fail to fine employers found to be engaging in abusive practices; and sometimes refuse to rule on issues within their mandate.

“Limited resources are a problem, but what you have in El Salvador is a serious lack of political will to protect workers’ rights,” according to Pier. “What we need here is a fundamental change in the government’s attitude toward labour rights.”

In recent years Washington has increased its own aid to labour and other government ministries in Central America precisely to enhance their enforcement powers, but these have shown little results, says the report. “More funding only helps if there’s a desire to enforce the law,” Pier noted.

The report also found that in several cases the companies involved were contractors for major U.S. apparel retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Kmart, and JC Penney. U.S. companies buy approximately two-thirds of El Salvador’s manufacturing exports.

The report called for CAFTA to not only require enforcement of local labour laws but to ensure that those laws include core labour rights, with a phase-in mechanism to ensure that countries do not receive full CAFTA benefits until they take steps to achieve those goals.