There is rising anger among trade unionists, environmentalists and civil society groups in Gabon after a wood company, Rain Forest Management (RFM), sacked 38 fixed-term workers last month in Mbomao, Ogooué-Ivindo province.

RFM, a Gabonese wood processing company with Malaysian investment, is one of several exploiting the rich natural forests in Gabon. The forestry sector is the country’s second source of foreign exchange after oil.

RFM and the woodworkers had been locked in a lengthy dispute over working conditions, lack of contacts and legal working hours, among other complaints.

According to the Entente Syndicale des Travailleurs du Gabon (ENSYTG) union, RFM refused to negotiate with them and workers who were planning to take part in trade union meetings were threatened and intimidated.“Although Gabon’s forests are often described as being relatively undamaged and offering great potential for long-term sustainable timber production, it is clear that industrial forestry within the current policy framework threatens their future integrity and the country’s biodiversity” – Forests Monitor

After numerous threats and charges of intimidation, on Feb. 17, as the employees were returning to work, RFM called on police to evict them from their company-supplied dormitories, claiming that the workers had violated company rules.

The dismissals were linked to worker protests over poor working conditions, unsanitary housing infested with rats, cockroaches and snakes, demands for legal working hours and payment of wages on time.

Léon Mébiame Evoung, president of ENSYTG, told IPS that the workers were simply calling on the company to respect basic rights and provide a pharmacy and an infirmary that should be managed by competent Gabonese health professionals.

RFM failed to meet any of these demands, said the union official. Instead, it decided to execute its earlier threat by firing all protesting workers.

The action has provoked the ire of civil society groups and syndicates, including Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWINT), which is circulating an online petition to help the strikers’ return to their jobs.

Marc Ona Essangui, founder of the environmental NGO Brainforest and president of Environment Gabon, a network of NGOs, told IPS in an online interview that he could not accept such “gross suppression” of workers’ rights. “I have signed up to the call to protect the workers,” he said.

“I strongly protest against the dismissal of these workers, which is clearly linked to their strike action,” he insisted. Such anti-union activities, he added, violate International Labour Office (ILO) conventions 87 and 98 (on freedom of association and the right to organise and bargain collectively, respectively).

Along with other environmentalists in the region, Essangui – who once received a suspended sentence for accusing a presidential ally of exploiting timber, palm oil and rubber in Gabon’s “favourable agri-climate” – is troubled by risks to the region’s natural forests due to development activities.

The Gabonese government and international donors, however, regard the exploitation of timber as central to the country’s macroeconomic development.

According to Forests Monitor, an NGO that supports forest-dependent people, “although Gabon’s forests are often described as being relatively undamaged and offering great potential for long-term sustainable timber production, it is clear that industrial forestry within the current policy framework threatens their future integrity and the country’s biodiversity.”

The NGO notes that “production levels are already considerably above the official sustainable production estimates and are set to continue rising”, meaning that “the contribution which forestry sector revenues make to the country’s population as a whole and to people living in the locality of forestry operations is questionable.”

On its website, the World Resources Institute (WRI) notes that “nowhere is the pressure (on resources) more intense than in Gabon, a nation with 80 percent of its territory covered by dense tropical forest. With resource use demands spiralling in recent years, Gabon urgently needs better forest management planning if the government is to achieve its goal of becoming an emerging economy while preserving the country’s natural resources.”

RFM’s woodworking factory lies at the centre of three national parks – Lope, Crystal Mountain, and Ivindo – and to the east of Libreville. The park area is a small fraction of the land marked for development on a WRI map. The wood used by RFM is locally sourced.

Established in 2008, RFM produces windows and doors for the Gabonese domestic market. It exports semi-finished products to Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The company employs more than 700 workers, with a Gabonese majority.

Since November 2009, when log exports were banned, the formal economy production of processed wood has increased significantly.

According to a WRI report titled ‘A First Look at Logging in Gabon’, compiled by seven Gabonese environmental organisations, “Gabon has vast forest resources, but rapid growth of logging activity may threaten those resources. If managed properly, Gabon’s forests could offer long-term revenues without compromising the ecosystems’ natural functions.”

However, the authors continued, “(we) found information about forest development unreliable, inconsistent, and very difficult to obtain. We believe that more public information will promote accountability and transparency and favour the implementation of commitments made to manage and protect the world’s forests, which would significantly slow forest degradation around the world.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

Aasia Riaz (24) is one of Pakistan’s 8.5 million domestic workers. She earns about 8,500 rupees (82 dollars) each month. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Feb 9 2015 (IPS)

Sumaira Salamat, a mother of three in her mid-40s, works every day from ten in the morning until half-past two in the afternoon. She travels between three homes, and in each one she dusts, sweeps, washes utensils, and does the laundry. For her efforts, she earns about 3,000 rupees (29 dollars) per month.

Based in the eastern city of Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, Salamat is one of Pakistan’s estimated 8.5 million domestic workers, who daily perform the hundreds of housekeeping tasks necessary to keep a home spick and span.

"We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work." -- Sumaira Salamat, a domestic worker in Lahore
Experts here say that very nearly every middle class family in Pakistan employs some form of domestic help, but while the workers are a mainstay in houses and apartments across the country, the terms of their labour are far from clear; few have fixed working hours, benefits, pensions and proper contracts. Abuse is a frequent occurrence, and the laws governing domestic work are murky.

But things are changing. The recent formation of Pakistan’s first domestic workers trade union, combined with the promise of various bills pending in parliament, have workers here daring to hope that their situation might improve very soon.

Rights violations

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Lahore, Salamat says she has been on a four-year quest to secure some basic rights for herself and her fellow workers.

“It’s only in the last year-and-a-half that these women have finally realised the importance of what it means to become a united force,” she explains.

“We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work,” Salamat concluded.

Substandard working conditions are one of the primary grievances of employees in this sector. Many are lured into homes with the promise of a good life and a decent salary. What they find when they arrive is something altogether very different.

Take Sonam Iqbal, 22 and single, who has been a domestic worker since she was 15. “When we are interviewed, we are shown a rosy picture,” she claims, “but slowly and steadily the workload is increased and we cannot even protest.”

Long hours of work and low pay are not the only issues. Many female workers complain that they are always the ones held accountable for any loss of money or valuables in the home.

It is hard to state with any accuracy the number of domestic workers in the country. Labour Department Director Tahir Manzoor is not willing to give even a conservative estimate, explaining to IPS: “They [domestic workers] are largely invisible, isolated and scattered among thousands of homes and apartments.”

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics states that of the 74 percent of the labour force engaged in the informal sector, a majority is employed in domestic work; this includes men and children.

Still, experts are agreed that the bulk of the industry is fueled by a steady stream of mostly uneducated rural women who flock to urban centres in search of work.

Their hopes of securing a better future, however, are often dashed when they realize their earnings fall far short of even the minimum wage, which is fixed at 10,000 rupees (about 97 dollars) per month in provinces like the Sindh, home to over 30 million people.

Legal mechanisms

Last month, Pakistan’s minister for Inter Provincial Coordination introduced the Minimum Wages for Unskilled Workers (Amendment) Act 2015, which, if passed, will see wages of so-called unskilled workers increase from 97 to about 116 dollars per month in all the provinces.

But there is no guarantee that domestic workers will benefit from it, since there are no mechanisms with which to check implementation.

In fact, except for mention of domestic workers in two legislations, there is no specific law protecting their rights in Pakistan, says Zeenat Hisam, senior research associate at the Karachi-based NGO Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER).

The two pieces of legislation in question are the Provincial Employees Social Security Ordinance 1965, which states that “employers of a domestic servant” shall be liable to provide medical treatment “at his own cost”; and the Minimum Wages Act of 1961, which covers those employed as domestic labourers.

Despite these provisions, “the government has never notified the minimum wages applicable to domestic workers under this law in the last 53 years,” Hisam told IPS.

Protecting women and children

In December 2014, the Pakistan Workers Federation formed the very first Domestic Workers Trade Union. It has 235 members of which 225 are female domestic workers.

The Union was registered with the Registrar’s Trade Union in Lahore, under the provisions of the Punjab Industrial Relations Act, 2010, and was established under the International Labour Organisation (ILO)’s Gender Equality for Decent Employment project (GE4DE), funded by the Canadian government.

“The ILO is working with Pakistan to bring about changes in laws and policy in accordance with the ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189),” said Razi Mujtaba Haider, a programme officer with the ILO.

Ratified by 17 countries, the convention guarantees fundamental rights to domestic workers, including the right to decent and secure work. With an estimated 52.6 million people employed as domestic workers globally in 2010, the convention governs a massive workforce spread far and wide across the globe.

In keeping with such international standards, Manzoor says the labour department is “working in several areas – building the capacity of the domestic workers so that they have stronger bargaining power; working out a contract form between the employee and employer; fixing per-hour salary to stop exploitation; [providing] benefits and social security and most importantly, restricting employment of children, specially girls aged 14 and under.”

While Pakistan defines a child as a “person below 14 years of age” it does not declare domestic work as hazardous.

Manzoor says the Punjab assembly is on the verge of enacting the Prohibition of the Employment of Children Act 2014, which he hopes will restrict the use of child labourers in domestic settings.

Quoting various media reports, Hamza Hasan, a manager of the research and communications section of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), says that between 2010 and 2013, a total of “51 cases of torture of child domestic workers were reported from different parts of Pakistan resulting in the deaths of 24 children”.

He added that in 2013 alone eight children working in homes died, likely from overwork or abuse.

Both industry experts and employees are waiting anxiously for the sweeping changes that will relegate such horror stories to a thing of the past. But until the necessary laws are passed and ratified, Pakistan’s domestic workers will continue to toil for long hours, and low pay.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Legislators in Cameroon have voted in a draft law proposing the death sentence for all those guilty of carrying out, abetting or sponsoring acts of terrorism. The draft law, which is now being examined by the Cameroon Senate, call for punishment acts of terrorism committed by citizens, either individually or in complicity, with death.

The draft law also prescribes the death penalty for persons who carry out “any activity which can lead to a general revolt of the population or disturb the normal functioning of the country” and for “anyone who supplies arms, war equipment, bacteria and viruses with the intention of killing.”

The same applies for people guilty of kidnapping with terrorist intent, as well as for “anyone who directly or indirectly finances acts of terrorism” and for “anyone who recruits citizens with the aim of carrying out acts of terrorism.”“This [anti-terrorism] law is manifestly against the fundamental liberties and rights of the Cameroonian people … In the guise of fighting terrorism, the government’s real intent is to stifle political dissent” – Kah Wallah, leader of the Cameroon People’s Party

The draft law also punishes people and companies found guilty of promoting terrorism, as well as people who give false testimony to administrative and judicial authorities in matters of terrorism, with various fines and prison terms.

The anti-terrorism law has sparked a wave of criticism across the political chessboard – from opposition political leaders to civil society, church ministers and trade unions.

“This law is designed to terrorise the people and kill their freedoms,” opposition leader, John Fru Ndi told IPS.

Kah Wallah, the lone female leader of a political party in Cameroon [the Cameroon People’s Party], added that “the government is taking us back to the worst days of the most barbaric dictatorship … This law is manifestly against the fundamental liberties and rights of the Cameroonian people … In the guise of fighting terrorism, the government’s real intent is to stifle political dissent.”

For Maurice Kamto, a former cabinet minister who resigned to form the Movement for the Revival of Cameroon (MRC), President Paul Biya – now in power for 32 years – is afraid of any popular up-rising that could put his stay in power in jeopardy.

“The president has certainly learnt from the lessons coming from Burkina Faso. A similar uprising here will sweep his failed presidency under the carpet,” he said. Facing mounting pressure, President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso was forced to resign on Oct. 31 after 27 years in office.

Various opposition political leaders and civil society exponents have vowed to fight the proposed law to its logical end. “Cameroonians must resist and say no to this other manoeuvre … We will fight this law by every means,” Ndi said, without elaborating.

However, Jean Mark Bikoko,  president of the Public Service Workers’ Trade Union, already has an idea on how to proceed. In a strongly-worded statement released on Dec. 3, Bikoko said that the law “is a veritable declaration of war against the people … The anti-terrorism law has provoked the ire of civil society and we will protest on December 10 – International Human Rights Day.”

But the government has said it will not falter in the fight against terrorism. Justice Minister Laurent Esso told MPs that “Cameroon will never be complicit to those whose only agenda is to cause mayhem and destabilise the normal functioning of the state.”

Counting the costs

In the north of the country, Cameroon’s military are combating cross-border raids by Nigeria’s militant Islamist group Boko Haram. On May 17, President Biya along with other regional leaders and French President François Holland said they were declaring war against Boko Haram.

Cameroon has since deployed thousands of troops in the country’s Far North Region and plans to send still more troops. Defence Minister Edgar Alain Mebe Ngo’o and Delegate General for National Security Martin Mbarga Nguele have announced that some 20,000 defence and security forces will be recruited within the next two years to reinforce the fight against Boko Haram.

However, as the security crisis in the country continues to worsen, Cameroonian authorities have been counting the costs, not only in terms of human loss, but also in terms of the impacts of the crisis on the economy.

During a special parliamentary plenary session on Nov. 27, Ngo’o said that since the crisis escalated eight months ago, Cameroon has so far lost some forty soldiers, but killed about one thousand Boko Haram fighters. “Our defence forces have simply been formidable,” he said.

But the economic costs of the war are heavy. According to the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi, “the most affected sectors have been the tourism, transport, trade, agriculture and livestock sectors.”

He said  that “almost all tourism enterprises have been shut down, the number of tourists visiting attraction parks like the Waza National Park and the Rhumsiki Mountains have gone down drastically, and the hotel occupation rate has dropped from 50 percent before the crisis to just 10 percent today.”

In addition, there has been a sharp drop in customs revenue. Although customs officials have not tallied the losses, they say they are astronomical.

“There was a border custom post in the Far North Region that used to give us a monthly income of CFA 700 million (1.4 million dollars).That customs post has been closed down. Can you imagine what the state is losing yearly in customs revenue? It’s enormous,” said the Director-General of Customs, Lissette Libom Li-Likeng.

Government spokesman and Communication Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary told journalists in Yaounde that in view of the human, economic and psychological losses that Cameroon has been incurring as a result of Boko Haram, a stringent law is necessary to contain the militant group.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S. Its relationship with the United States has been denounced as colonial by both the independence and pro-statehood movements. Credit: Arturo de la Barrera/cc by 2.0

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Aug 27 2014 (IPS)

A feeling of insecurity has overtaken broad sectors of Puerto Rican society as the economy worsens, public sector debt spirals out of control, and the island’s creditworthiness is put in doubt.

To tackle this economic crisis, the administration of governor Alejandro Garcia-Padilla has adopted a number of measures that have been extremely unpopular with civil society and labour unions."Capital is on the offensive all over the world. But in Puerto Rico it's worse because it is a colony of the United States." -- Retired telephone company worker Guillermo De La Paz

Retirees have been particularly affected. In 2013, the government passed Law 160, which drastically changed the retirement system of public employees. It puts an end to the previous retirement system, established by Law 447 of 1951, under which every public sector worker was entitled to a full pension after 30 years of service, regardless of age.

But Law 160 changes that. The size of monthly pension payments is no longer guaranteed, and employees must work more years in order to get full benefits.

“The retirement system has been compromised,” said labour attorney Cesar Rosado-Ramos in a position paper for the Working People’s Party (PPT).

“It is unheard of, abusive and unjust that people with 30 years of service now have to keep working for four, five, 10 or even 15 additional years in order to receive a full pension. This means the working class will have to spend a lifetime working and if you survive you get a miserable retirement plan.”

The PPT was formed in 2009 by current and former members of the Movement Toward Socialism and the Socialist Front. Its first electoral participation was in the 2012 general elections but it did not get enough votes to elect any candidate.

Public school teachers were spared from Law 160. They sued and last April the PR Supreme Court ruled key parts of the law unconstitutional because they violated teachers’ contracts. Thus the teachers’ retirement was saved, but the court ruling upheld other parts of the law that reduce their Christmas bonuses, summer pay and medical benefits.

“The retirement age of public employees has been raised and their [retirement] benefits have been reduced to poverty level,” economist Martha Quiñones told IPS.

Ramón Marrero, an emergency doctor who works in the city of Cayey, was forced to continue working just when he was due for retirement. He was going to retire after 18 years of work, but with the new law he has to stay on for three more years to get a full pension.

“One has life projects for when retirement comes. When all of a sudden the date for retirement is postponed, all of these projects and plans are turned upside down,” said Marrero, who commutes to work from the nearby town of Cidra.

Quiñones, who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, pointed out that private sector workers and pensioners are also in for a raw deal. “Many of those private pensions are tied to Puerto Rico government bonds, which have recently been downgraded by Moody’s and Standard and Poor. When the value of these bonds is affected, pensions are reduced.”

Many public sector retirees are politically active, not only defending their benefits and pension plans from the ever present threat of privatisation, but also protesting the government’s neoliberal austerity policies, which affect all of society.

“The local ruling class seeks to reverse the gains and livelihoods of workers to what they used to be in a bygone era,” said labour activist Jose Rivera-Rivera, president of the retirees chapter of the UTIER labour union.

“In order for the neoliberal system to establish its superiority it must erase the last two centuries of labor struggle and solidarity. It’s the new stage of capitalism, they want us to start from zero.”

“Capital is on the offensive all over the world. But in Puerto Rico it’s worse because it is a colony of the United States,” retired telephone company worker Guillermo De La Paz told IPS. “Here the exploiters can experiment in ways they cannot do in a sovereign country.”

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S. Its relationship with the United States has been denounced as colonial by both the independence and pro-statehood movements.

The Puerto Rico Telephone Company was public until it was privatised by then governor Pedro Rosselló in 1998. Privatisation opponents paralysed the island in a two-day general strike in July of that year, but to no avail.

“For the rich there is no crisis,” said De La Paz. “I mean, we’ve got [billionaire] Henry Paulson urging rich people to come here to avoid taxes.”

Rivera-Rivera believes that in order to get Puerto Rico out of its economic crisis and protect retirement benefits, the government could start by taxing the rich.

“Our government is supposedly in crisis because it cannot pay its debt, but the previous administration [Governor Luis Fortuño, 2009-2012] practically eliminated the fiscal responsibility of major corporations and rich people in its 2009 tax reform. It wasn’t justified, they were already enjoying major tax breaks.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

PPC power station in Ptolemaida. northern Greece. Credit: Nikos Pilos

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

Plans by the Greek government to sell companies that handle the key resources of energy and water face serious obstacles and its policy to offer investors exceptional privileges in an effort to boost interest in privatisation is coming under strong pressure.

Privatisation is one of the ‘prerequisites’ of the Troika – the tripartite committee led by the European Commission with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – in exchange for additional bailout money that Greece is seeking to continue to avoid insolvency.

The Greek government recently announced plans to sell a 30 percent share of its Public Power Corporation (PPC), and create a new ‘Small PPC’, which will be sold to private investors.

The new company will take with it some key production sites, lignite mines, and hydroelectric and natural gas units. In addition, about two million customers will be transferred from the original company and will be obliged to receive services from the new company for six months.Tax exemption seem to be a vehicle the Greek government favours using in its effort to attract investors to the country.

The lucrative terms and assets accompanying the new company, described in the legislation that creates it, are already attracting many local investors as well as major foreign energy companies like Germany’s RWE as well as the French EDL and the Italian ENEL.

The plan has caused strong reactions in north-western Greek cities where communities depend heavily on employment created by PPC mines and electricity production plants. PPC unions decided to take strike action to protest the privatisation plans, but these were declared illegal. The Greek opposition has called for a referendum on the issue but it appears unable to gather the 120 signatures of members of parliament necessary for it to go through parliament.

Kriton Arsenis, an independent Member of the European Parliament, has asked the European Commission whether obliging customers to receive services from the company constitutes an illegal state subsidy. In response, European Commissioner for Energy Gunther Oettinger said that the Commission “does not have adequate information to deliberate on whether this constitutes illegal state subsidy”.

At the end of March, Arsenis submitted a similar question concerning the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF), which has been set up to manage Greek privatisations, and met with a similarly evasive answer.

The HRADF has announced the sale of 100 percent of Hellinikon SA – which administers 6,200 acres of land occupied by the former Athens Airport of Hellinikon – to Lamda Development.

Arsenis pointed that Article 42 of Law 3943/2011 establishing Hellinikon SA states that the company “shall be exempt from any tax, duty or fee, including income tax, in respect of any form of income derived from its business, of transfer tax for any reason, and capital accumulation tax” and again asked the Commission whether this unjustifiable tax exemption constituted state subsidy.

European Commissioner for Competition Joaquin Almunia replied that “Greece has not notified the Commission about the alleged tax exemption measure”, thus the Commission does not have sufficient information to assess whether it constitutes state aid and will ask Greece to provide clarifications on the issue.

Tax exemption seem to be a vehicle the Greek government favours using in its effort to attract investors to the country. Last week, Greek Energy Minister Ioannis Maniatis said that oil and gas explorers would pay 25 percent tax, down from the current 40 percent, to attract them to help exploit Greece’s untapped offshore hydrocarbon resources. “We have done this in order to incentivise our investors to invest in the future of Greece” he told a conference in London.

Plans to privatise water utilities stalled last month after the Supreme Court considered privatisation of the Athens Water Supply and Sewerage Company (EYDAP) unconstitutional. Following this decision, the transfer of a 34.03 percent share of the company’s stock holding to HRADF has been cancelled and the privatisation authority has publicly admitted that it is reconsidering the tender despite still holding 27.3 percent of the company.

This has effectively cast doubts on the privatisation process for EYATH, the water and sewage company of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. HRADF President Konstantinos Maniatopoulos was quoted saying in Greek media that “it will be difficult to continue the process for EYATH without taking into account the decision for EYDAP.”

The Suez/Ellaktor and Merokot/G. Apostolopoulos/Miya/Terna Energy consortia had been in the process of submitting binding offers by June 30. It appears now that HRADF will return about 50 percent of the 74 percent of its share in EYATH back to the state.

Two weeks ago, the Greek National Commission for Human Rights produced a focus report about the protection of access to water. Kwstis Papaioanou, President of the Commission told IPS: “International experience has proven that privatisation curtails the access of people to safe water. It is very encouraging though that the water has united citizens against its privatisation.”

Privatisation of water has indeed provoked strong public reactions. In an informal referendum in Thessaloniki in which over 200,000 people took part, 98 percent voted against privatisation.

“The court’s deliberation against privatisation of water companies is very clear but I would not be surprised if the government finds a way to circumvent it. There are plenty of other examples in which they have not implemented court decisions,” Arsenis, told IPS.

“Those interested in Greek public assets do not think like real investors. They take an interest only in privileged deals when profits are guaranteed and when most of investment risk is undertaken by the state in advance so that they have secured income that will cover their expenses in two or three years’ time.”

A first privatisation target of 50 billion euros in revenue by 2020 has been cut by more than half, with the country’s lenders now forecasting 22.3 billion. So far, only 3 billion has been collected.  The 2014 and 2015 targets for revenue from privatisations were set at 1.5 billion euros and 2.24 billion euros respectively but these are now very unlikely to be achieved.

Polish conservatives protesting against a reading of Golgota Picnic in Warsaw. Credit: Maciej Konieczny/Courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna

By Claudia Ciobanu
WAESAW, Jul 8 2014 (IPS)

A mix of conservative Catholicism and nationalism has become the predominant view in Polish public debate, with some worrying effects.

These were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Observers note that the Polish Catholic Church has also grown increasingly conservative since 1989, in apparent contrast to an opening up of the Church worldwide.Conservative Catholicism and nationalism were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Last month, the director of a theatre festival in the city of Poznan decided to cancel showings of a play fearing he could not ensure the safety of viewers in the face of threats by conservative and far-right groups. The play – “Golgota Picnic” by Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia – describes the life of Jesus using striking depictions of contemporary society, including some with a sexual meaning.

Among those asking for play to be cancelled were representatives of Poland’s main opposition party, Law and Justice, the main trade union Solidarity, and the far-right Ruch Narodowy (National Movement), all of which stand for traditional Catholic values. The Church also voiced its opposition to the play.

In itself, protesting against the play was unremarkable (it has also been met with opposition from Catholics in other countries, for example in France), but the Polish response was interesting: even if the festival was largely financed from public sources, the show was cancelled and there was hardly any resistance from public authorities to the decision. The public, however, made itself heard and readings of the play were organised in major Polish cities, with hundreds attending.

Meanwhile, the dynamics surrounding “Golgota Picnic” are being replicated over other issues in Polish society, among which the most striking is women’s reproductive rights. Poland is one of only three countries in the European Union where abortion is prohibited, unless the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, there is a serious threat to the mother’s health or foetal malformation has been detected.

Abortion had been legal in communist Poland but was outlawed in 1993 after pressure from the Catholic Church. Ever since, attempts to make abortion legal have failed. In 2011, the Polish parliament came close to further tightening the law on abortion by prohibiting it no matter the circumstances.

At the time, it was not only the political forces explicitly standing for Catholic values that endorsed a total ban, but also many members of the governing centre-right Civic Platform, which depicts itself as Poland’s main liberal political force.

De facto, even the current restrictive law is not being implemented. In a series of high profile cases over the years, Catholic doctors in public hospitals have refused to perform abortions even if girls were pregnant as a result of rape, had serious health conditions or malformation had been detected in foetuses.

In May, in an escalation of the situation, over 3,000 Polish doctors, nurses and medical students signed a “Declaration of Faith” in which they rejected abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilisation and euthanasia as contrary to the Catholic faith. Signatories included employees of public clinics and hospitals. One of them was the director of a Warsaw maternity hospital who said he would not allow such procedures to take place in his institution.

The “Declaration of Faith”, which has been endorsed by the Polish Catholic Church, is contrary to Polish law and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has spoken out against it.

State authorities have been carrying out check-ups at those institutions in which signatories of the Declaration work to establish whether the law is being respected, and one fine has been imposed on the Warsaw maternity hospital whose director prohibits legal abortions. Yet more determined measures are still pending.

“Lack of massive resistance [to the Declaration] is not a sign of approval on the part of the general public,” comments Agnieszka Graff, writer and feminist activist. “It is rather a question of resignation: for 20 years we have seen politicians court the Church while ignoring public opinion on matters that have to do with reproductive rights. The pattern of submission has emboldened the radical anti-choice groups.”

Political power in Poland is firmly in the hands of conservatives. Law and Justice, the party with the best chance of winning next year’s parliamentary elections, is staunchly pro-Catholic and nationalist, and has in the past allied in government with far-right politicians. The governing Civic Platform, the choice of many liberals in this country, is bitterly divided between social conservatives and liberals, meaning it cannot enforce the constitutional secularity of the Polish state.

As Graff explains, in this political context, those who oppose the Catholicism-nationalism nexus find it difficult to coalesce into a strong movement. And ultra-conservatives continue to advance.

Far-right elements breeds in this environment and, in an ethnically and racially homogeneous country, their main targets are feminists, the LGBTQ community and leftists (the same groups that the Church condemns). Their strength is most visible in Poland during the annual Independence March on November 11, when tens of thousands of far-right youth take to the streets of Warsaw and other cities wreaking havoc.

According to June polls, the third strongest political force in Poland is the New Right Congress, which has a neo-liberal far-right agenda. The party, whose leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has declared that women have lower IQs than men and that they enjoy being raped, gathered 7.5 percent of the vote in the May elections for the European Parliament.

“There is no clear demarcation between the Polish extreme right, the populist right and the mainstream right,” notes political scientist Rafal Pankovski of anti-racist group Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again). “The notion of a cordon sanitaire against the far-right does not seem to have been accepted in Polish politics and the media.”

Over recent years, civic mobilisation by progressive forces has nevertheless grown, and political parties with a strong liberal, secular and anti-nationalist message have been forming, but they still lack consolidation. Faced with the constant accusation of being “communists”, leftist forces that might counterbalance the conservative, nationalist and far-right trend are slow to grow in Poland.

Electric utility workers of the UTIER labour union protest for safer workplace conditions. UTIER spearheads the fight against privatisation and against the Puerto Rico government's unpopular emergency economic measures. Courtesy of Photo Jam

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Apr 15 2014 (IPS)

Puerto Rican society has been shaken to its foundations by the announcement in February by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s credit rating agencies that they had downgraded the island’s creditworthiness to junk status.

“The problems that confront the commonwealth are many years in the making, and include years of deficit financing, pension underfunding, and budgetary imbalance, along with seven years of economic recession,” said Moody’s."Working people are faced with three choices: they can migrate, resign themselves to poverty, or go out to the street to organise and struggle for justice." -- Luis Pedraza-Leduc

Located in the Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico has been a Commonwealth of the United States since 1952.

Moody’s added that the island’s worsening economic situation has “now put the commonwealth in a position where its debt load and fixed costs are high, its liquidity is narrow, and its market access has become constrained.”

In order to meet its debt obligations, the PR legislature has considered enacting fiscal measures that are strongly opposed by labour unions, including dipping into the public school teachers’ retirement fund. Law 160, the retirement “reform”, was approved by both House and Senate earlier this year.

Unions have headed to court to challenge the law. On Apr. 11, the Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled some key provisions were unconstitutional because they breached teachers’ contracts.

Schoolteachers’ unions declared the ruling a triumph, although the court upheld other parts of the law that adversely affect Christmas bonuses, summer pay and medical benefits.

The current fiscal crisis is the result of the commonwealth economic model’s failure, according to union official Luis Pedraza-Leduc.

“Our economic model, based on providing cheap labour to the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries and light manufacturing, has exhausted itself,” said Pedraza-Leduc, who runs the UTIER utility workers union’s Solidarity Programme (PROSOL) and is spokesperson of the Coordinadora Sindical, a coalition of over a dozen unions.

“In recent decades there has been a worldwide trend towards reducing state involvement in the economy to a minimum,” he told IPS.

“Things that were considered basic services provided by the state are now turned into commodities as private enterprise moves in to fill those spaces. Rather than reducing these essential services, the government went into debt.”

According to a chart provided by the office of PR Governor Alejandro Garcia-Padilla, the commonwealth’s public debt reached 10 billion dollars in 1987, when the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) ruled, and passed the 20-billion-dollar mark in 1998 under governor Pedro Rossello, of the New Progressive Party.

Under PDP governor Sila M. Calderon (2001-2004) the debt went over 30 billion dollars. And at the end of his 2009-2012 mandate, NPP governor Luis Fortuño left the country with more than 60 billion in debt. Garcia-Padilla belongs to the PDP.

Pedraza-Leduc recalls that successive governors undertook neoliberal measures that made matters even worse.

“Governor Rossello privatised the health sector, the phone company and the water utility. Governor Acevedo-Vila [of the PDP, 2004-2007] imposed a sales tax on retail sales [known as IVU],” he said.

Governor Fortuño laid off over 30,000 public sector workers, and introduced “public-private partnerships”, which were decried by labour unions as thinly disguised privatisation schemes. Upon beginning his mandate in early 2013, Garcia-Padilla privatised the San Juan international airport and is considering new taxes.

The Puerto Rico Constitution obligates the government to honour its debts.

“In order to pay bondholders, the government could close down schools, reduce the number of Urban Train daily trips, scale down 911 emergency phone services, and freeze the hiring of employees”, warned Pedraza-Leduc. “They are considering reducing Christmas bonuses and sick leave days.”

According to University Puerto Rico economist Martha Quiñones, “We are having here the same crisis as Greece and Detroit, but here it is broader because of our colonial situation.

“We had an economic model based on bringing foreign corporations and enticing them with cheap labour and tax incentives,” she told IPS, calling this the “exogenous” model, which is based on bringing investment from outside.

“It did not work. Not enough jobs were created, and the unemployed do not pay taxes. Locally owned businesses ended up picking up the tax burden that foreign investors were exempted from, which caused many of them to close. Local and foreign businesses were not competing in conditions of equality.”

Quiñones said that the model’s death knell was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other similar trade deals that the U.S. has struck, which made even cheaper labour available in other parts of the world.

Successive Puerto Rico governments made up for these failures by requesting help from the U.S. government in the form of food stamps and unemployment benefits, and other forms of social assistance. Another way was by issuing bonds, which led to long-term debt and the current debacle.

As an alternative, Quiñones advocates an “endogenous” economic model, which strengthens local capabilities rather than looking abroad for deliverance. “The government must support locally owned businesses,” she said. “Those are the businesses that create jobs at home and pay taxes.

“The government must also collect the IVU sales tax, which most retailers simply pocketed. A progressive tax reform is needed, plus rich tax evaders must be brought to justice. Start by investigating businesses that take only cash, and individuals who are taking second mortgages. Those are pretty obvious red flags.”

She also advocates that the health system be changed to single payer, “which would be more efficient than the current inefficient and unsustainable health system we have now.

“Working people are faced with three choices: they can migrate, resign themselves to poverty, or go out to the street to organise and struggle for justice,” said Pedraza-Leduc.

But he admits that the prospects for all-out popular struggle are uncertain at best. “The lack of class consciousness complicates the outlook. Maybe we are not prepared for a confrontation,” he said.

To him, the way out of the impasse lies in education. “I propose an educational project, a Union School [Escuela Sindical] that can transcend the unions and branch out into broader issues and thus further the political struggle.

“And we need a new model for our country, we need to speak concretely about justice and a fair distribution of wealth.”

He also called for a reexamination of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. “Under our current status we are not allowed to sign trade agreements with other countries. We could be associating ourselves with other countries, and also get cheaper oil from Venezuela. But under our current status we cannot.”

Military checkpoint on the Atrato River. Credit: Jesús Abad Colorado/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

Three years after Colombia agreed to U.S. demands to better protect labour rights and activists, a “Labour Plan of Action” (LPA) drawn up by the two nations is showing mixed results at best, according to U.S. officials and union and rights activists from both countries.

Pointing to continuing assassinations of union organisers, among other abuses, U.S. lawmakers and union leaders here are calling on President Barack Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to do much more to ensure that the LPA achieves its aims.“In spite of numerous new labour laws and decrees... companies still are violating worker rights in Colombia with impunity." -- Richard Trumka

“(V)iolence against trade unionists continues; in the three years since the Labour Action Plan was signed, 73 more trade unionists were murdered in Colombia. That alone is reason enough to say the Labour Action Plan has failed,” said Richard Trumka, the president of the biggest U.S. union confederation, the AFL-CIO, Monday in response to a new report by the Colombia’s National Labour School (ENS).

“In spite of numerous new labour laws and decrees, and hundreds of new labour inspectors not a single company fined by the Ministry of Labour for violating the law and workers’ rights has paid up, and companies still are violating worker rights in Colombia with impunity,” he added.

For years Colombia has been considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for trade unionists, more than 3,000 of whom have been killed since the mid-1980s.

While Colombia has long been given preferential trade treatment by Washington as part of its broader “war against drugs” in the Andean region, the administration of President George W. Bush negotiated a free-trade agreement (FTA) with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in 2006.

But the deal was strongly opposed by the AFL-CIO, labour and human rights-groups, and their allies in Congress who refused to ratify the FTA without provisions designed to substantially improve the country’s labour rights performance.

The pact was essentially put on ice until Obama and Santos signed what is formally known as the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement in April 2011 to which the Labor Action Plan (LAP) was attached.

The LAP — which, among other provisions, required the Colombian government to protect union leaders; enact legislation to ensure that workers could become direct employees instead of subcontractors; establish a new ministry of labour; and prosecute companies that prevent workers from organising — aimed to bring Colombia’s labour practices up to international standards.

While the original intention was to delay the FTA’s implementation until after the LAP’s conditions had been met, Congress approved the FTA in October 2011.

The activists insisted this week that the approval was premature in that it relieved the pressure on the Santos government to fully carry out the LAP.

“The approval of the FTA by the United States Congress, without verifying full compliance with the LAP, significantly reduced the political will behind the plan and contributed to decisively in turning the LAP into a new frustration for Colombian workers,” according to a joint statement issued Monday by Trumka and the leaders of two of Colombia’s trade union movements, the Confederation of Workers of Colombia (CTC) and the Union of Colombian Workers (CUT).

The statement, which also called for a “serious review” of the FTA’s impact on Colombia’s agricultural and industrial sectors and on its exports to the U.S., was also signed by more than a dozen other trade-union and human rights groups in the U.S. and Colombia.

For its part, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), which oversees the implementation of both the LAP and the FTA, gave the record of the past three years a more positive spin in its own report released Monday.

“Three years ago, the Colombian Labor Action Plan gave the United States and Colombia an important new framework, tools and processes to improve safety for union members and protections for labor rights. We have made meaningful progress to date, but this is a long-term effort and there is still work to be done,” USTR Michael Froman said.

The department’s report noted that 671 union members have been placed in a protection programme, which in 2013 had a nearly 200 million dollar budget; that more than 250 vehicles had been assigned assigned to union leaders and labour activists for full-time protection; and that the prosecutor general has assigned over 20 prosecutors to devote full-time to crimes against union members and activists, among other achievements.

It also noted that the number of union members who have been murdered for their organising activities has been reduced to an average of 26 per year since the LAP took effect from an annual average of nearly 100 in the decade before it.

“The action plan has been a good effort, and I know the government [in Bogota] has been taking it seriously,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a hemispheric think tank.

“Of course, the activist groups are right to press harder for compliance and to hold both the U.S. and the Colombian governments to account on this, but the fact is that there has been progress and there should be more,” Shifter, a specialist on the Andean countries, told IPS.

In its report, the ENS concluded that the LAP had overall failed to produce meaningful results in protecting worker rights, including the right to be free from threats and violence or in prosecuting recent and past murders of trade union leaders.

“We would like to emphasize that thousands of workers and their trade union organizations have tried to make use of the new legal provisions that protect them against labor abuses, but mmost have found themselves more vulnerable since judges, prosecutors, and labor inspectors almost always refuse to provide the protection available under the new legal framework,” the ENS report concluded.

In many cases, it said, efforts to gain protection had “only backfired on workers,” particularly those working in ports and palm plantations.

ENS’s conclusions echoed those of a report released last October by U.S. Reps. George Miller and James McGovern, both of whom serve on the Congressional Monitoring Group on Labor Rights in Colombia.

“The ENS report reminds us that we have a very long way to go in successfully implementing the LAP and ensuring that workers can safely and freely exercise their fundamental rights,” the Group said, adding that the new U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker, make LAP’s implementation a priority and highlight illegal forms of hiring, the use of collective pacts by companies to thwart union organising, and the problem of impunity for anti-union activity.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Workers stitch Hanes tee-shirts at a factory in the CODEVI free trade zone in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. Credit: Jude Stanley Roy/IPS

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

Haiti’s minimum wage will nudge up 12 percent on Jan. 1, from 4.65 to 5.23 dollars (or 200 to 225 gourdes) per day. Calculated hourly, it will go from 58 to 65 cents, before taxes.

But the raise will not affect Haiti’s 30,000 assembly factory workers, who are supposed to already be receiving about seven dollars for an eight-hour day – about 87 cents per hour. Recent studies have found rampant wage theft at almost two dozen of the factories that stitch clothing for companies like Gap and Walmart.“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there. I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that." -- Haitian garment worker

The wage hike comes almost five years after the Haitian parliament asked for a 200-gourde minimum wage, then worth 4.96 dollars a day, but failed to overcome Washington-backed industry opposition [see sidebar].

Agreed to on Nov. 29 by a government-convened Council on Salaries (CSS) – made up of labour, business and government representatives – the raise falls far short of the minimum wage of 11.63 dollars (500 gourdes) that factory worker unions and others were demanding.

Last month, in the capital and in Haiti’s north, the Collective of Textile Factory Unions federation (KOSIT), which represents workers in three industrial parks, mobilised for the 500-gourde wage.

On Nov. 7, to chants of “500 gourdes! 500 gourdes!,” over 5,000 workers and supporters marched outside the gates of a free trade zone on the border of the Dominican Republic in Ouanaminthe. Hundreds of others marched on Nov. 26 in the capital.

The factory owners countered late last week with an open letter which pled to “keep Haiti competitive” with what they identified as their “big rivals” – Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam, countries all known for harsh conditions and abuse.

Union members, other workers and their supporters demonstrate to demand a 500-gourde minimum wage in Port-au-Prince on Nov. 26, 2013. Credit: Batay Ouvriye

“We recognise that the clothing and assembly sectors are not ends in and of themselves, but they can be a very important stimulus and can serve as a motor to help Haiti open up and present itself as a country that is changing and modernising,” said the 23 Haitian, Dominican and South Korean factory owners and industrialists from the Association of Haitian Industries (ADIH).

Two days later, on Nov. 29, eight of the nine members of the CSS, including all three union representatives, approved the 225-gourde wage. (None of the union representatives were from KOSIT.)

Yannick Etienne of Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle), a labour group which supports KOSIT and other textile unions, said her organisation and the unions disagree with the 225-gourde salary.

“We think it is a shame that the CSS union representatives agreed to the miserable wage of 225 gourdes. At a meeting the night before, we requested that they refuse to sign any agreement that was less than 300 gourdes,” Etienne told IPS.

Rampant wage theft

The country’s 30,000 workers – almost two-thirds of them women – in Haiti’s free trade zone assembly factories stitch together clothing for Gap, Gildan Activewear, Hanes, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Russell, Target, VF, and Walmart. Haitian law stipulates that “the price paid per production unit… must be set in a way that permits a worker to earn at least 300 gourdes for an eight-hour day.”

But recent studies by three different international groups, including the U.N.’s International Labour Organisation (ILO), have documented that the vast majority of workers receive the legal minimum only rarely: about 25 percent of the time, according to the ILO.

A 29-year-old mother who works at the Multiwear factory, which makes tee-shirts for Hanes, is one of those being gypped. (Like all workers interviewed for this story, she agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity.)

“I support my four-year-old, and two sisters, and one brother,” she told IPS. “Sometimes I make the quota and get 300 gourdes, but just once in a while.”

In its October 2013 report, the ILO’s Better Work textile factory monitoring programme found all 23 factories surveyed, including Multiwear, to be “non-compliant” with the law. To be “compliant,” Better Work said that “at least 90 percent of experienced workers” should be able to make 300 gourdes in an eight-hour day.

The mother is her family’s sole support.

“I am the oldest,” she continued. “Right now, my husband is not working. We live in one room.”

She wants the minimum wage to be raised, but said “many people won’t even show up to a sit-in, because if the bosses think you support a wage hike, you’ll immediately be fired.”

Workers, KOSIT leaders, several reports and many economists agree that 225 gourdes, and even 300 gourdes, are not living wages.

A 2011 study by the U.S.-based AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Centre held that a factory worker living in the capital and supporting two children would need to earn about 29 dollars per day (1,152 gourdes), six days a week, to support his or her family.

A 54-year-old worker from One World Apparel, owned by former presidential candidate Charles Henri Baker, also rarely earns 300 gourdes, she told IPS.

“When the boss started to hear talk about the minimum wage going up, he clamped down on us,” said the mother of three, who said she has worked at One World for eight years.

“You have to do 75 dozen pieces, but not every job is the same. Sometimes you can make the quota, but sometimes you can’t. No matter what the job is, the number is the same. Once in a while, if I work really hard, I can at least make 225 gourdes,” she added.

Both Gildan and Fruit of the Loom recently released statements promising to ensure their subcontractors respected the 300-gourde minimum.

“It is our view that the clear intent of Haiti’s minimum wage law is for production rates to be set in such a manner as to allow workers to earn at least 300 gourdes for eight hours of work in a day,” Fruit of the Loom said in a statement. “Based on our independent investigation, we concur with the WRC that the garment industry in Haiti generally falls short of that standard.”

In addition to denying most workers the 300-gourde minimum, bosses were regularly cheating labourers out of overtime and making them work essentially for free, according to a report from the Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), issued Oct. 15, 2013.

In Stealing from the Poor, based on worker interviews and pay stubs from five factories (four in the capital and SAE-A at the Caracol Industrial Park), the WRC found repeated cases of employers paying workers the incorrect amount for overtime hours. (The ILO reported only nine percent of factories cheating workers out of overtime.)

In the capital, WRC maintains that at the four factories surveyed – One World, Genesis, Premium and GMC – workers were “being cheated of an average of seven weeks’ pay per year.” Workers sometimes willingly work “off the clock” in order to make the quotas necessary to be paid 300 gourdes, the group reported.

Economist Camille Chalmers, director of the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA), is highly critical of the Haitian government for, among other things, not enforcing the 300-gourde minimum. He has called for a 560-gourde minimum wage.

“The government does not play the role of arbiter, as it should,” said the university professor while speaking at a Nov. 18 meeting on the wage issue. “Government authorities instead tend to listen to the embassies, to ADIH… Our government is really tied to the upper class, the oligarchy.”

The current government – whose slogan is “Haiti is Open for Business!” – has pushed Haiti’s low wages at numerous national and international conferences.

The mother of three agrees that the minimum wage needs to go up to at least 500 gourdes.

“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there,” she told IPS. “I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that. They are just cruel.”

The recent ILO/Better Work report is the seventh Better Work report to document shortfalls and violations.

Additional reporting by Patrick St. Pré.

Mekhredze Telman (left) pushes Amanda Arthur's (right) cart of dry and canned goods at Tukwila Pantry, Tukwila, Washington on Oct. 20, 2011. The pantry provides monthly food bank services to individuals and families in need. Credit: USDA/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2013 (IPS)

U.S. state legislators and corporate lobbies have engaged in an unprecedented attack on minimum wages that has lowered U.S. labour standards, according to new research released Thursday.

The report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank here, is the first of its kind, providing a comprehensive overview of all legislation enacted over the past two years across all 50 U.S. states.“This is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.” -- Ross Eisenbrey of EPI

According to EPI researchers, some of the country’s largest corporate lobbies have engaged in an intense attack on U.S. labour standards and workplace protections, including minimum wage laws, the amount of paid sick leave offered, and even child labour protections.

“What is particularly important about this new report is that it emphasises the recent legislative developments at the state and local levels, which unfortunately have been largely ignored,” Jon Schmitt, a senior economist at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an economic research institute here, told IPS.

“That means that the discussion of economic and political inequality also needs to move to the local level,” he said.

EPI says such legislative attacks have seriously undermined the ability of average U.S. citizens to achieve economic prosperity.

“What is clear from the report is that attacks on labour unions are part of a larger attempt by trade associations and corporate lobbies … to fundamentally change the labour situation in America,” Gordon Lafer, an EPI research associate and an associate professor at the University of Oregon, said at the report’s launch here on Thursday.

Despite the country’s general economic growth, EPI notes that more and more people in the United States are struggling to earn a living wage.

“According to our statistics, from 1983 to 2010 the bottom 60 percent of Americans actually lost wealth, despite the fact that the overall U.S. economy has grown over this same time period,” Ross Eisenbrey, the EPI’s vice-president, said Thursday. “This is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.”

Although most attacks on labour standards come through state legislatures, the report notes that the momentum behind this large legislative movement has been driven primarily by powerful national corporate lobbies “that aim to lower wages and labour standards across the country.”

Wage theft

Indeed, one of the striking features of the report is the way it sets the local data into the larger national context.

Today, one out of five U.S. citizens is getting paid less than the federally mandated minimum wage. According to recent polls, workers in the U.S. are also increasingly dissatisfied with their current standards of living.

As many as seven in every 10 are saying that the economy is getting worse, and average confidence in the economy has reached its lowest point since November 2011, according to recent polls by Gallup.

On top of that, several U.S. states have already acted in one way or another by taking measures aimed at cutting minimum wage laws, considered some of the last bastions of low-wage worker protections in the country.

In 2011, for instance, New Hampshire legislators repealed the state’s minimum wage, mandating that only the federal minimum wage should be heeded. South Dakota recently abrogated the minimum wage for much of its summer tourism industry.

And while federal minimum wage standards are still in place, these recent trends suggest that the corporate influence at the state level is growing steadily.

While minimum wage restrictions are starting to take their toll on the average worker, the report also notes that many workers are not even able to recover those wages they have actually earned. Their failure to get paid – or what the report calls “wage theft” – refers to those widespread instances in which workers see parts of their paycheques being illegally withheld by their employers.

According to a 2009 survey by the National Employment Law Project, a labour advocacy group, as many as 64 percent of low-wage workers in the United States have seen portions of their paycheques stolen by their employers.

“The problem with alarming issues such as wage theft is that it’s actually very difficult to provide accurate evidence,” the CEPR’s Schmitt says. “Employers say that they’re eventually going to give that money back, but there’s no way of actually monitoring that.”

Advantage: employers

And as workers struggle to obtain those wages legitimately owed to them, national labour regulations seem to be increasingly tilting to the advantage of employers.

Some states have tackled the growing problem of wage theft by requiring employers to keep detailed pay records, or by passing legislation that enables state authorities to inspect these records. But according to the EPI, business lobbies have worked hard to block the enforcement of these efforts, in some cases by challenging the constitutionality itself of wage-theft laws.

In 2010, Florida’s Miami-Dade County enacted the first wage-theft law in the country. Lacking a department of labour since 2002, the state charged its Department of Small Business Administration with the law’s enforcement.

During its first year, the new law enabled the collection of nearly two million dollars’ worth of illegally withheld pay.

But as other counties sought to follow suit with their own wage-theft laws, business lobbies engaged in extensive legal battles aimed at curbing such laws. In 2011, Palm Beach County, another Florida county, tried to enact a wage-theft law similar to Miami-Dade’s, but business lobbies successfully blocked it by arguing that it would only add a costly new bureaucracy.

“The very little enforcement of wage-theft allegations has only contributed to emboldening employers across the country,” Schmitt says. “Right now, they feel they can take more risks and take advantage of their employees, without fear of retaliation.”

The “other march”: fancy trade union banners, flags and signs and powerful sound systems, everything highly organised to set forth the labour movement’s own demands. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 13 2013 (IPS)

The young people who have been protesting in Brazil over the last few weeks, who say they are apolitical and who have organised over the social networking sites, were not entirely pleased with Thursday’s demonstrations by the country’s trade unions and social and popular movements.

During a “National Day of Struggle” Thursday, strikes, protests and roadblocks were organised by the CUT central trade union and 77 urban and rural social organisations.

The demands of the new and more organised protests included better wages, a reduction of the work week to 40 hours, job security and an end to outsourcing, higher pensions, 10 percent of GDP for education, higher spending on public health, and improved public transport.

According to the organisers, 100,000 demonstrators came out on the streets nationwide.

In Rio de Janeiro, where some 10,000 people joined the march, the trade union’s flags and banners, professional-looking signs, sound systems and balloons contrasted with the hand-made placards of the students and other young people who began to take to the streets in Brazil’s cities in June.

But the student protests, initially triggered by bus fare hikes and organised over Facebook and other sites, were much bigger, reaching one million people countrywide.

Thursday’s protest “was peaceful; we’re asking for better working conditions and we’re protesting cuts in our companies,” one worker taking part in the protest, who said his name was Eduardo Henrique, told IPS.

Among the demonstrators, a group of engineers from Brazil’s Petrobras oil company called for an end to public auctions of oil industry concessions.

“We discovered enormous oil reserves, so there’s no need for foreign companies to come in,” Silvio Cidog, with the association of Petrobras engineers, told IPS.

Rural workers also made their voices heard. A small farmer who identified himself as
Osuara, with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), said it was urgent for the government’s land reform programme to speed up.

Apolitical protests

Far away from the noise of the trade union’s sound systems, a group of around 200 demonstrators blocked traffic on one of the city’s main avenues with a sit-in, to draw attention to the demands that gave rise to the movement of young people who describe themselves as apolitical.

“This is a movement without party affiliations that was organised over the Internet. They (the trade unions) took advantage of us. They have sound wagons, they buy everything, they hand out flags, the people don’t have any of those things,” said Karina Monteso, an economist.

“In Brazil, there’s a dictatorship of the left…They don’t want to release their hold on power,” said lawyer Marcio Simoes. “Our only weapon is this,” he said, holding up his iPhone, which he uses to communicate with other protesters who, demonstrating in another Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood, were preparing to march to the government palace.

Around the Guanabara Palace, things got out of hand. Isolated groups of masked protesters used stones, Molotov cocktails and flares to try to knock down bars protecting the building, and clashed with police.

Their chants focused on protesting the police repression and the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games to be hosted by Brazil.

Meanwhile, in the demonstration organised by the trade unions, urban planner Orlando dos Santos, with the NGO Observatorio de Metrópolis, was also opposed to the organisation of the two sporting events.

As a member of the non-governmental World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee, he is against the forced evictions caused by the sports-related construction projects in poor neighbourhoods.

With regard to the criticism from “the other protesters,” Dos Santos said “society is diverse. This demonstration was organised by the central trade unions, which are more classic-style organisations, and it is to be expected that there are groups that question this more traditional kind of group. But they are as democratic as the new forms of organisation,” he told IPS.

Nadine Borges, who represented a group of demonstrators from the Rio Truth Commission, called for the 1964-1985 military dictatorship’s documents to be made public so that human rights abuses committed during that period could be investigated.

“For us, historically, the defence of democracy has been based on the organisation of workers. This here is a democratic event that represents the organised central trade unions,” Borges said, in response to the criticism from other groups.

Some 100 young people dressed in black and covering their faces to avoid tear gas demonstrated in parallel to the workers’ march. “We have no words,” one of the young demonstrators told IPS. But their signs did: “Make love not war”, “Power to the people”, “Anarchist shock troops”.

Separated from the main trade union march, which filled an entire avenue, a group of young artists dressed as clowns chanted against police repression. They called themselves the “nhoque nhoque troops” – a play on words alluding to the security forces’ “tropa de choque” or “shock troops”.

Members of the governing leftwing Workers Party took part in the march organised by CUT, although without carrying party flags. After they identified themselves as party members, they said they were calling for a “deepening” of the socioeconomic improvements ushered in over the last decade by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and President Dilma Rousseff.

This was the first reaction by organised leftwing political and social groups in Brazil in response to the wave of young people’s protests.

CUT, which supports organised participation by today’s young people, is worried that “conservative and rightwing sectors will try to influence their protests with objectives that have nothing to do with the immense majority of the people,” according to one of the union’s leaders.

He said “the organised participation of the working class in this new scenario is of fundamental importance, to make sure this situation has a positive solution.”

Inmates of Villa Devoto prison at the founding meeting of SUTPLA, the prisoners' union, in July 2012. Credit: CTA

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 7 2013 (IPS)

The first prisoners’ union in Argentina, a country with a strong organised labour tradition, fights for the rights of inmates.

“No one had never fought before for anything like this in here,” 33-year-old inmate Gustavo Moreno, serving a 22-year sentence in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal in Buenos Aires, better known as the Villa Devoto prison, told IPS.

Moreno, who has been in prison for three years, works on the cleaning detail. He is also the coordinator of the foundation course at the university education centre there, and is studying Business Administration.

Moreno is the social action secretary for the new prisoners’ union, the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Privados de la Libertad Ambulatoria (SUTPLA), created in July 2012, which is recognised under an agreement with the Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF).

SUTPLA belongs to the centre-left Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA) trade union federation, whose leaders said the prisoners’ union is being closely watched by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as an example that could be followed in other countries.

“We have 700 male and 100 female members, and the basic idea is to defend the rights of people who are in a defenceless and vulnerable state,” Rodrigo Díaz, the secretary-general of SUTPLA, who has been out of prison on early release since April, told IPS.

At present they are seeking legal union status with the help of CTA lawyers. Once this is achieved, they will have to begin collecting union dues, but this is not an important concern for the organisation.

The growing strength of the union fills Díaz with enthusiasm. He has been in prison a number of times – “a total of 12 years in different prisons,” he said. He started studying law behind bars and is now continuing his studies on the outside. He has only one year to go to graduate.

Through his studies and the time he spent in different prison facilities, he has learned about the labour rights of inmates, which are not always respected. “The prison service does not see it as a question of rights but of benefits,” he said.

At present 64 percent of the nearly 10,000 prisoners in the SPF are working. Another 49,000 prisoners are inmates in facilities dependent on provincial governments, where the proportion of inmates doing remunerated work varies.

Argentina’s prison law, which was reformed in 2012, stipulates that prisoners have the right to work and study, as part of their rehabilitation. It also states that their work “must be remunerated.”

The Justice Ministry established that all prisoners who worked would receive the national minimum wage, equivalent to 553 dollars a month, regardless of their actual working hours.

But in practice, most working inmates are paid much less, because the SPF makes a number of controversial deductions. “Someone is keeping the difference, very probably ENCOPE,” Díaz complained.

ENCOPE (Ente de Cooperación Técnica y Financiera del Servicio Penitenciario), an agency for technical and financial cooperation with the prison service, “does not fulfil the functions for which it was created…and actually oversees itself,” the trade unionist said.

Víctor Hortel, the head of SPF, has admitted that in the past there were irregularities in the deductions that were made, which were supposed to be credited to a reserve fund for prisoners when they were released. But he denied that these practices continued, now that anti-corruption bodies are exerting greater control.

With the help of CTA lawyers, the new union lodged various appeals against deductions from imprisoned workers’ pay, except for contributions toward their future pensions.

This year, the fight against deductions and other labour demands led to the first strike by SUTPLA workers, lasting 72 hours.

The union is also demanding that proper clothing and footwear be issued to workers for safety and health reasons, especially when they handle waste or other contaminating materials.

Díaz has met with social security authorities to negotiate payment of six months unemployment benefit for newly released prisoners, just like any other person dismissed from a job.

He himself received wages until April for his work in the Villa Devoto prison, but was left without an income as soon as he was freed, six months before completing his full sentence.

He said the worst situations were found in prisons run by the provincial governments. “In Unit No. 1 in Olmos (in the province of Buenos Aires), inmates are ‘paid’ with just two telephone cards a month,” he said.

In some prisons, inmates work in exchange for benefits such as visitors’ permits on weekdays. But work is not seen as part of rehabilitation, or a right, or something that should be remunerated, Díaz said.

“The idea is not instilled in prisoners that they can learn a trade through working, and also help their families. That is why the recidivism rate is so high,” he said.

Against this backdrop, SUTPLA wants to strengthen trade union activity in the Villa Devoto prison, where the organisation was founded, and then extend the same rights to other men’s and women’s prisons.

The work done in prisons is varied and includes agricultural production – vegetable gardens, nurseries, growing fodder, dairy production – and industrial workshops – printing, sportswear, bicycles, bags and furniture.

Maintenance work is another option, like the cleaning work done by Moreno, the social action secretary of SUTPLA, for which his net monthly income is 385 dollars.

“I’m working for my kids,” he said. He has four children, aged 13, 11, seven and one. “What I do for myself is study. That will give me a tool when I get out,” said Moreno, who is waiting to hear whether his sentence has been reduced.

“Studying is my way of detaching myself from life inside,” he said. He has been in prison before, and managed to finish his secondary schooling. “I had no opportunity of doing that on the outside,” he said.

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 31 2013 (IPS)

Top U.S. companies are now in negotiations to agree on new safety standards for their clothing-producing contractors in Bangladesh, a month after a garment factory’s collapse in Dhaka killed more than 1,100 workers.

The move comes after these companies, most prominently including Walmart and Gap, refused to sign on to a fire and safety standards agreement, announced weeks ago, that has received wide backing among European companies. Yet labour advocates are disparaging the new talks, suggesting the results will likely not be binding and thus will not be able to ensure worker safety."They are still looking for political cover so they can preserve the very lucrative status quo.” -- Scott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium

“Walmart is … undermining the constructive efforts of other companies,” Jyrki Raina, general-secretary for IndustriALL Global Union, an umbrella of unions with 50 million worldwide members that has led the European agreement process, said Friday. “The kind of voluntary initiative being put forward by Walmart and Gap has failed in the past and will again fail to protect Bangladeshi garment workers.”

The new discussions, announced Thursday, are being sponsored by the BipartisanPolicyCenter, a Washington think tank, and being co-chaired by two respected former U.S. senators, George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe. The negotiations also include several U.S. and Canadian trade associations.

“Over the next several weeks, we look forward to building on [past] efforts … and seeking input from key stakeholders to forge an effective response,” Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), said Thursday.

Currently, the process is aiming to come up with a final agreement on new standards for Bangladeshi contractor factories by July. (BPC did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“We are hopeful that … these discussions will result in a plan for long-lasting change for the garment industry in Bangladesh,” Bill Chandler, vice-president of global corporate affairs for Gap, Inc. told IPS. “We believe the American alliance can be a powerful path forward to achieve lasting change in Bangladesh, and will build upon the work that is already underway.”

A spokesperson for Target also confirmed the company’s involvement in the BPC-facilitated talks process.

Contacted by IPS, a Walmart spokesperson emphasised that the company has already taken “a number of actions that meet or exceed other factory safety proposals”. But he also noted Walmart’s belief that “there is a need to partner with other stakeholders to improve the standards for workers across the industry”.

Nonbinding “not good enough”

This interest in entering into the new negotiations appears to be motivated particularly by public pressure following the companies’ refusal to sign on to the European Union accord, which now has more than 40 corporate backers, including three U.S. companies.

That agreement would include financing to upgrade factories as well as independent inspections. In addition to concerns over potential costs and the prospect of court litigation, a key sticking point for U.S. companies over the E.U. proposal has been that the agreement would be legally binding.

According to documents on Gap’s corporate website, for instance, in mid-May the company was “ready to sign on today with a modification to a single area – how disputes are resolved … With this single change, this global, historic agreement can move forward with a group of all retailers, not just those based in Europe.”

Yet it is because of this stance – reportedly repeated at a Gap shareholder meeting on May 21 – that observers are now sceptical that a company-led negotiations process will be able to result in strong, and legally enforceable, agreement.

“Forty retailers from all over the world … have agreed to a binding comprehensive safety plan for Bangladesh,” the AFL-CIO, one of the largest labour unions in the United States, said Friday, noting its “deep concern” about the new BPC-led talks.

“No amount of bipartisan window dressing can change the fact that Walmart and the Gap have refused to take this important step. This is a matter of life or death. Quite simply, nonbinding is just not good enough.”

Such concerns are heightened by the fact that, currently, no worker-rights organisation is included in the talks.

“This is the latest, and probably most sophisticated, in a series of industry public relations gambits designed to deflect attention from the real issue: the refusal of these companies to make a binding commitment to clean up their factories in Bangladesh,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an advocacy group, told IPS in an e-mail.

“This shows the pressure these corporations are under and their recognition that the failed inspection schemes they have been touting no longer have any public credibility. Unfortunately, their goal has not changed: they are still looking for political cover so they can preserve the very lucrative status quo.”

Corporate-led process

Concerns over corporate-led international labour and safety programmes have received boosts from U.S. lawmakers in recent days, as well. Last week, Representative Sander Levin warned that the oversight process has “been left up to the retailers, suppliers and government all these years, and that hasn’t worked.”

On May 15, Levin and two dozen members of Congress wrote to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, urging that her government put “the highest priority on aggressively enacting and enforcing comprehensive reforms … including the right to organize and form unions”. The lawmakers also noted, “it is critical that all key stakeholders take action”.

Reports in recent days have suggested that the U.S. State and Labour Departments are currently arguing over how hard to push the Bangladeshi government on these issues. Unions and some advocacy groups are pressuring the U.S. to revoke certain bilateral trade concessions given to Bangladesh, though critics say doing so would give up important leverage for change.

For now, Washington, seemingly led by the embassy in Dhaka, has chosen not to back the E.U. accord, although the U.S. State department says it is urging Bangladeshi officials to institute a suite of labour reforms.

“We need a lot more from the U.S. government – why the embassy has decided not to endorse the E.U. standards is beyond me,” Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“Of course, we have to remember that even the E.U. accord hasn’t put any emphasis on workers’ right to organise. It’s only workers themselves that can win their rights, and they can do so only once they have the right to organise and bargain collectively. The U.S. government needs to do far more on two issues: binding agreements on safety codes and the right to organise.”

Walmart built a store less than two km from the ancient Teotihuacan pyramids of Mexico. Credit: Owen Prior/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

Trade unions in Canada, the United States and Mexico are preparing protests and legal action against the Mexican subsidiary of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, which is accused of paying bribes and breaching labour rights.

Unions in the three North American countries want the company to be penalised by the Mexican authorities, and are calling for a ban on opening more stores on artistic or natural heritage sites.

“What is needed is action in Mexico. We are somewhat out of step with the investigations in the United States,” said Héctor de la Cueva, the coordinator of the Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoría Sindical (CILAS), a Mexican trade union research centre. “That’s why we’re going to explore avenues to initiate legal action against the company and then evaluate using international courts,” he told IPS.

The Walmart scandal erupted on Apr. 21, 2012 when the New York Times reported that the firm had paid 24 million dollars in bribes to Mexican officials between 2002 and 2005 to expedite the opening of new stores, a possible violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In the United States, Walmart has been under investigation since December 2011 by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission in a process that has already cost the company millions of dollars and will cost it considerably more yet.

Walmart is now Mexico’s largest private employer, with over 240,000 workers, who are not allowed to form trade unions or demand labour rights on pain of dismissal. Nearly 20 percent of the over 10,000 Walmart stores worldwide are located in Mexico.

“We are deeply concerned about this scandal and aware that Walmart has not even applied its own code of ethics,” said Eduardo Pérez de San Román, the regional director for the Americas of UNI Global Union, based in the Swiss city of Nyon.

“We are experiencing great difficulties in promoting union freedoms and collective bargaining in the company,” the leader of the federation of trade unions representing some 20 million workers in 1,000 organisations in 150 countries, in the retail trade, finances, telecommunications and postal services, told IPS.

UNI Global Union is carrying out a campaign to denounce Walmart’s practices, and has formed a global network against the company. It has already presented a complaint with Walmart’s Global Ethics Office for breaches of its own code.

The Mexican investigation into the alleged payoffs has made slow progress and there are few results, even though over a year has passed since the scandal first broke.

The now defunct ministry of public administration announced on Nov. 21 that the early investigations found no irregularities requiring any penalties against senior Walmart executives in Mexico.

“Walmart should not be allowed to harm cultural heritage sites or labour rights,” Luis Gálvez, a leader of the workers’ union of the state National Institute of Anthropology and History, complained to IPS. “It should be regulated by the state, or expelled from the country,”

In 2003 and 2004, Gálvez took part in the failed struggle against the opening of a Walmart superstore on a plot next to the archaeological zone of Teotihuacán, one of the country’s emblematic pre-Columbian sites some 50 kilometres northeast of Mexico City, in Mexico state.

The store is one of those where bribes are alleged to have been paid to allow it to operate. At the time the governor of Mexico state was Enrique Peña Nieto, who became president of Mexico on Dec. 1.

Things turned out very differently in the small indigenous town of Cuetzalan in the southern state of Puebla, where protests managed to block construction of a Walmart branch in 2012, on the argument that it was a threat to local employment, organic agriculture, and local customs.

Encouraged by this precedent, activists are waging a similar battle in the cities of Xalapa and Orizaba, both in the southeastern state of Veracruz, where Walmart wants to build two stores. In Xalapa, the store would threaten a forested area rich in flora and fauna, and in Orizaba it would endanger a retirement home built in the 1930s that is listed as of special artistic interest.

In both cases, civil society organisations have asked the municipal authorities to deny permission for building and operating the stores.

“The expansion of Walmart has been at the expense of the most basic workers’ rights. Workers have been prevented from organising freely, and the Mexican authorities have permitted this to happen. If the labour ministry wants to act, it has every means at its disposal to do so,” said CILAS’s De la Cueva.

In Gálvez’s view, the Walmart store in Teotihuacán must be closed down. “It is one more reason in our argument that this store should not be in the archaeological zone. It must be removed, because it is an offence against Mexico,” he said.

Map of La Guajira peninsula showing the Cerrejón mine, the railroad tracks and Puerto Bolívar. On the left is the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains and on the right, Venezuela. Credit: Felipe Osorio/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Feb 23 2013 (IPS)

Two weeks into an indefinite strike called by workers at Cerrejón, one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world, the company has agreed to sit down again and negotiate with Colombia’s National Union of Coal Industry Workers (Sintracarbón).

Negotiations, which had been broken off by Carbones del Cerrejón on Sunday, Feb. 17, are back on track with tentative meetings between company representatives and leaders of Sintracarbón, an affiliate of IndustriALL, a global trade union organisation that represents 50 million workers in a 140 countries in the mining, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Representatives of both sides met in the afternoon of Feb 22 to “discuss the methodology for resuming negotiations,” Sintracarbón president Igor Díaz announced on Twitter.

The decision by Carbones del Cerrejón — a joint venture between the multinational corporations Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Xstrata — to return to the negotiating table was most likely influenced by a change in attitude on the part of the Colombian government, who stepped in to play a role as mediator in this conflict.

In a laconic text message late on Wednesday, Feb. 20, Labour Vice-Minister José Noé Ríos told IPS: “We’re moving ahead. We’re still looking for a way (to solve the conflict) and overcoming the mutual distrust” between the parties.

The following day, Ríos was able to bring two representatives from both sides together to discuss the conditions for reopening negotiations.

A leader of the governing Liberal Party and former peace commissioner, Ríos is an experienced negotiator and in this opportunity he was called on to mediate by Sintracarbón.

Nobody, however, can accuse the vice-minister of “helping” the union, a Sintracarbón advisor told IPS. The source spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity and not as an official spokesperson for the union.

All things considered, after a week of efforts, Ríos’ mediation seems to be yielding results.

Another factor that probably played a role in the company’s change of heart was a social protest demanding a resumption of negotiations, staged on Feb. 21 in the northeastern department of La Guajira, whose economy revolves around the Cerrejón pit and its 9,870 workers.

The protest was initially called by local merchants as a measure apparently against the union, but it was taken up by the population who turned it around. And not just because the demand for dialogue coincides with Sintracarbón’s position.

Carbones del Cerrejón — and with it Guajira politicians and the government — came out of the civic strike looking badly in the eyes of the public, according to the union advisor interviewed by IPS.

During the strike, a usually silent population demonstrated loudly in front of closed stores and businesses, protesting the lack of a healthcare system in La Guajira and the missing royalties paid by Cerrejón to the government, allegedly misappropriated by corrupt local politicians.

Merchants and business operators also decried the environmental damage and health problems caused by coal mining and criticised the scarce development of La Guajira.

The company operates in the area since 1983, mining high-quality thermal coal, but only 10 percent of its purchases and contracts are conducted in Colombia, and less than one percent in La Guajira, the country’s fifth poorest department.

Carbones del Cerrejón established four foundations, with different purposes: strengthening government and accountability in La Guajira; promoting the construction of aqueducts and sanitation works; expanding micro-businesses; and fostering the sustainable development of the Wayuu indigenous people, who represent 42 percent of the Guajira population.

These foundations are financed with the company’s “tax deductions”, Álvaro Pardo, head of the extractive economy analysis centre Colombia Punto Medio, told IPS, and “the work they do has little impact, as is evident from the unsatisfied basic needs index and the alcoholism and illiteracy rates” in La Guajira.

According to his calculations, the almost five million dollars provided by Cerrejón from 1982 to 2002 in compensation to the Wayuu communities, are the equivalent of two and a half days of the company’s coal production.

The Red por la Justicia Tributaria en Colombia, an organisation of Colombian academics and activists who advocate for a fair tax system, mining companies deduct royalties and manipulate prices to lower the sums they are required to pay the government.

The company’s willingness to find a prompt solution seemed in doubt on Feb. 19 when Carbones del Cerrejón’s marketer, Coal Marketing Company (CMC), which exports 90,000 tonnes of coal per day, declared “force majeure” to get out of paying daily fines for not meeting supply contracts.

CMC had 15 shipments scheduled for Turkey and Europe between Feb. 7 –when Sintracarbón called the strike– and Feb. 18.

Force majeure can be invoked in extreme situations, such as natural disasters and strikes. On its website’s home page CMC proudly, and somewhat belatedly, announces: “We have never declared Force Majeure.”

Union records show that from 1986 to date Carbones del Cerrejón and Sintracarbón signed 12 collective bargaining agreements. This is the first work stoppage in the mine in 18 years.

In September 1995, nine workers were fired after a five-day strike called to protest against the quality of the food served by the company’s canteen.

In 1996, Gustavo Palmezano, a unionist who had participated in another Sintracarbón protest against two layoffs, was murdered. Half of the trade unionists murdered in the world over the last four decades were Colombian.

Díaz and another Sintracarbón negotiator have received repeated threats against them and their families since the list of demands was submitted in late November.

Carbones del Cerrejón condemned the threats, backed Sintracarbón when it reported them to the police, and urged the government to grant adequate protection to the unionists and their families.

According to data from Germany’s Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources, 30.3 percent of the world’s energy today comes from coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, whose gas emissions are a leading source of global warming.

With coasts on two oceans and very vulnerable to climate change, Colombia is the world’s fifth coal exporter.

Although in 2011, global coal consumption was up 5.4 percent from 2010, as per information from British Petroleum’s Statistical Review of World Energy, other power sources also increased, pushing international coal prices down.

The 2010-2014 National Development Plan projected an annual production of 124 million tonnes, at prices higher than today’s.

In 2012, 89.2 million tonnes of coal were extracted in Colombia, according to data from the Ministry of Mining and Energy.

In its conflict with Sintracarbón, Carbones del Cerrejón has claimed that prices have dropped 35 percent in the last two years.

The illusion of a development driven by the “mining locomotive”, as President Juan Manuel Santos likes to call it, crashes head on with the government’s weak enforcement of what are already lax regulations.

More than 90 percent of Colombia’s coal comes from fields mined by foreign companies. Carbones del Cerrejón is the single largest producer, with 38 percent.

The company’s operations extend over 800 square kilometres in the Guajira peninsula, bordering with Venezuela. It has its own railway lines running through the isthmus to Puerto Bolívar, a private port on the Caribbean sea which is used exclusively by Carbones del Cerrejón and CMC.

The company reported that in 2012 it exported five percent of global coal production: 32.8 million tonnes. This volume determines the amount of royalties the company must pay the government for extracting non-renewable resources. But the government does not control the volumes actually exported by large mining companies.

Sintracarbón is asking for an eight percent raise in wages — most Colombian workers received a four percent increase in average — and the company is offering five percent.

Carbones del Cerrejón says it agreed to a raise that doubles last year’s inflation and a bonus of 7,250 for each worker, in addition to “maintaining and improving all the benefits enjoyed by workers.”

While the company’s machinery, technology and productivity are on a par with U.S. and European companies, Cerrejón miners are paid five times less than their peers in the North, according to Colombia Punto Medio and other sources.

“Prices have dropped, but the enormous profits of the mining companies have not shrunk. They’re selling coal at about 60 dollars a tonne, but in 2001-2002 coal was 35 dollars a tonne and it was still profitable,” Pardo said.

The vice-president of Sintracarbón, Jairo Quiroz, believes Carbones del Cerrejón is trying to bring down the cost of production per tonne by cutting labour costs.

“That’s what they’re aiming for in this negotiation. Which is why they’re putting up less economic resources to respond to the workers’ list of demands,” Quiroz told IPS.

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Jul 31 2012 (IPS)

Swazis should not see the ongoing nationwide one-month teachers’ strike as a movement capable of overthrowing the political regime here, despite the fact that civil servants and nurses have joined the action, according to political analyst Dr. Sikelela Dlamini.

Since Jun. 21, teachers in this southern African monarchy have engaged in an indefinite strike demanding a 4.5 percent cost of living increase, which has left thousands of pupils in about 30 to 50 percent of the country’s 179 secondary schools and 153 primary schools without teachers.

The country’s National Association of Public Servants and Allied Workers Union has also since joined the strike, although over 70 percent of its members are at work, and the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union is engaged in a go-slow after the government won an interdict in the country’s Industrial Court against full-blown strike action on Jul. 19.

While strikers have mainly protested against the government’s move to freeze all public servant salaries, on numerous occasions the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) president Sibongile Mazibuko warned that if the government refused to give workers the 4.5 percent cost of living adjustment, which is below the inflation rate, “the government might end up losing the country.”

The inflation rate currently stands at 9.43 percent, which has made it difficult for the 63 percent of Swazis living below the poverty line of two dollars a day to put food on the table.

But Dlamini and other analysts feel that the struggle for democracy in Swaziland lacks clear political alliances between labour and political organisations.

Dlamini told IPS that Swazis should not read too much into the teachers’ strike because workers have not yet declared their regime-change agenda at the negotiating table. In addition, only just over half of SNAT’s 9,000 members are on strike.

“No amount of all-out protest and defiance on the part of labour alone is sufficient to topple the status quo without a clear political direction,” Dlamini told IPS.

While workers are in a strategic position to challenge King Mswati III’s regime because they can withhold the labour that fuels the economy, Dlamini said that the country needs political organisations to negotiate and contest power.

Political parties have been banned in Swaziland for almost four decades and King Mswati III’s government continues to use security forces to quash any political dissent spearheaded by trade unions.

Following the fiscal crisis that has hit the country since 2009, after a 60 percent decrease from Southern African Customs Union income, workers began to call for political change, better working conditions, and below-inflation salary increases.

A United Nations Impact of the Fiscal Crisis in Swaziland survey released on Mar. 16 said that 21.9 percent of surveyed households have experienced reduced income since the crisis hit in 2009. And about seven percent of households surveyed admitted to having a member who lost a job as many families here survive on a meal a day.

The government has said that there is no money to pay public workers, whose salaries constitute a significant 52 percent of the national budget. Last year, the cash-strapped country took out a 320-million-dollar loan with neighbour South Africa. And at the time, the International Monetary Fund advised the Swazi government to reduce public servants’ salaries by 4.5 percent and politicians’ salaries by 10 percent, to save the government 24 million dollars a year.

However, the government has refused to adhere to calls demanding the cancellation of the controversial Circular No. 1, a government gazette that awards politicians, including the prime minister, cabinet ministers and members of parliament, lucrative perks. The government also continues to spend, and has plans to purchase 800 new cars over five years.

In addition, Mswati, Africa’s last absolute monarch, who has 13 wives, has also been criticised for his lavish lifestyle. The South African Mail & Guardian newspaper reported on Jul. 25 that three of the monarch’s wives are to soon go on holiday to Las Vegas, in the United States, with a 66-member retinue.

“We want a competitive government that will care about ordinary people instead of only those in power,” Mazibuko told IPS.

The government has responded to the strike by cutting the striking teachers’ July salaries by a third. It said that this was done because the strike is illegal as the Industrial Court recently ruled against it. However, teachers remain on strike.

But South African-based socio-economic analyst Thembinkosi Dlamini told IPS that civil society organisations in Swaziland, particularly labour unions, are weak and not very well coordinated to challenge the regime.

“The state has also made frantic efforts to dismantle any form of collective effort that could bring pressure to bear on the system,” said Dlamini.

For instance, in March the government registered the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), only to deregister it in April after stating that there is no legislation governing the merger of trade union federations here.

Trade unions felt that the government was trying to weaken the labour movement by deregistering TUCOSWA so that there could be no unity among workers, which could lead to them protesting against the government.

Meanwhile parents and public school pupils, who are supposed to be sitting for their mid-year examinations, are the ones most affected by the labour action, said human rights activist Doo Aphane. Some children do not even attend class currently, which exposes them to all sorts of risks, including sexual abuse and drug use, Aphane told IPS.

“Our government lacks a human rights-based approach because it is clear that the government has not taken into consideration the plight of the many ordinary people who are suffering because of this strike,” said Aphane.

Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini has threatened to fire striking teachers and close down schools if the strike continues. He has maintained that public servants will not receive a salary increase for the next three years.

“This does not guarantee lessons for the children who have been idling for weeks now,” the director of Save the Children Swaziland, Dumisani Mnisi, told IPS. “I wish that the government and teachers could sit down and sort out their differences so that children do not suffer the consequences of the action.”

A director of one of the country’s civil society organisations, who asked for anonymity, said that the prime minister was not handling the matter well and was “very arrogant because he is the King’s appointee and he has nothing to lose even when the public complains about his conduct.”

“Since the strike started we’ve been trying to get an appointment to engage the prime minister, but he’s been refusing to see us,” he said. “He seems to be only interested in fixing up the teachers and not ensuring that the children receive an education.”

He said that the government’s decision to buy cars to the value of 2.4 million dollars when it claimed that there was no money for workers showed how insensitive those in power were.

“That’s why people are now calling for a system that will ensure that those serving in the government take the citizens seriously,” he said.

Analysts insist though that it will take more than a group of aggrieved workers and empty threats to bring about political change in Africa’s last remaining absolute monarchy.

Two months after a free-trade agreement between the United States and Colombia went into effect, workers and activists are warning that U.S.-stipulated labour reforms have not been fully implemented and have yet to result in promised improvements in the lives of workers.

“We ask President (Barack) Obama to push for more guarantees for Colombian workers,” Miguel Conde, with Sintrainagro, a union representing workers on palm-oil plantations, said here on Tuesday. “In Colombia, it is easier to form an armed group than a trade union … because we still have no guarantees from the government.”

Colombia today is the most dangerous place in the world to be a member of a trade union.

Further, those gathered Tuesday at the Washington headquarters of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the United States, warned that much of a year-old labour agreement, meant to pave the way for the free-trade agreement (FTA), was in certain respects making things even more difficult for labour organisers in Colombia.

The FTA, although stridently opposed by a spectrum of workers and rights activists, was originally signed in late 2006 but was only passed by the U.S. Congress in October 2011. One of Washington’s prerequisites for the deal was the implementation of a 37-point Labour Action Plan (LAP), aimed at improving decades’ worth of labour rights abuses in Colombia.

According to a new report by the AFL-CIO, of those 37 points, at least nine have yet to be adopted, while the implementation of several others “can be regarded as partial or insufficient”.

The FTA came into full effect in mid-May, though only after President Barack Obama claimed, in April, that the Colombian government had already met its LAP-related commitments – just a year into what was expected to be a four-year plan.

“What happened since then is a surge in reprisals against almost all of the trade unions and labour activists that really believed in the Labour Action Plan,” Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, a rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group, said at the report’s launch.

This included the Apr. 27 killing of Daniel Aguirre, a labour leader who had helped to organise Colombia’s sugarcane workers. According to Sánchez-Garzoli, 34 Colombian trade unionists have been killed since the LAP was implemented, including 11 this year alone.

Further, such figures do not capture an ongoing campaign of intimidation. According to José Luciano Sanín Vásquez, executive director of the National Trade Union School, in Medellin, Colombia, since the LAP began more than 2,900 acts of violence and 1,500 assaults have taken place, aimed at workers and labour activists.

The Colombian government dismisses such numbers as simply part of a half-century of paramilitary violence that has dogged the country.

This is in part correct, says Vásquez, but it misses the crux of the matter: as paramilitary violence has wound down in Colombia in recent years, former rebel groups have been hired by companies to provide thuggish repression of trade unions.

Tolerated, condoned, promoted

While many have been critical of certain parts of the LAP – including that it does not cover public-sector workers – those gathered here on Tuesday were quick to note the agreement’s promise if it were fully implemented.

“We think the LAP is a very positive step forward and, if properly applied, would radically change a situation that’s been systematically problematic for the past 20 years in Colombia,” WOLA’s Sánchez-Garzoli says.

But the recent spike in anti-labour violence has forced a slowdown in progress on the LAP, Jhonsson Torres, a founding member of the sugarcane union Sinalcorteros and former colleague of Daniel Aguirre, said Tuesday.

More critical is a continuing lack of political will. “Even if the different sectors want to implement the Labour Action Plan, they can’t do it,” Torres said in Spanish. “In places where the government has complied with the LAP, it has only been because they’ve been forced to do so due to strikes and other actions.”

Others point to broader issues. “There is no reason to believe that top officials are not making sincere efforts to make a change,” cautions Celeste Drake, a trade policy expert with AFL-CIO.

“The problem is these changes cannot simply be made by people with good intentions at the top. It’s a culture within the government and throughout Colombia that for years has tolerated, condoned, promoted intolerance to the exercise of worker rights.”

Citing eyewitness reports, Drake says that government ineffectiveness and corruption is leading to hesitancy in reporting labour-rights infringements, for fear that an employer – or a paramilitary group – will be notified.

Workers and activists repeatedly reference the government’s stubbornness or inability to offer judicial or even informational responses to trade unions’ LAP-related queries and requests for justice and security.

At Tuesday’s meeting, when a representative from the Colombian Embassy in Washington noted that officials were taking note of the recent allegations of violence against labour organisers, participants responded that it was unfortunate that workers needed to come all the way to the United States to get an official response.

Rallying point

The Colombian business community, meanwhile, is hesitant to make LAP-instigated pro-labour changes, for multiple reasons.

“Most businessmen still think that (these reforms) won’t progress, that soon we’ll be back where we were a year ago,” says Vásquez, speaking in Spanish. “For that reason, this part of the political message needs to reach the public in all areas of the country.”

Drake, Sánchez-Garzoli and others are urging that financial and technical assistance for building up such a culture of trust come in part from the U.S. government.

“Obama and (Colombian President Juan Manuel) Santos have clearly delivered for the multinational companies and commercial interests,” Sánchez-Garzoli says.

“That’s fine. However, they must also keep their promises to the labour and human rights community. This is a matter of U.S. legislation as well, including specific protections for trade unions.”

While many observers have been frustrated that an opportunity for a broader public debate in Colombia on labour issues has so far been missed, there remains optimism over the unique opportunity to continue organising around the LAP in the years to come.

“The Labour Action Plan, imperfect though it may be, provides hope for the future,” Drake says.

“There are now themes that workers can point to and say, ‘This is now what I’ve been promised by my government. This is what we are going to hold the government up to.’”