Workers in Central America Seek Alternatives to Unionizing

For Rosa Maria Mendoza, 1995 was a year of struggle.

For the first eight months, she struggled to meet her quota, sewing 400 dozen buttons a day on MacGregor shirts at the Formosa Textiles factory in a gritty industrial park east of San Salvador.

She struggled to survive on a $90 monthly wage, paying a baby sitter to care for her three children and walking half an hour to work every day because she could not afford bus fare.

She struggled against illnesses brought on by drinking water from the plant’s cockroach-infested cistern and against the indignity of supervisors’ curses in English she could not understand.

In August, Mendoza decided to struggle a different way. Along with 86 co-workers, she joined a union.

In October, they were fired. When the union members tried to force their way into the factory to demand severance pay, all of the plant’s 400 workers were locked out of Formosa Textiles.

“They are punishing not only us but also innocent workers,” says the 24-year-old, tucking her long, dark hair inside a baseball cap. “Of course, we are innocent too. Forming a union does not make us criminals.”

But in El Salvador, as in many of the countries where contractors make goods sold under brand names in the United States, many employers consider forming a union a crime, punishable by firing. The near certainty that any effort to unionize will result in mass layoffs and probably the closure of the factory has forced labor organizers to look for new tactics, often deeply dividing leadership and impeding efforts at international cooperation.

What’s more, many Latin American labor leaders have become convinced that offers of solidarity from U.S. unions are part of a plot to drive factories out of their countries. Some have even given up direct efforts at organizing in favor of outreach programs to make workers aware of their basic legal rights, which they say many export plants do not respect.

“Ultimately, workers and their supporters must find new ways to organize at the international level,” concludes Global Production, a recent study of the garment industry worldwide. “Because international competition in effect pits workers against one another--a situation often encouraged by nationalistic campaigns on the part of industry and government--cross-national and cross-regional labor organizing is extremely difficult.”

NAFTA’s Impact

The situation has become particularly difficult in Central America and the Caribbean. Export industries fostered by the Ronald Reagan administration’s favorable Caribbean trade initiatives have foundered as the George Bush and Clinton administrations emphasized commerce with Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

“This is what has happened within one year of NAFTA,” says Carlos Arias, whose company makes Van Heusen shirts. “In Guatemala, 120 plants are closing down. We have quotas [limiting garment exports to the United States]. We pay duties.”

Many manufacturers have decided that cutting labor costs is the only way to compete with the devalued Mexican peso and NAFTA terms that will reduce Mexico’s duties to zero and eliminate its quota restrictions over the next 15 years. That view has reinforced anti-union attitudes.

“The demands they make on you assure that you will not be competitive,” said Michael Patillo, president of the Central American Sourcing Agency, a contractor that sews for such well-known brands as Leslie Fay in Guatemala. “I would close before I allow a union into my factory.”

An Owner’s Loss

A year ago, Patillo was on the verge of closing one of his three factories, which employ 800 people, because of a union organizing effort.

Patillo, who is from the United States but has lived in Guatemala a dozen years, was vulnerable to an organizing drive because of a production change that virtually assured that his employees were going to be disgruntled: He lost the Jessica McClintock contract.

To save the business, he had to find another customer. In a matter of weeks, the factory switched from gauzy prom gowns and lacy bridesmaid dresses to nightgowns and sleeveless casual dresses.

“I had 40- to 50-year-old women who were great seamstresses, making great money,” Patillo said. “I had people making 50 quetzales [$8.25, double what most factory workers earn] a day. The price structure was geared to a higher wage.”

He tried to convince his workers that they could make just as much sewing quickly as they had sewing skillfully, but what they saw was a severe drop in pay and an increase in their hours.

During that turmoil, Patillo said, “the union identified somebody in the factory” who was angry enough to lead an organizing drive.

The way union activist Flor de Maria Salguero remembers the story is that her neighbor Virginia Aguilar was working double shifts at Patillo’s Del Prado factory. To keep up the pace, Aguilar was taking 500 grams a day of stimulants, a dose so strong that it gave her tremors, according to Salguero.

Salguero offered to help Aguilar. “Five or six people who wanted to organize came to my office,” recalled the compact, graying woman who crackles with energy and outrage.

“We began talking about what a union is,” she said. But the workers did not want to talk. They wanted to get an injunction forbidding Patillo from firing employees or moving equipment, the first step in calling a union election in Guatemala.

“I felt we were going too fast,” Salguero said. “We got the injunction, but it didn’t matter. They were fired. This is a country where the laws are only written, never enforced.”

That was her last effort to start a union inside a factory.

“We need these jobs,” she said. “If we try to organize now, the plants will leave the country. We already lost 14 factories to Nicaragua last month.”

Instead, Salguero has changed tactics. Armed with Labor Ministry pamphlets about the minimum wage, overtime and the rights of working mothers, she visits workers at their homes in what she calls casework.

A Family’s Struggle

One of her cases involves the Escobar sisters, who sew Leslie Fay clothes at the Sunbelt factory on the south side of Guatemala City. Nancy, Sulma and Yani live with their parents in a squatter shack of castoff wood and sheet metal about an hour’s ride--on three buses, at a fare of $1 a day--from the plant.

Like many Guatemalan peasants, Jose Adalberto Escobar and his wife, Esperanza, moved to the city because they had no land and could no longer support their family on what they earned as sharecroppers. That was five years ago.

Escobar soon realized he could not support them on what he earned at Sunbelt either. Sulma, now 19, got a job at the factory to help.

After hunching over a sewing machine for three years--on top of all those years of heavy farm labor--Jose’s knotted muscles could no longer do the work. He was fired for failing to meet his quota.

So Nancy, now 20, and Yani, now 16, went to work. Their father has since found another job, but the four of them--along with Sulma’s fiance, Sandrino Lopez, who lives with them--barely make enough to support the family, which includes two grade-school-age brothers. Lopez must also send money home to his parents on the Pacific coast.

“The girls wanted to stay in school, but there was just no way,” Esperanza said.

Nancy studied the longest, finishing sixth grade and a typing class. But when she looked for office jobs, she was told no one needed typists anymore, and she lacked the clerical and secretarial skills needed for other positions.

“I could get a job faster at the factory,” said Nancy, who now earns considerably less than her younger sisters because they sew darts and waistbands while she makes pockets, which requires less skill.

The combined income of the five breadwinners is about 1,500 quetzales, or $250, every two weeks. That amount includes overtime, which usually brings the workweek to 67 hours, they say. That means they usually get home after dark. Especially on paydays, robbers wait at the bus stop.

“Last week, I was mugged,” Nancy said. “They stole my shoes and bruised my arm.”

Salguero listened to their stories, sitting on the couch the young women bought by pooling their Christmas bonuses last year. She left a Labor Ministry pamphlet about overtime laws and offered to accompany the two younger sisters to the Education Ministry the following week to sign up for primary school courses offered on Sundays, their only day off.

To the family, she said, “We are grateful that these jobs are available for girls who have not studied, but we also want to make sure they are not exploited.”

Later, she said: “This is a very slow way to work. But it is the only way we can work now.”

That view is not universally accepted among labor leaders.

Workers must not give up their right to organize because employers threaten to fire them, many activists insist.

“Our strategy is to support the rights of workers everywhere to organize,” said Jeff Harmanson of Unite!, a New York-based group dedicated to international cooperation among unions.

Firing employees in response to organization drives “happens all the time in the United States,” he said. “The National Labor Relations Board is only slightly more effective than the Guatemalan Labor Ministry” in protecting workers’ rights.

He says the best way to influence working conditions in U.S. or foreign factories is campaigns that make consumers aware of how workers who make the products they buy are treated.

“We are putting pressure here on the companies that supply the work,” he said. “They [local unions] can no longer try to go it alone.”

In the field, however, providing that help can sometimes be difficult.

“Many Guatemalans are entrenched in a leftist discourse that will not allow them to trust gringo unions,” said Rhett Doumitt, who for three years has been the Guatemala contact for an international labor coordinating effort, the U.S.-Guatemala Labor Education Project.

Skeptical of Outsiders

Indeed, Central American labor leaders indicate that they are often skeptical of international efforts to help them.

“We are not going to let U.S. labor federations use us to scare factories out of our country,” said Juan Jose Huezo, secretary-general of the National Federation of Salvadoran Workers, which was closely associated with the leftist rebels during this country’s 12-year civil war.

Huezo’s federation was the union that Mendoza and her co-workers turned to when they could no longer tolerate working conditions at Formosa Textiles. He eagerly accepted them as members because the garment industry is one of the few his federation has identified as ripe for unionization.

But as Huezo stood outside the locked plant, where office workers refused to talk with either reporters or workers until the owner returned from a trip to Asia, he looked chagrined.

“Here we kidded ourselves,” he admitted. “This man is never going to permit a union. But we have to accept export factories as a source of work. We are going to accomplish something--if not for these people, then for someone else.”