Labor & Employment Law

Colombia Workers: Keep Fighting Against Free Trade Agreement

By James Parks

Over the past 24 years, more than 2,800 trade union members have been killed in Colombia and the government?s highly publicized efforts to bring the killers to justice are just a public relations spin to try and convince the United States to sign the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Colombian workers said today.

International solidarity is ?fundamental,? said Tarsicio Muñoz, director of education for the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT). Speaking during a brown-bag discussion today at the AFL-CIO here in Washington, D.C., Muñoz said workers in the United States must continue to publicly fight against the agreement and help create the political will necessary to prevent it from being signed.

Four of the Colombian unionists spoke last night at Georgetown University, in an event sponsored by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

Some 15 Colombian union leaders took part in today’s discussion and will return home this week after spending the past two months in the United States as part of an exchange program sponsored by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

The union leaders said nothing has really changed under the new Colombian leader, President Juan Manuel Santos. Not only is Santos continuing the anti-worker policies of his predecessor, Alvaro Uribe, but he is backing a proposed law that would allow employers to pay young workers between 18 and 28 years of age just 75 percent of the national minimum wage of about $250 a month.

?We are not against trade,? but trade has to work for everyone, not just the multinationals and the wealthy, Diaz said. Few workers are actually covered by the labor law, he said.

The government has created so-called associated labor cooperatives that in reality are low-wage, subcontracting agencies controlled by big employers, and not by the workers themselves, said Jaime Diaz Ortiz, secretary-general of SINTRAIMAGRA, a trade union representing agricultural workers. Cooperatives are supposed to be voluntary, worker-managed associations that distribute their collective gains to their members. 

Cooperatives in Colombia are employer-controlled and serve as labor agents to avoid a direct hiring arrangement and any responsibility for legally mandated benefits such as health care or pension. Workers in cooperatives are not covered by labor law and are legally ineligible to form or join unions. In Colombia, some 1.5 million workers are in such arrangements.

Ortiz said the government and agricultural companies in Colombia are rapidly increasing the acreage devoted to palm oil and corn?not to produce food for the thousands who are hungry, but to satisfy the demand for biofuels  to replace gasoline and coal in the United States and other developed nations. The Colombian unions are calling for direct hiring of workers and the right of agricultural workers to join a union, he said. 

Lina Malagon Diaz, an attorney who focuses on labor matters, who also spoke today, said a government tribunal set up by Uribe to reduce violence against union members and bring the killers to justice just is not doing its job. The majority of those responsible for these crimes have not been brought to justice. The judges and prosecutors only go after the ?hit men? not the persons who ordered the murders, she said.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on November 09, 2010 (boomark / email).