HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS in Guatemala have been on the rise over the past year, and trade unionists are often the target of this new wave of violence. In the maquiladora sector, which in Guatemala produces apparel for the U.S. market, labor activists have become victims of harassment, kidnapping and murder. In the past, maquiladora labor leaders have generally not faced the same level of violence as activists in other sectors, but a number of recent incidents suggests that this situation is changing.
For example, on September 30, 1994, the entire executive committee of the Marissa maquiladora union was abducted and threatened with death. In March 1995, the violence reached a new level with the first assassination of a labor leader in the maquiladora sector, Alexander Yovany Gomez. And in May 1995, Flor de Maria Seguero, a union organizer, was abducted, beaten and raped three times. Seguero has been active in focusing international attention on worker rights violations in the maquiladora sector. Last year, Seguero attended U.S. congressional hearings on working conditions in Central America.
Guatemala on probation
After a six-year struggle, worker rights advocates persuaded the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in August 1992 to accept two petitions filed under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) trade program challenging the systemic denial of worker rights in Guatemala. The petitions, filed by the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund, the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project , the AFL-CIO and eight other U.S. trade union and human rights organizations, documented extensive worker rights violations in Guatemala's maquiladora sector and other industries.
GSP extends duty-free trade benefits to certain commodities from Third World countries, but these benefits are supposed to be conditioned on beneficiary countries "taking steps" to afford their workers "internationally-recognized worker rights." These rights are legally defined to include acceptable working conditions, the right to organize, and prohibitions on child labor and slave labor.
Acceptance of the 1992 petitions placed Guatemala "under review," a probation- like status. Guatemala has been under continuous review since August 1992. By keeping Guatemala under review, the USTR is acknowledging that Guatemala has not taken sufficient steps to end probation. But review status also means that, in the USTR's estimation, Guatemalan labor conditions are not bad enough to warrant termination of GSP benefits.
Since the petitions were accepted, Guatemala has approved its most significant labor code reform in 40 years, opened two new labor courts, hired new labor inspectors, granted legal recognition to the first maquiladora unions in six years, recognized unions that have had applications pending for years (such as the Army Bank union), recognized a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant union in the record time of just two months and, in October 1994, increased the legal minimum wage by 40 percent to about $2.50 a day.
Yet, these steps have not brought significant progress to workers for two main reasons: labor laws go unenforced and anti-union violence goes unpunished.
Guatemalan labor courts are not functioning, having resolved just one out of the 600 cases that have come before them in the past two years. The minimum wage is not paid by most employers. The government rarely imposes fines for violations and, when it does, the fines are rarely paid. The government stands idly by while members of most of the maquiladora unions that it has recognized have been the targets of death threats, bribery and illegal firings and plant closings. Not a single maquiladora works under an independent union contract, and half the maquiladora unions have been destroyed in the past year.
In a country that remains one of the worst human rights violators in the hemisphere, impunity persists for those who kill, torture, disappear or threaten trade unionists. Not a single perpetrator of violence against workers has been prosecuted during the review period despite scores of cases.
Moreover, violence by right-wing forces against trade unionists, including in the maquiladora sector, has been on the rise. Examples involving workers producing directly or indirectly for U.S. companies include:
Last year, despite continued abuse of workers in Guatemala, the Clinton administration rejected requests by petitioners and members of Congress to prod Guatemala by suspending duty-free imports of Guatemalan sugar. The administration, apparently more concerned with providing political support for President Ramirio de Leon Carpio, tried to drop Guatemala's trade probation. But the USTR's efforts to end GSP review on July 1, 1994 were turned back by strong congressional opposition and pressure from the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which was particularly concerned about the transfer of several thousand Leslie Fay apparel jobs to Central America from northeastern states.
On October 1, 1994, a decision to end Guatemala's probationary status was delayed indefinitely in the face of continued opposition in Congress prompted by a new surge of violence in Guatemala. Representative George Brown, D-California, said the USTR has "been unable to furnish convincing evidence of concrete progress" on Guatemalan worker rights. Brown, then chair of the International Labor Rights Working Group, led last year's congressional push to keep the heat on Guatemala. In October 1994, Brown and 58 other U.S. representatives wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, insisting that probation be maintained. A similar letter initiated by Senator James Jeffords, R-Vermont, was signed by 19 senators.
Prior to both attempts, U.S. embassy officials had told Guatemalan government and business leaders that termination of the GSP review was imminent, according to the newsletter Inside NAFTA. Such signals undercut the threat of the petition and compromised efforts to advance worker rights in Guatemala.
The USTR's attempt to lift Guatemala's review prematurely illustrates the administration's unwillingness to use worker rights trade provisions effectively, says Pharis Harvey, executive director of the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund. "USTR has still not realized how much it could accomplish by truly enforcing the worker rights provisions of U.S. trade law," says Harvey.
Conditioning trade
Despite inadequate support from the U.S. government, GSP probation has yielded modest progress for worker rights in recent years. Guatemalan trade union leaders, who have dared to publicly back the probation, say probation has not worked miracles but any pressure on behalf of workers is better than nothing. "GSP pressure has not gained anything substantial or extraordinary," says Sergio Guzman, a leader of the progressive labor organization UNSITRAGUA. "However, it has helped open space for discussion between employers, workers and the government."
Elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, GSP leverage has also had a limited but positive impact on worker rights. It has contributed to the negotiation of the first maquiladora union contracts in the Dominican Republic, opened up some organizing space within Honduran maquiladoras, and led to the passage of a new labor code in El Salvador.
Not surprisingly, all the major trade union federations in Guatemala and most of the rest of the region argue that any new trade agreements with the United States should include strong labor protections. "We can't ignore the rights of workers as market integration moves forward," says Juan Francisco Alfaro, head of the AFL-CIO-backed labor federation (CUSG) in Guatemala. "We demand that any regional integration includes the same protections currently under GSP." Another trade union body in the region says that any proposal for new U.S. trade benefits should be defeated if it does not include worker rights provisions that are at least as strong as those in the current GSP and Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) laws.
Even if the new trade benefits protect worker rights, U.S. trade policy is expected to become an even weaker protector of worker rights in the near future. The labor side agreement President Clinton attached to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a step backwards from the labor protections afforded by the GSP and CBI. Worker rights conditions are entirely absent from the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) accord that establishes the World Trade Organization. And the new Republican majority in the U.S. Congress has indicated that it will not provide the fast- track negotiating authority that the Clinton administration wants to expand NAFTA if it contains labor or environmental protections. "There is clearly a weakening of political will in Washington to link worker rights to U.S. trade policy," says Professor Lance Compa, an international labor relations expert at Yale University.
Management-written labor codes
While U.S. business is opposed to having international or U.S. trade agreements establish protections for workers, many companies are less opposed to setting - and implementing - their own standards for workers. An increasing number of U.S. companies are adopting codes of conduct for their overseas "business partners" that govern working conditions and some basic worker rights at foreign factories that supply U.S. corporations. These "sourcing codes" typically require contractors to meet certain standards, such as a prohibition on child labor, slave labor or physical abuse. Levi's led the way in 1992 after a Washington Post story exposed abuses at a Levi's contractor in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands which locked workers in the factory overnight and paid them sub- minimum wages. Other major retailers have joined the trend. Codes have now been adopted by Wal-Mart, JCPenney, Reebok and others.
Most of these sourcing codes are minimalist. They simply require contractors to abide by local law and pay prevailing area wages, which are usually well below the poverty line. Only Reebok and Levi's make reference to the right of workers to organize unions. And most codes are barely monitored, if at all. "Sourcing codes, which only work for companies that care about their brand image and consumer opinion, need to be strengthened, expanded, and independently monitored if they are to become fully effective in ensuring decent working conditions and basic rights for workers," Compa says.
Despite these limitations, sourcing codes acknowledge that U.S. companies are accountable for policing working conditions and worker rights at the foreign factories that supply them. Responding to a grassroots campaign focused on abuses in Guatemala, Starbucks Coffee Company, the leading U.S. gourmet coffee company, recently became the first U.S. company to extend this principle to the agricultural sector. Starbucks announced at its February 15, 1995 shareholder meeting that it would adopt a code of conduct for its international suppliers of green coffee beans.
Experience in Guatemala shows that sourcing codes can be used effectively to promote worker rights if there are independent investigators who can document and report abuses directly to the U.S. companies with the implicit threat of making the abuses public. Workers who had been illegally fired for two years at the Confecciones Unidas maquiladora in Guatemala City were reinstated when Sears, Wal-Mart and JCPenney pressured their supplier in response to information supplied by the U.S./Government Labor Education Project. Physical abuse and sexual harassment ended at another factory, East-West, when U.S. companies intervened. And conditions improved at the JMB apparel maquiladora owned by the U.S. firm Cigne in the fall of 1994 after the Working Assets social investment firm began making inquiries about the company's Guatemala operations. Workers reported a reduction in physical abuse and better treatment by supervisors after Working Assets' inquiries.
"Sourcing codes are no substitute for effective worker rights conditions in U.S. and international trade agreements," argues Compa. But in a "free-trade" era, when U.S. and international trade policy is abandoning even the rhetoric of setting an international floor for basic worker rights, sourcing codes takes on an added importance in the struggle to ensure respect for basic rights of workers around the world.
Advocates of such a trade gift for the Caribbean region argue that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has put their region's maquiladoras at a competitive disadvantage with Mexico. Central America's apparel industry, which dominates the region's maquiladora boom, has been hardest hit by Mexican competition under NAFTA, according to Clinton administration officials.
An earlier attempt to secure duty-free benefits for the region through U.S. implementing legislation for the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was abandoned last year. Pro-GATT legislators dropped the matter after a private viewing of a video produced by the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America. The video graphically depicted child labor and other worker rights violations at Honduran maquiladoras producing for brand-name U.S. firms. GATT supporters feared that a public airing of the documentary would focus unwanted attention on labor abuses and could lose votes for GATT.
With GATT approved, leaders in Congress and the Clinton administration have promised quick action on duty-free apparel benefits for the region. The Clinton Administration's 1995 proposal and a similar bill, the Caribbean Basin Trade Security Act, introduced by Trade Subcommittee Chair Philip Crane, R-Illinois, would expand the duty- free trade benefits currently provided by the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) trade program to include apparel.
Neither the administration proposal nor the Crane bill would make any changes in CBI's current worker rights provisions. CBI's labor provisions are identical to those of the Generalized System of Preferences, except that CBI contains no public petition process.
Nonetheless, some members of the new Congress may try to further weaken
these lax provisions or even omit them. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia,
and other House Republican leaders have made it clear that they oppose
linking U.S. market access to worker rights. The Clinton administration's
own commitment is tenuous, having included the worker rights provisions
in last year's proposal only after vigorous lobbying of U.S. Trade Representative
Mickey Kantor by worker rights and Central America advocates. The administration
also excluded worker rights from its testimony on the legislation in the
February hearings.