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CHAPTER ONE

The Work Enslaves Us

Bananas are a familiar part of the daily life of most North Americans and Europeans. But few know where their bananas come from, let alone anything about the daily life of the men and women who produce them. For over a hundred years a few giant transnationals with enormous concentrated power have controlled the Latin American banana export industry. The surprise, though, is that banana workers are often unionized—which makes all the difference for women and men banana workers alike.

First, a few broad strokes: Of all bananas produced globally, three-quarters are consumed within the country that grows them; only a quarter hit the export market. The export banana industry, in turn, is divided into two large categories. On one side are so-called ACP bananas, produced in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, representing about 19 percent of export bananas. While the big transnational corporations are increasingly producing bananas on plantations in all these regions, most ACP bananas are still grown by very small producers, usually a family unit; many are sold through a single giant conglomerate, Fyffes, based in Ireland. Fyffes, in turn, sells to a guaranteed, protected market in the European Union.¹

Most export bananas, though, are “dollar bananas,” grown in Latin America. In contrast to the ACP sphere, Latin American export bananas are overwhelmingly grown in a plantation system dating back to United Fruit’s initial conquests in the 1880s. In 2004 approximately 400,000 workers labored on these banana plantations, with 150 to 300 workers on each, about one-quarter of them women.² Three giant transnationals with familiar names sell two-thirds of dollar bananas today: Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte Fresh Produce, in descending order of global sales. The remainder are largely grown on plantations owned by local elites, known in the industry as “national producers.” It’s all about colonialism. In the ACP sphere, former European colonies sell to Europe and are in large part controlled by a European-based corporation; in the dollar sphere, countries in thrall to US-based corporations sell to US, Canadian, and European markets.

In Latin America the big three banana producers have been moving away from direct ownership of plantations since the 1950s, preferring instead to subcontract to plantations owned by the national producers, who absorb the risks and have to answer to tightly controlled quality standards—while helping the transnationals evade responsibility to their workers. The corporations still own their own docks, ships, railroads, and politicians, though, making it difficult, often impossible, for independent or small producers to reach export markets.³

In the past decade a new thug on the banana block has emerged, Ecuador, driving a classic global race to the bottom for banana workers. The worst culprit is Ecuador’s giant Noboa Corporation, which sells Bonita brand bananas and is number five after Fyffes in global sales. By 2002 Ecuador produced 28 percent of all export bananas in the world, including one-fourth of all bananas consumed in the United States. Dole alone now gets 31 percent of its bananas from Ecuador. Since the 1970s the Ecuadoran banana industry has been entirely nonunion. Its over 250,000 workers receive as little as one-fifth the wages and benefits of banana workers elsewhere in Latin America. Their work is almost entirely casual, with no health care, vacations, retirement, or job security of any kind. That’s why the banana transnationals are gradually pulling out of other parts of Latin America and sourcing from Ecuador, or using Ecuador as a pretext to lower standards elsewhere—with devastating effects throughout the region.⁴

The challenge of Ecuador has combined with a crisis in global banana overproduction since the early 1990s to put enormous pressure on the banana unions of Latin America. These unions, like the banana corporations, have a powerful history, however, and remain the core of the private-sector labor movement in Central America and Colombia. To understand them, we need to pull back a bit and look at the history of the region.

The small countries of Central America haven’t been known as “banana republics” since the beginning of the twentieth century for nothing. The companies that would eventually consolidate as United Fruit and Standard Fruit (later Chiquita and Dole, respectively) moved in on Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia beginning in the 1880s and have never left, buying off, threatening, and manipulating national governments as aggressively as they originally seized the lands of peasants who resisted their incursions. In 1954 Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz learned the limits to any reform of the banana corporations’ rule the hard way when he tried to nationalize fallow lands held by the United Fruit Company—the United States overthrew him in a coup. Throughout the twentieth century the US government backed repressive governments in the banana-producing regions to guarantee profits and “stability” for the banana corporations. Whether headed by dictators, generals, or elite oligarchs, these regimes were all held in place at the point of a US-made gun, viciously holding the lid down on workers’ and peasants’ protests through systematic assassinations and state terror.⁵

By the 1970s, though, the lid was flying off. In Guatemala, guerrilla movements linking urban mestizos with indigenous communities in the Highlands spread rapidly. The Guatemalan and US governments responded with two decades of horrendous repression, in which whole towns were slaughtered and buried in hidden, mass graves. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, similarly, insurgent movements rose up throughout the 1970s. At the decade’s end the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front; FSLN), known as the Sandinistas, came to power in Managua. But US president Ronald Reagan, inaugurated in 1981, soon swept down in retaliation and occupied bordering Honduras for use as a military base against the Sandinistas. During the 1980s the US-funded “Contra War” killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and Salvadorans. The blood only stopped flowing when peace processes brokered settlements in Guatemala and El Salvador in the early 1990s, and the Sandinistas lost out to a US-sponsored slate in the 1989 elections. Repression continues today throughout the region.⁶

Most of the banana unions rose up in the 1950s and reached their greatest power just as these rebellions were emerging during the 1970s. The US-backed “counterinsurgency” project dovetailed with local elites and the banana transnationals to launch big attacks on labor throughout Latin America. First came the destruction of the Ecuadoran banana unions in the 1970s, followed by attacks on Costa Rica’s labor movement, which paid a high price for solidarity with the rebellions to its west and north. In 1984 Costa Rica’s banana unions counted 18,000 members, with excellent contracts and a full range of benefits. Three years later they were almost entirely wiped out by an alliance of the Costa Rican government, the Catholic Church, the US government, and the banana transnationals, which combined to introduce a bogus company union system, known as Solidarismo, that rapidly supplanted the legitimate unions and remains in place today on almost all corporate-allied plantations in Costa Rica.⁷

In Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, already weakened banana unions were devastated in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch wiped out plantations throughout the region. After Mitch, Chiquita, in particular, either tried to walk away from unionized plantations or replanted them with African palms (for palm oil), which require few workers. In Colombia, by contrast, banana unions have miraculously survived. They counted 17,500 members in 2004 and continue to grow, despite over two thousand assassinations of Colombian labor activists since 1991—184 killed in 2002 alone. In all these enormously hostile climates the banana unions still hang on; in 2005 they represented about 37,000 total workers in the seven countries.⁸

If we look at the big picture from the union side, we’re talking Chiquita. Ninety percent of unionized banana workers work for the Cincinnati-based corporation, whose banana workers were 50 percent unionized in 2002. On all of Dole’s vast directly-owned plantations, only 2,000 workers, in Honduras, have union contracts; only 1,500 Del Monte workers, in Guatemala, are unionized.⁹ Starting around 1999, Chiquita executives made a decision to position their company as the “socially responsible” banana corporation. In 2001 the company signed an unprecedented agreement with COLSIBA and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), pledging to respect labor rights on its plantations and those of its subcontractors. The actual effects of the agreement are quite patchy, as Chiquita has been offloading its unionized plantations since then—most spectacularly, selling off its enormous Colombian holdings in early 2004. But the agreement has certainly held Chiquita back from overtly destroying all its unions.¹⁰

Whether at Chiquita, Dole, or Del Monte, unionized workers protected by contracts not only enjoy wages generally above nonunion banana workers, but are protected from arbitrary firings and often receive an impressive package of benefits more important than the wage differential. Depending on the country and corporation, these benefits can include two weeks of paid vacation, paid holidays, primary education for the workers’ children, health care, a modest retirement payment, and participation in their country’s legally mandated social security health care system—which most nonunion employers evade.¹¹

THE LIFE OF THE MUJER BANANERA

Women first started working on the banana plantations in the 1960s. As part of a broad restructuring prompted by containerized shipping and a new, more easily bruised variety of banana, the corporations introduced packinghouses to cut up banana stems into clumps, wash the bananas, and place them carefully into standardized 42-pound boxes. Almost all women banana workers work in the packinghouses. Except for a very few cases in Nicaragua, they are never employed in what’s called the “agriculture” side of banana production—the arduous labor of tromping through the fields cutting down 75- to 120-pound stems and carrying them to cables leading to the packing plants. Nor are they ever allowed into skilled trades on the plantations, such as tractor driver, carpenter, or crop duster mechanic—all of which pay far better than work in the packing plants. In the packinghouses, by contrast, men and women work in many of the same jobs such as “deflowering” the fruit (picking off dead little flowers at each banana’s end), cutting up clumps, or washing them. Other jobs are still gender specific: only women stick on brand-name labels; only men cut up the initial big stems or move boxes into shipping containers.¹²

All women banana workers’ jobs are thus numbingly simple and monotonous. They stand up eight to fourteen hours a day (usually ten to twelve), for six, sometimes seven days a week, performing one of a handful of motions in a big open shed, assembly-line fashion. In the regions where bananas grow it’s almost always between 95 and 105 degrees the entire year and oppressively humid. Between the sweat, the water spraying about, and the water tanks laced with fungicides, pesticides, and the latex that oozes from the cut bananas, it’s dripping wet in the packinghouses. Men and women both wear rubber gloves and rubber boots the entire day.¹³

The women all say the worst part is those gloves: inside them, their hands burn with the heat. “Imagine wearing gloves all day. From 6:30 [a.m.] until 7 or 8 [p.m.] every day with gloves on,” stresses Domitila Hernández.¹⁴ That and standing up all day. Gloria García recalls that during her fourteen years in a Honduran packinghouse, her feet hurt all the time.¹⁵ ‘María Amalia,’^aa a rank-and-file woman banana worker from Nicaragua, describes in her autobiography how she gets up at four in the morning, travels an hour to get to work, and then stands up until six or seven at night. She’s done it since she was fourteen or fifteen. “Do you know what it’s like to be on your feet for thirteen hours?”¹⁶

‘María Amalia’ is a psuedonym, as are all the names of the women whose autobiographies appear in Lo Que Hemos Vivido. The authors use first names only, which I am using here in single quotations, to distinguish them from actual first names to which I refer.

A 2001 study the women unionists conducted of women banana workers in seven Latin American countries, under the auspices of COLSIBA, found a litany of other health problems caused by packinghouse work. At the top of the list were repetitive motion injuries, chemical exposure, and skin diseases caused by both the chemicals and the water. The study’s respondents spoke of back injuries, premature arthritis, and cuts and falls at work. The women also reported high rates of miscarriage and rare cancers among banana packinghouse workers. Most of these women, without union contracts, have little or no access to health care.¹⁷

Working on a unionized plantation makes a huge difference for the banana women. With a union contract, women banana workers, just like the men, can usually count on a relatively permanent job for around twenty years; they can’t be laid off without an extensive grievance procedure. Although contracts vary from country to country and among corporations, unionized women generally get paid vacations, pensions, holidays, and health care benefits. Unionization also provides additional benefits specific to women. In most countries where union contracts apply, there are usually no wage differences by gender for the same work. In nonunion Ecuador, by contrast, men working in packinghouses earn three or four times what the women earn for identical work. Where there are unions, sexual harassment on the job has largely been eliminated by union demand. On nonunion plantations, not only is harassment common but women are routinely fired if they become pregnant. With a union contract, women can often get maternity leave, prenatal care, and hospitalization.¹⁸

Daily salaries for women packinghouse workers vary dramatically from country to country, from a starvation-level low of $1 in Nicaragua to $4 in Ecuador, $6 in Honduras, $9 in Panamá, and $10 in Colombia. The most important payoff, though, isn’t the salary—again, it’s the benefits, which, as the corporate calculators are well aware, can amount to three or four times a given worker’s salary in value. That’s why it doesn’t work to simply compare salaries between union and nonunion workers.¹⁹

With or without a union, being a mujer bananera doesn’t end at the packinghouse. It dominates the women’s every waking hour and family life. Banana work leaves very little time for anything else. One Costa Rican woman recalls, “We worked every day, sometimes from Monday through Sunday and holidays. I spent my days between two sinks of bananas, with my adolescence passing by me, leaving my youth and energy behind on that plantation.”²⁰ As a result, the “double day” of housework and child care of the banana women is crammed into very few available hours. “Weekends don’t exist for me because I use Sunday to straighten up the house,” writes a Nicaraguan banana worker; she also has to cook and iron clothes for herself, her partner, and her son.²¹

The uncertain scheduling of banana production adds further stress, as the packing plants can randomly demand workers’ presence for a fourteen-hour day or on Sundays with only a few hours’ notice, if management suddenly wants to cut more fruit.²² Since 1998 the corporations have deliberately instituted more “flexible” labor systems on the plantations, making the availability and hours of women’s packinghouse work increasingly uncertain. “In terms of length their jobs are more and more unstable,” summarizes one union report.²³

The companies only hire young women, who generally stay for as long as they can. But very few women can bear standing on their feet for more than twenty years; so the women workers are almost all between twenty and forty, with a smattering in their forties or even fifties.²⁴ They’re also predominantly single mothers, largely responsible for their own housework—in contrast to male banana workers, who can count on female companions or mothers for cooking, cleaning, and child-care services. The women’s study, discussing the predominance of single mothers, concluded: “The general opinion was that a great deal of paternal irresponsibility persists, and that men frequently abandon their responsibilities to their children and female partners.”²⁵ The combination of single parenthood, long distances from home to workplace, and long hours of wage work, combined with housework, is brutal. ‘Carmen,’ a banana union leader from Honduras who raised two kids on her own, sums up:

The work on the banana plantations enslaves us, because we work twelve hours a day or longer; that means that we almost don’t live with our families and our children are looked after by our siblings, aunts and uncles, or grandparents, those of us that have family support; those who don’t, their children are left alone. Most of the women are both father and mother to their kids.²⁶

Domitila Hernández and Iris Munguía both volunteered the same common saying: “They say that on the banana plantations, we don’t raise our children—our families do.”²⁷

Historically, most banana workers in Latin America have lived on company-owned housing clustered near or on one edge of the plantation. Classic company houses are wooden, either a two-family unit with a room downstairs for each family to cook and eat in, another upstairs for sleeping, and perhaps an open space for hanging hammocks; or a long row on the same model. More recent company-owned houses are made of cinder block. They have a gloomier feel, but as one banana woman explained, “A bloque is better than the wooden houses because it’s easier to clean, and doesn’t fall over in a storm”—no small consideration in hurricane country.²⁸ In recent years the corporations have begun selling off company houses to the workers, in a long-term move away from paternalism, but the alternatives can be even worse—and certainly more expensive. In all cases, substandard housing makes housework even more difficult.²⁹

Wherever the women live, banana cultivation permeates their lives, literally. Although the companies are legally barred from spraying where people are present, and the situation has improved dramatically in recent years, the women still live daily lives not far from the aerial crop spraying of pesticides.³⁰ The unions’ survey of banana women concludes with this chillingly eloquent passage:

The women in the banana zones often face the effects that banana production has on the environment: when they wash clothes, when they cook food, when they want to keep a garden or cultivate a small plot in areas near the plantation, in their reproductive lives when they or their partners are contaminated with agrochemicals that produce birth defects or malfunctions in their bodies.³¹

In all the countries, moreover, water quality is usually terrible, often poisoned by chemical spills from the same companies.³²

If banana packinghouse work is dangerous, exhausting, and, in the women’s own words, “enslaving,” the banana regions’ lack of economic development leaves the women with few other options for employment. The only other jobs lie in the informal economy—usually making and selling food in small batches or sometimes working as a domestic servant. Most women banana workers have only a sixth-grade education—in Guatemala, the worst case, 34 percent are illiterate—which further limits their choices. With steady employment at a living wage, unionized or not, women banana workers are in fact the lucky ones. Until they’re forty. After that, it’s grim. Age combined with gender discrimination leaves only the informal economy or family networks to help them survive. When they leave the packinghouse, women from unionized plantations receive, though, a lump-sum pension payment of perhaps $2,000, which they use to help buy a house, start a tiny business, or pay a coyote to get them into the United States to be with children who are increasingly forced to migrate.³³

Why are so few other choices available? Since the debt crises of the 1980s, neoliberal economic policies imposed by the United States through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have tightened the noose around all these Latin American countries. As part of structural adjustment programs to pay back loans, their governments have been forced to conform to a tight formula: cut back State-funded social services, privatize government-owned entities, and reduce the economy to two export tracks, instituted through new free trade agreements—export agriculture in open and disastrous competition with more powerful economies in the North, and maquiladora-style industrial development. The results have been disastrous throughout Latin America. And there’s no place at all in this model for women over twenty-five; no jobs, no safety net.³⁴

The banana women’s situation, in other words, is always precarious. Trapped in the cold arms of the banana transnationals, the women’s fate is intertwined not only with the global banana industry, but also with the future of the banana labor movement. And they know it. That’s why, beginning in the mid 1980s, they fought so hard for a place within it.

a ‘María Amalia’ is a psuedonym, as are all the names of the women whose autobiographies appear in Lo Que Hemos Vivido. The authors use first names only, which I am using here in single quotations, to distinguish them from actual first names to which I refer.