Labor contractors on the docks in Buenaventura, the largest port in Colombia, pay $200 for two weeks work loading and unloading ships. They don’t pay cash. On payday, longshoremen have to go to a loanshark, and borrow against the promise of a paycheck, but for considerably less — $170 or $180. “They have to sell the pay from the contractor,” charges Jhon Jairo Castro, president of the Union Portuaria, or Dockworkers’ Union, in Buenaventura.
To get that pay they have to work far longer than the government-mandated maximum workweek of 48 hours. Some labor eight hours on, then get eight hours off, and then return for another eight hours. Others work “the devil’s shift” — kept on the docks for 24 or even 36 hours, but only paid for eight. “Everyone is hired on a daily basis, and gets paid by the hour, with no daily guarantee,” Castro says.
In 1994 the Colombian Port Authority was privatized and replaced by the privately-run Regional Port Society of Buenaventura. A second private company, TECSA, S.A, runs Port operations under contract. TECSA then brings in an “intermediary,” which hires a temporary employment agency. The agency uses a labor contractor, who has no office and simply stands on the street, hiring longshoremen. The contractor has no financial resources for meeting a payroll, thus forcing workers to wait weeks to get paid, or to sell the promise of a paycheck.
“People cannot earn enough to support themselves,” Castro says. “We have port workers who are actively working who make only 200 dollars a month. We have workers who have to beg in the streets, who sleep on the sidewalks. Even after working 20 years they have no social security and no pensions.”
Buenaventura’s 370,000 inhabitants are mostly Afro-Colombian — people descended from slaves brought from Africa during centuries as a Spanish colony. Over 80% of its people live in poverty, and a third are unemployed, four times the national average. Two thirds of Buenaventura homes have no sewer connection, and almost half have no drinking water. Life expectancy here is 51, while nationally it is 62. “Poverty causes the disintegration of families,” Castro says. “Our children are recruited as prostitutes, or into criminal gangs and illegal armed groups.”
The conditions of Buenaventura’s longshore workers, and the harsh reprisals against them for trying to form unions, dramatically illustrate the failure of Colombia’s Labor Action Plan. Negotiated three years ago as part of its free trade agreement with the United States, it’s condemned as totally ineffective in a recent report by the country’s labor federations, backed by the AFL-CIO. Tarcisio Rivera, president of the Central Unitaria de Colombia, calls the trade agreement and labor action plan “useless and detrimental for both the Colombian economy and the rights of workers.”
The report, supported by a number of international labor organizations including IndustriALL Global Union–Américas, cited extensive illegal subcontracting and illegal hiring. “This is the case at the port of Buenaventura … where several intermediary companies … have practiced illegal intermediation for the benefit of the port operator, TECSA S.A.” According to Castro, “the national government is responsible for this system, because it privatized the ports and didn’t implement any regulations or labor standards covering employment.”
Today the port consists of four terminals, handling 14 million tons of cargo. The largest is mostly owned by DP World of the Arab Emirates, Harinera del Valle (a Colombian food company), Asocaña, (sugarcane growers) and the city government.
Lines operating in the port include APL, China Shipping, CMA-CMG, Cosco Line, CSAV, Evergreen, Hapag Lloyd, K Line, MOL, MSC Line, NYK Line, PIL (Pacific International Lines), and Wan Hai Lines. One wharf even belongs to the Colombian military, which leases it to Grupo Portuario, a private company.
The capacity of the port of Buenaventura will grow enormously with the new Aguadulce terminal. It has begun some operations, but much is still under construction, and full operation is scheduled for 2016. International Container Terminal Services (ICTSI), through its subsidiary Sociedad Puerto Industrial Aguadulce – SPI (Aguadulce Industrial Port Society), was given this port concession for 30 years by the Colombian government. One ICTSI partner is Compas, a Colombian company with operations in the US (Houston) and Panama (Bahía Las Minas). The longshore union is making plans to organize workers in Aguadulce as the workforce grows, and expects that employment conditions will be the same as those in the rest of the port.
In the free trade agreement’s first year Colombian exports to the US fell by 15% while imports from the United States grew by nearly the same amount. “The government promised that the free trade agreement would increase our income,” Castro adds, “but our misery increased instead. Businesses have gone into debt with the banks and then been forced into bankruptcy. Wages have gone down. It’s caused a tremendous social breakdown.”
Treaty supporters promised the Labor Action Plan would curb attacks on unions trying to resist the impact. Those increased too, however. “In 2013, 26 trade unionists were murdered, four more than in 2012,” according to the AFL-CIO. “Attempted murders also increased, from seven to 13. Since the LAP was signed, there have been 31 attempted murders, six forced disappearances and nearly 1,000 death threats.” Some 86.8% of murders went unpunished, and 99.9% of threats against unionists, giving an overall impunity rate for human rights violations against trade unionists of 96.7%.
For Buenaventura longshoremen, those numbers are more than statistics. Castro accuses companies in the port of mass firings when workers organize. “They demand that workers sign letters resigning from the union to get hired,” he charges. “A number of our members have been murdered, but the authorities ‘investigate’ and then say it has nothing to do with their union activity.” The result is a climate of fear. “Talking about the union invites being fired. We call it labor terrorism. There is absolutely no guarantee of your right to union activity.”
Only a minority of the port’s 6000 workers, therefore, belong to the union. “We survive because of solidarity, from our own members and from other organizations,” Castro explains. “We have the right on paper to negotiate with the employers, but it’s another thing to be able to exercise it. In 2012 we had a strike at TECSA and started negotiations. The company filed a suit against our union, demanding that all our members be fired and our union dissolved. The government backs them with the police and laws that violate our rights, like the decree that anyone blocking the street during demonstrations would be imprisoned.”
According to Neil Martin of the Project for International Accompaniment and Support in Colombia (PASO), which organizes support for the Union Portuaria, “The union’s strategy is to organize these sub-contracted workers into a low profile Workers Committee until a majority is willing to go on strike. Other strategies include building city-wide coalitions between unions and grassroots community organizations around broader social issues in Buenaventura, and increased involvement in international networks.”
Other workers and unions in Colombia also share the problems faced by the Union Portuaria. But in Buenaventura the union says it is also targeted because of discrimination against Afro-Colombians. Employers, it says, bring people from the interior and give them better jobs than the ones available to Buenaventura residents. “In the Afro-Colombian community work and pay is lowest and most unequal,” Castro says. “The cane cutters. The longshoremen. Those who work in the African palms.”
Of Colombia’s 44 million people, 49.2% live below the poverty line. But poverty is not evenly distributed. The country’s healthcare system, damaged by budget cuts to fund the government’s counterinsurgency war, covers 40% of white Colombians. Only 10% of black Colombians get health services. A mere 3% of Afro Colombian workers receive social security benefits. Institutionalized inequality is reinforced by internal displacement. From 1940 to 1990, Colombia’s urban population grew from 31% to 77%, as people fled rural poverty and decades of civil war. But by 2009 Colombia’s Constitutional Court found the fundamental rights of displaced Afro Colombians were “massively and continuously ignored,” citing Buenaventura as a symbol of inequality.
Human Rights Watch’s 2014 report, “The Crisis in Buenaventura,” says “for the past three years, Buenaventura has led all Colombian municipalities in the numbers of newly displaced persons.” It counted 22,028 residents who fled in 2011, 15,191 in 2012, and 13,468 between January and October 2013. According to Castro, in the last decade sixty thousand people have been forced out. “Now the latest plans for expanding the port will affect another five to ten thousand. Since almost 99% of displaced people are Afro-Colombians, privatization and displacement have a racist component.”
Human Rights Watch charges that violence drives displacement. At its height the right wing paramilitary organization, the United Self Defense Forces (AUC), killed more than 1000 Buenaventurans in 2000 and 2001 alone, according to prosecutors. After the AUC was “demobilized” in December of 2004, other rightwing paramilitary groups emerged incorporating former AUC members. People are “disappeared” every year — 24 in 2006, 63 in 2008, 43 in 2010 and 38 in 2013, the report states. Many corpses are dismembered, washed up on the beaches after being cut apart in “chop up houses.” Paramilitaries require permits to hold gatherings, enforce curfews and prohibit visitors in the areas they control. They cooperate with local businessmen. After water was privatized several years ago, service was cut to 2-3 hours a day, while rates went up. When protesting residents refused to pay, company representatives showed up at their homes with men carrying machine guns.
“In Bajamar,” HRW says “for the first three days of November, there were shootouts three or four times a day, lasting up to two hours. On the third day, the Urabeños removed a man from a house and executed him in front of community members.” Despite repression and extreme violence, however, the longshore union in Buenaventura continues to exist. It participates actively in labor resistance to Colombia’s free trade policies. “We admire the people who can stand up to pressure from the companies and the port association,” Castro says. The union organized two strikes last year and won contracts, although several workers were beaten and thirty were fired.”
“Today we see more unity in our community, like the recent strike in the countryside which led to a strike among longshore workers and students. With this kind of mobilization we will be able to stop the policies that are hurting us, and change Colombian society.”
– David Bacon