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,
