TO RAISE WAGES IN PANAMA, DOCKERS JOIN A U.S. UNION
By David Bacon
PANAMA CITY, PANAMA (4/2/15) -- You see a lot of parked
taxis in the parking lot at the Panama Ports terminal here. They're not waiting to give rides to
longshoremen. Dockworkers themselves are
the drivers. Longshore wages in Panama
are so low that after a shift driving a crane, a longshoreman has to put in
another shift driving a taxi, just to survive.
At Panama Ports, however, this situation has begun to
change. A few weeks ago the union signed
a new contract with raises totaling more than 27% over the next four
years. One factor that made this
agreement possible was support from a U.S. union, the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union. That agreement will
have a big impact on the lives of longshoremen and their families.
In Panama they call longshore pay "hunger
wages." Workers' families live
below the government's own poverty line, and some families literally go hungry.
"That's one reason why the company had to constantly
hire new workers," recalls Ramiro Cortez, a leader of the Panamanian union
SINTRAPORSPA. "Most people who got
jobs here were just working while they were actually looking for better jobs
somewhere else. Many accidents in the
port could have been avoided if the workers weren't so exhausted. They go in at 7AM, and leave at 8PM, and then
go and drive or do some other job."
The port does have a high accident rate, and two workers
were killed a month apart at the end of last year. In one accident, a crane lifting a container
hit a six-high stack of other containers that were being stored on the dock,
right next to the ship. As they fell,
one hit a 22-year-old man who'd been working less than a month.
Cortez was called by the workers. On arrival he saw the crane operator in shock
and weeping. He stopped managers from
interrogating him until he got counseling, and then told the company that all
the workers in the terminal had been traumatized and should be sent home. If they weren't, he warned, the union itself
would shut down the terminal. In the
end, management sent the shift home with pay for the day.
When Cortez announced the agreement to the workers,
"I could have been elected president of Panama that day," he
says. "It had never happened
before."
The new union contract established five committees, the
most important of which is safety. "The challenge is now to implement this
agreement and ensure the company abides by it," emphasizes SINTRAPORSPA
president Alberto Ochoa. "Before
the company did what it pleased, and changed the hours, overtime, days off, and
wages - whenever it wanted. Now they
know we're not on our own, by ourselves. Companies don't want real unions
because we open the eyes of the workers."
Panama Ports is a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based
Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH).
Workers at the terminal were trapped in a "yellow" or company
union there for many years. Ochoa and
other independent-minded longshoremen had a long history of trying to change
this, and finally organized a new union - SINTRAPORSPA. They collected over 2000 signatures on a
petition for recognition, and asked for a government-administered election to
certify it as workers' bargaining representative.
In balloting last year, however, the Ministry of Labor
claimed that 1500 workers had voted against SINTRAPORSPA. Workers out on the docks found this
unbelievable, since they knew how many votes they had lined up. They also knew, however, that the President
of Panama himself, Juan Carlos Varela, is a partner in the law firm used by
Panama Ports, one that specializes in helping company management fight
unions. The dockworkers challenged the
transparency of the election.
"It was obvious that we had the support of the great
majority of the workers, including those who belonged to the company
union," recalls Cortez.
"Nevertheless, when we went to the ministry to protest, they did
everything they could to stop us."
Ochoa and Cortez appealed to the ILWU, whose headquarters
is in San Francisco. ILWU International
Vice-President Ray Familathe and Greg Mitre, president of the ILWU retirees in
Southern California, flew to Panama City and met with the Minister of Labor,
Luis Ernesto Carles Rudy. They brought
with them a letter signed by six U.S. Congress members, asking for a
rerun. The government reluctantly
agreed, and in a fair vote SINTRAPORSPA won overwhelmingly.
"The support from the ILWU was very effective,"
Cortez says. "The Panamanian
authorities were never concerned before about how they conducted themselves
with us. Powerful companies, with the
money at their disposal, got whatever that money could buy."
The impact of that support was also felt in the
subsequent contract negotiations, which only took a month to arrive at
agreement. In one meeting the company
executive president even told union negotiators that he was "very
concerned" at the union's growing relationship with the ILWU.
These experiences led the Panamanian dock union to become
the newest member of the ILWU's Panama Division. The division was established in 2012, when
several hundred members of the Panama Canal Pilots Union decided to join the
ILWU. The division has now grown to include 2580 Panama Ports longshore
workers. According to Capt. Rainiero
Salas, the Panama Canal Pilots' Union secretary general, "The Panama
Division is growing as workers see what we can gain by working together. It's not going to stop here." Adds Ochoa, "Unions in the ports and the
Canal should get together so that we can speak with one voice, and get better
benefits and respect for all workers."
Panama division leaders are also meeting with the union
for dockers in Colon on the Atlantic side of the isthmus, the Union of Workers
at the Manzanillo International Terminal.
Like the workers at Panama Ports, the dockers in Colon also rebelled
against a former union leadership they viewed as too close to the company. At MIT they elected a new slate of officers a
few months ago.
The MIT terminal is operated by SSA Marine, a global
company headquartered in Seattle, Washington.
According to workers in Colon, container crane operators work 8-hour
days, for six days straight. For that,
their pay starts at $854 a month, or about $4.27 per hour. Base pay for an experienced longshore worker
in SSA Marine's home port of Seattle is $35.68 per hour.
The low wages on Panama's docks have a lot to do with the
difficulty workers face in forming militant unions and negotiating
contracts. But poverty is also a product
of trade and economic policies pushed by U.S. corporations and the government
trade negotiators who represent their interests.
The U.S. signed a free trade agreement with Panama in
2009. In 2007 Panama's National Agrarian
Organization, the country's largest organization of farmers, wrote to the U.S.
Congress, asking it to stop the negotiations.
In Panama, it said, the agreement "was ratified by ... a small
sector of Panamanian elites." It
predicted a huge displacement of farmers no longer able to compete with U.S.
agricultural exports. They would then
become either migrants leaving the country, or unemployed people desperate for
work in the country's cities.
In Colon, displaced farmers have become workers in the
Free Trade Zone, a stone's throw from the harbor and MIT terminal. The zone is one of the world's oldest, set up
in 1946 when the Canal Zone was a defacto U.S. colony. Today over 300 mostly-foreign companies run
factories that pay no municipal or local taxes, no national taxes on
investment, and no duties on products they export. Workers earn $10-15 a day - even less than
longshoremen.
"In this country," says Ramiro Cortez,
"there is no middle class. There is
just the upper class and the lower class."
While wages are low, Panama is second only to Hong Kong as a home for
multinational firms' subsidiaries - many created with the sole purpose of
evading taxes.
The U.S. gave up the Canal in 1977, in an agreement
negotiated between President Jimmy Carter and one of Panama's most progressive
presidents, General Omar Torrijos.
Nevertheless, U.S. influence in Panamanian politics is still
strong. The U.S. invaded Panama in 1989
to "arrest" then-President Manuel Noriega for drug dealing. Hundreds of residents of Panama City's
poorest barrio, El Chorillo, died after it was bombarded by naval vessels. The seafront neighborhood was then assaulted
by troops.
Resentment against the U.S. still reverberates. Eighteen years after El Chorillo burned, a
U.S.-led naval exercise used the Canal to practice repelling a hypothetical
terrorist attack. Three Panamanian
sailors drowned, and vocal protests followed.
The ILWU in Panama does not directly challenge the
reverberations of that old colonial relationship. But it does represent the interests of
workers by advocating progressive policies on wages, trade and labor rights,
while effectively defending workers on the job.
Over the past year pilots have fought, with the
division's support, to ensure that the huge ships that pass through the canal
every day are operated safely. The Canal
Authority has launched a huge expansion project, building new locks capable of
handling giant post-Panamax container ships carrying up to 13,000
containers. The union has criticized the
government for not working closely with pilots to design work rules and procedures
for safely handling these larger ships in the new locks. It is especially concerned over a new
unilateral government directive that, for the first time, seeks to have ships
pass each other in the narrow Culebra Cut.
Previously ships traveling in opposite directions have waited, so that
only one ship at a time traverses the cut.
The government says the cut has been widened, but pilots
says there is no room for error, and the consequences of ships hitting each
other would be disastrous. Last October
Capt. Salas criticized the government publicly.
"It seems very odd that the most experienced people moving ships
through this highly important system have been completely ignored by its
governing authority," he charged. "Pilots' most critical mission is
ship safety, yet we've not been consulted."
Panamanian port and maritime unions are also concerned at
the government's efforts to decertify the union for the canal's tugboat
captains. The same legal technicalities
used against the captains, they fear, could be used to attack the
representation rights of other unions.
That would undermine dock unions just as they are starting to change the
basic living standards of workers.
"Our main objective as a union is to make a
difference in the economic status of those who have earned the least - the
longshoremen," Ochoa declares.
"I'm not saying this new contract will give us a wage that can pay
for everything, but it's a lot better than what we had before. As a union we will keep struggling to win
better conditions, especially economic ones."
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