TO RAISE WAGES IN PANAMA, DOCKERS JOIN A U.S. UNION

TO RAISE WAGES IN PANAMA, DOCKERS JOIN A U.S. UNION

By David Bacon

ILWU Dispatcher

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."

LELEUA LOUPE'S JOURNEY AS A FREEWAY FLYER

INSTEAD OF ISOLATION, A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Leleua Loupe's Journey as a Freeway Flyer

By David Bacon

Capital and Main,  2/11/15

http://capitalandmain.com/inequality/teaching-today-leleua-loupes-journey-freeway-flyer/

"At the beginning of the semester," explains historian and lecturer Leleua Loupe, "students don't know history or understand the world around them. Some even get angry when I challenge what they believe.  But by the end, they become aware of our history, of discrimination, and begin to understand what they themselves have experienced. 

"I love every aspect of teaching," she continues, "the interaction with students, the research in my own field.  I feel I'm contributing to creating a better world."

It's that love of her profession that keeps her going, despite the obstacles she faces.  Hers is a familiar story - that of the freeway flyer.  Today she teaches on just two campuses -- five classes a semester at Cal State Fullerton, and one class at Mount San Antonio College.  But there have been years where it was three campuses, and even more classes.

In the hierarchy of academia, lecturer positions are sometimes described as stepping stones to eventual tenure, and lecturers themselves denigrated as less experienced or knowledgeable faculty.  This clearly doesn't fit Loupe's professional profile.  Growing up between Seattle and Honolulu, she started in community college in Hawaii, did archeological field work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and then got bachelors, masters  and doctorate degrees at the University of California in Riverside, in public history resource management.  Since receiving her PhD in 2005 she's written books and many journal and encyclopedia articles, recorded oral histories, and presented papers "all over," she says.

That, however, didn't get her tenure.  That's no surprise, given that institutions of higher education now employ far more non-tenured faculty than tenured.  But in this environment it's also easy for discrimination to thrive.  A decade ago Loupe started with a tenure track interview at Cal Poly Pomona.  But her interviewer questioned her about her marriage and children.  Instead of tenure, she got a one-year contract that wasn't renewed.  "I didn't know about the CFA then," she says, "so when they wanted to get rid of me, I went quietly." 

Loupe did then what most recent graduates do, and began picking up classes wherever she could get them.  Every year she taught 3-5 at Cal State Fullerton, 2-3 at Mount San Antonio, and 2-3 at Rancho Santiago - a total of 7-9 per semester.  At first she lived in Riverside.  From there it's 30 miles to Mount San Antonio in Walnut, another 20 to Fullerton, and then 10 to Rancho Santiago in Orange.

Loupe was a single mom by the time she got her PhD, but her good fortune was that her mother, an artist and muralist, lived with her and her oldest daughter Alea.  Loupe's family is Hawaiian, and many relatives have migrated to southern California.   Alea was surrounded by aunts and uncles.  "But my mom raised her because I was never home," she remembers.  "She told Alea why I had to do what I was doing, and I made sure we got some quality time, but it was a big price to pay."

Putting together all the classes, she was making $2000-2500 a month, paying $550 rent on a two-bedroom apartment, and putting a lot of miles on a worn-out car.  She and her partner then moved to Fullerton, and using her credit and his cash, were able to buy a house.  Even with both incomes, however, her debts piled up, and eventually they lost the home to foreclosure and bankruptcy.

That was when the recession began.  In the budget cuts she was reduced to one class each on two campuses.  "For a year I was desperate.  I still don't know how we survived," she shudders.  But things got better, and eventually she got her classes back - a blessing and a curse.

The curse is living in the car.  "I'm commuting sometimes 8 hours a day," Loupe says.  She's been rear-ended three times, spending three years in therapy after the last one.  As an adjunct, she has no office of her own, sharing space and a copier at CSU Fullerton, but with nothing at the two community colleges.  "I have to think ahead all the time, and constantly make lists of things to do, and when.  I prepare for one campus at another, going to the cafeteria, or even Starbucks.  I get home at 10 and then stay up til one."    

Her actual office is the trunk of her car - full of books, office supplies, changes of clothes, water and her laptop.

Finally she found a partner who could understand and accept the crazy lifestyle, got married again, and had two more children.  "I come from a large family, and I'm 39 now.  So it was take the risk and have kids now or I'd never be able to.  But," she says, "I have colleagues who aren't married and have no kids because they can't afford it.  Some are still living at home with their parents."  She herself now pays $1200-1600 a month for childcare, which would have been impossible when she was still single.

For the first few years of adjunct work she got tenure interviews every year, but never was offered the position.  "I began to ask myself, 'Is it me?'  Finally, after the worst abuses, I got in touch with CFA.  That changed my life.  Being a freeway flyer means instability and isolation.  CFA gave me a sense of community."

When she got active, her chapter in Fullerton wasn't very responsive to lecturers, but with the efforts of Loupe and other adjuncts that began to change.  The chapter established a lecturers' council, with a consistent membership of 4-5 people.  The bylaws were changed to create a permanent position on the executive board for a lecturer, which she now holds, and other lecturers were elected local vice-president, secretary and board member.

"We have input now on campus policy on evaluations and appointments," she says.  "We've gotten some pay raises and restructured the salary schedule, and there's more security in reappointment rights." 

If only Loupe could get a tenured position she'd be able to envision a secure future.  "When I began I had this idea of being a professional and having a career.  Now I just have a job.  I see people given tenure with less experience or publications, while some of the most talented faculty are still untenured.  People say, 'you have to pay your dues,' or 'you're lucky to have a job.'  But really, we should all have tenure, especially after teaching ten years.  People should be lecturers only by choice, not because they're forced into making a living this way."

So, with no secure future in sight in California, Loupe is planning a return to her roots in Hawaii.  "It's a huge risk - to take ten years to build up again what I have now," she worries.  "But the way we're living isn't sustainable."  She dreams of becoming active in the native Hawaiian homestead movement, helping people descended from the islands' original inhabitants not just to reclaim land but to reestablish community.

For Loupe, community is where it's at.  "It's like what I found in CFA," she explains.  "For the first time at work I felt that sense of community.  We feel isolated so much of the time, and now instead we are colleagues cooperating for the common good, working towards a common goal." 

AFL-CIO REPORT: U.S. POLICY IN HONDURAS CAUSES MIGRATION

AFL-CIO REPORT: U.S. POLICY IN HONDURAS CAUSES MIGRATION

By David Bacon

Equal Times, 2/10/15

http://www.equaltimes.org/unions-call-for-a-new-chapter-in#.VNos1hZloTA

In a waiting area for port truck drivers and their families in Puerto Cort?s, Honduras, a driver sleeps in a hammock by his truck.

OAKLAND, CA - In the wake of the political crisis in the United States last year, caused by the migration of large numbers of children from Central America to the U.S./Mexico border, the AFL-CIO in November sent a delegation to Honduras, the country that sent the greatest number of unaccompanied minors.  "What we witnessed," reported Tefere Gebre AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, "was the intersection ?of our corporate-dominated trade policies with our broken immigration system, contributing to a state that fails workers and their families and forces them to live in fear."

The delegation issued a report, "Trade, Violence and Migration: The Broken Promises to Honduran Workers."  It is unusually critical of U.S. foreign and immigration policies, and marked a return, in some ways, to the way voices in U.S. labor condemned the government's intervention policies during the civil wars in Central America. 

The report, in fact, contains a frank assessment of the history of U.S. foreign policy in Honduras, and draws out the disastrous consequences it has created in that country today.  "The fate of Honduras long has been tied to ?that of the United States," it charges. "Throughout the 20th century, Honduras was key to maintaining U.S. military and economic interests on the isthmus. The U.S. military intervened in Honduran politics throughout the early 20th century to protect the foreign investments of large U.S. corporations like the United Fruit Co. Later, Honduras served as a base of operations during the U.S.-supported 1954 coup in Guatemala, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and during the years of civil war and Cold War proxy wars in Central America in the 1970s and '80s, the government provided support for the 'Contra' counter-revolutionary war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua."

More recently the U.S. raised only pro-forma objections to the 2009 coup that overthrew Honduras' elected president Manuel Zelaya, and then quickly restarted military aid to the junta that seized power.  "Under the left-leaning Zelaya administration, the minimum wage was raised by 80%, direct assistance was provided to the poorest Hondurans, and poverty and inequality declined," the report says.  After the coup, however, "numerous trade unionists and community activists who participated in resistance were killed, beaten, threatened and jailed," it declares. 

Francisco Palencia Espinoza shows the bald tire on the truck he drove from Honduras to the Salvadoran Port of Acajutla, and which he'll have to drive back.

Based on extensive interviews with unionists, it details current abuses of labor and human rights.  The government has built an apparatus to put down dissent, while the Secretariat of Labor and Social Security has passed laws to reduce permanent work, protections and freedom of association.  Teachers face news laws limiting their right to strike.  Farm worker unionists face an increase in violent attacks and threats against their lives in the sugar cane fields.  Five union executive councils have been fired by the partnership of the Kyungshin Corp. of South Korea and the Lear Corp. of Michigan. 

According to Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America and a participant in the delegation, Honduran unions "confirmed constant violations of organizing rights in direct violation of CAFTA. These included everything from the murder of leaders to the collapse of bargaining rights where they once existed."

In the port of Puerto Cortez, the delegation reports deteriorating conditions due to the privatization of docks, with over 1000 workers fired.  The head of the dockers' union, Victor Crespo, was forced to flee Honduras after his father was killed and mother injured, and he himself received threats to his life.  A support campaign by the U.S. International Longshore and Warehouse Union helped save his life, and eventually won guarantees that allowed his safe return to Honduras.

The AFL-CIO report condemns a plan to "reduce the wage bill" in the public sector by cutting jobs and privatizing public services, especially in electricity.  It points out that this reflects the policies of the International Monetary Fund called for cutting the public sector from 7.5% of GDP to 2% in four years.  The resulting job loss has a clear impact on increasing poverty, forcing many Hondurans to migrate in search of survival.

A family of port workers in a neighborhood outside Puerto Cortez.

The report makes the case that poverty in Honduras has been deepened by the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement: "Today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America."  Poverty rose from 60 to 64.5% from 2006 to 2013.  By emphasizing a policy that deregulated business and used low wages as an incentive to attract foreign investment, "CAFTA only exacerbated the desperation and instability ?in Honduras," it charges.  "Honduran workers identified the 2009 Honduran coup d'état and the subsequent militarization of Honduran society, and the implementation of CAFTA and its impact on decent work and labor rights, as two essential elements to understanding the current crisis."

Cohen urged, "We need to look at our own immigration policy, concentrating enormous resources on deportation and nothing on resettlement.  We need to look at the trade deals, in this case, CAFTA, that accelerated free market devastation."

Backing up the increasing militarization of Honduran society is U.S. military aid, which reached $27 million in 2012.  The report notes that both Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield and Commander John Kelly of the United States Southern Command praised Honduran "advances in security."  In the U.S. media, General Kelly has demonized migration from Central America, calling the movement of families and children a national security threat and a "crime-terror convergence."

That migration, described in the AFL-CIO report, has grown sharply.  More than 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children arrived in the United States in 2014 alone.  "In 1990, there were approximately 109,000 Honduran migrants in the world. In 2010, that number grew close to 523,000, with the vast majority living in the United States," it says. "Today, migration is seen by many families as a means to escape violence or seek employment opportunity or reunite with family, while the government has embraced the remittances from migrants as a major economic resource."

Marvin Mejia, a port truck driver, his sister Wendy and his mother Isabel, in one of the two rooms of their rented house.

Josie Camacho, executive secretary of the Alameda Central Labor Council in California, was a member of the delegation.  "As a mother, I couldn't imagine why a Honduran mother would ask her child to walk 1700 miles to the border, alone, and put her in the hands of unscrupulous people," she relates.  "I got a real education about the consequences of our military policy, and now I see people have no choice.  We should embrace and protect them - it's part of what being a union really means."

Three quarters of those migrants, arriving in the U.S. after the immigration amnesty of 1986, have been undocumented.  As a result, Hondurans, even children, have felt the impact of the U.S. policy of mass deportations - about 400,000 per year for six years.  In 2013 alone, the U.S. deported 37,049 Hondurans.

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka last year called on the U.S. president to suspend deportations:  "Continuation of the deportation crisis is incompatible with our values as a country."  He urged "an end to a deportation machine that criminalizes hardworking immigrants while deporting hundreds and hundreds of people a day without even an appearance before a judge."

The report, however, pointedly differs with the immigration reform policies proposed by the U.S. administration and the Democratic Party in Congress, which call for vast expansions in temporary, guest worker programs, in which workers labor for low wages and have few labor or civil rights.  "Temporary visa programs are not a safe alternative to undocumented migration," it declares, noting the history of rights violations in the U.S., and abuses in recruitment, including extortion, fraud and the confiscation of documents.  

Erasmo Flores, president of the Honduran union for port truckers, talks with drivers about the impact CAFTA will have on them.

The report ends with a series of recommendations for both the U.S. and Honduran governments.  It demands that the U.S. extend refugee status to people, especially children, fleeing violence and persecution, and end the mass detention of migrants.  Instead of CAFTA, it calls for "trade policies that lead to the creation? of decent work," and instead of support for repression, "ending all aid to the military." 

"The Honduran government must turn away from militarization," it asserts. It recommends longer-term sustainable development policies and investment in public services. The report even urges the Honduran government to refuse to accept deportees from the U.S. unless they are given due process before deportation. 

Ultimately, the AFL-CIO concludes, the U.S. government must move away from policies that "criminalize migrant children and their families, while pursuing trade deals that simultaneously displace subsistence farmers and lower wages and standards across other sectors, and eliminate good jobs, intensifying the economic conditions that drive migration."