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In Puerto Wilches, Colombia, an agreement has been reached between palm oil plantation workers who have been on strike for two months, employers and the government of Colombia.

The agreement will protect the workers from retaliation—there were reports that military and counter-terrorism police were gathering and workers feared a crackdown. Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, with 22 killed already this year.

It also commits the Colombian government to enforcing its labor laws to ensure that the so-called labor cooperatives that workers must join to be employed at the plantations are not used to perform core, permanent functions on the plantation or undermine the workers’ rights, including the right of free association.

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Documents signed in a fraudulent attempt to violate workers’ and citizens’ rights are only sheets of paper. These do not reflect a bilateral commercial treaty but just one episode more in the history of pillage and barbarism in Colombia, Panama and South Korea.

On the other hand, we value the work of all organizations and individuals who worked hard to convince the many U.S. Senators and Congressional Representatives who did not vote in support of the so-called Free Trade Agreements, or FTAs. We also value these legislators and we say thank you for standing up for fairness and human rights. We call upon all people to continue working in unity for fair trade, which is the opposite of the newly passed FTAs.
My union, SINALTRAINAL, in Colombia, sends special thanks to the USW: especially to International President Leo W. Gerard, but also to the thousands of Steelworkers who assisted in this fight. To see the full list of the other signatory organizations please click on the following:  http://www.wola.org/sites/default/files/downloadable/Andes/Colombia/2011/June%2021/TLC%20Carta%20Final.pdf

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As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation last week, politicians in D.C. flipped the bird at protesters – including those camping in Washington’s McPherson Square.

Here’s how: While occupiers sought political focus on the unemployment, impoverishment and foreclosures suffered by the nation’s non-rich 99 percent, politicians considered three major pieces of legislation and passed only the one that will help the wealthiest 1 percent and hurt the remaining 99 percent.

Senate Republicans murdered-by-filibuster the American Jobs Act, which would surtax the 1 percent to provide jobs for the 99 percent. The Senate did pass the currency manipulation bill, but House GOP leaders refused to schedule a vote on the measure that would protect jobs for the 99 percent by punishing countries that undervalue their currencies to artificially lower prices on their exports.

By contrast, both houses of Congress adopted the so-called Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and Korea, which will, just like their predecessor NAFTA, destroy jobs held by the 99 percent.

It’s incredible. Inexplicable. Inexcusable. In a country where joblessness is a painful 9.1 percent. Where one in five children lives in poverty. Where foreclosures rose again last month. Where a whole movement is growing to protest the appeasement of the rich at the cost of the middle class. In that place, Congress chose to walk backwards. It didn’t take two steps forward – which it could have by passing the currency bill and jobs act. No. It just took a giant step backward by embracing job-killing trade agreements.

It all forces the 99 percent to demand even more loudly: Where’s the jobs?

WHERE’S THE JOBS? (more…)

Today, you can take action to stop Congress from approving job-killing trade deals with Korea, Colombia and Panama and tell Republicans and Democrats to put Americans back to work.

Join the AFL-CIO’s National Call in Day and dial 1-800-718-1008 and tell your lawmakers to stop these dangerous trade deals. You can also send your message via email by clicking here.

With 25 million Americans desperately looking for full-time work Congress should be spending its time on job-creating legislation like President Obama’s American Jobs Act, not job killing trade deals.

Also today, hundreds of workers from around the country will be on Capitol Hill to talk with their lawmakers about the trade deals that put corporations over people and profit over prosperity.

Here’s what’s wrong with these trade deals:

• The Korea agreement is the largest off-shoring deal of its kind since NAFTA. If enacted, it likely will displace 159,000 U.S. jobs, mostly in manufacturing. And its glaring loopholes would allow unscrupulous businesses to import illegally labeled goods from China and possible even from sweatshops in North Korea—potentially without any tariffs at all.
• In Colombia, one trade unionist is murdered nearly every week and almost none of the murderers are brought to justice. In 2010, 51 trade unionists were assassinated in Colombia—more than in the rest of the world combined. So far in 2011, another 22 have been killed, despite Colombia’s heralded “Labor Action Plan.” Would we reward a country where 51 CEOs were killed last year?
• And the Panama agreement has many of the problems of the other two deals, like deregulating big banks and letting foreign investors bypass U.S. health, safety labor and environmental laws. Panama is also a tax haven: a place where tax-dodging, money-laundering millionaires and billionaires hide their money.

Please take a few minutes today and call 1-800-718-1008 (or click here to e-mail) and tell Congress to stop the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals that will destroy U.S. jobs and decimate American manufacturing—and give a virtual blank check to foreign governments to trample on the rights of workers.

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This entry originally appeared at the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

Senate Republicans who nearly worship at the feet of free trade agreements—to heck with their devastating impact on U.S. workers—boycotted an opportunity to move the most recent free trade holy trinity of South Korea, Colombia and Panama deals closer to a vote.

The reason? President Obama wants to include in the South Korea free trade agreement some—let’s stress some—help for workers through Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to aid workers who have lost their jobs because of outsourcing, offshoring and unfair trade deals.

Workers? Talking about them would just gum up the works, the Republican lawmakers seemed to say.

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By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Tragically, the government of Colombia exhibits the behavior of an addict. And, just as regrettably, the United States is co-dependent, so addicted to so called free trade that it plans to award Colombia an agreement based solely on promises.

Addicts always promise. They’ll stop, they pledge. Their co-dependents desperately want to believe, so they cooperate with the addicts’ demands.

Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, has pledged to try to stop the murders to persuade Congress to approve a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Promises, promises.

And the United States has agreed to accept those promises rather than demand performance before signing an FTA. American’s Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations crave another FTA so badly they will believe anything.

When the Colombia FTA was first proposed, Congress refused to approve it because so many trade unionists are assassinated each year by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces that the murders exceed the number of unionists killed in all other countries of the world combined. In 2007, the year that former President George W. Bush completed the agreement, 39 Colombian unionists were slain.

The Colombian government knew why Congress denied approval. It could have responded four years ago by protecting trade unionists and preserving their lives. It did not.

Instead, the murders increased. In 2008, 52 Colombian trade unionists were assassinated, one a week. In 2009, the number declined by 5 to 47, but it was back up to 52 last year. Six have been slain so far this year, including Hector Orozco and Gilardo Garcia, members of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, who were threatened by the Colombian military just before they were assassinated. Promises, promises.

In response to the concerns expressed by Congress about the murders, the newly-proposed FTA requires Bogota to improve safeguards for workers by April 22, and to develop a plan by May 20 to enhance the capacity of regional judicial offices because the murders of trade unionists go unpunished by the Colombian government – giving the killers an impunity rate of approximately 95 percent. And by mid-June, the Colombian government promises to increase penalties for threatening workers.

The government of Colombia could have completed all of those steps four years ago. It didn’t bother.

To this point, Congress has taken the moral high ground by refusing to approve the trade deal. It said, basically, as long as Colombia continued to countenance the slaughter of its community and labor leaders, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, America would not give it special treatment for trade purposes.

In addition, Congress recognized the FTA’s potential to devastate Colombian farmers. The FTA would speed forced displacement of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people by encouraging increased exploitation of their land by business interests, such as palm oil companies, half of which are owned by paramilitary groups. Expelling these farmers from their land would further swell Colombia’s internally-displaced population – the largest in the world at 4.3 million.

Making matters worse for Colombian farmers, the main U.S. beneficiaries of the FTA would be big agricultural companies which would be permitted to dump cheap, subsidized food stuffs into Colombia duty-free. This would result in farmers’ impoverishment and land loss because small growers would not be able to compete with the low-cost American produce.  In Haiti and Mexico, domestic food production was wiped out by similar free trade agreements. It’s likely that Colombia would follow the path of Mexico, where, as the ability to grow legitimate crops became economically impossible, farmers turned more and more to producing illicit drugs. Colombia already produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s cocaine.

Business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, protested the refusal by Congress to approve the FTA, contending that increasing American exports and jobs was more important than protecting Colombian lives and human rights.

The Chamber’s position is not only depraved, it’s based on flawed calculations of exports and jobs. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and granting China entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Colombia FTA will cost America jobs and exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit.

Previous projections by the Chamber and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that NAFTA and China’s WTO membership would improve the U.S. economy proved catastrophically off base.

When the U.S. signed NAFTA in 1993, it had a $1.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. After the agreement, that surplus quickly morphed into a deficit, which ballooned to $64.7 billion in 2008. These annual deficits cost the U.S. 560,000 jobs between 1993 and 2004.

Similarly, the ITC predicted that the tariff reductions China offered when it entered the WTO would result in a trade deficit of $1 billion a year. Instead, between the years of 2001 and 2008, the actual result was deficits of $185 billion, and the loss or displacement of 2.3 million American jobs.

The U.S. already runs a trade deficit with Colombia. It was $1.86 billion in 2009. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the proposed FTA with Colombia would nearly double that trade deficit by 2015, which would cost the United States another 55,000 jobs.

Frankly, the EPI calculation, which factors in effects on trade like currency manipulation, is far more credible than the ITC and Chamber reports, which ignore these issues.

Bogota wants the FTA because it believes the deal will be good for Colombian business interests. One immediate bonus, for example, is that the FTA would eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of Colombia’s exports to the U.S.

To get what it wants, the Colombian government is willing to say anything. Just like an addict. Promises, promises. The Colombian government’s past performance shows its pledges to protect workers from assassination are empty.

America must reject the role of co-dependent. It must demand the proof of performance before rewarding the government of Colombia with an FTA.

Without proof of performance, the government of Colombia will get away with murder.  It will export more of its goods – crude oil, coffee, fruit and flowers — to the U.S.  And unwitting Americans will buy more blood red Colombian roses.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Over the past 24 years, more than 2,800 trade union members have been killed in Colombia and the government’s highly publicized efforts to bring the killers to justice are just a public relations spin to try and convince the United States to sign the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Colombian workers said this week.

International solidarity is “fundamental,” said Tarsicio Muñoz, director of education for the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT). Speaking during a brown-bag discussion Tuesday at the AFL-CIO here in Washington, D.C., Muñoz said workers in the United States must continue to publicly fight against the agreement and help create the political will necessary to prevent it from being signed.

Four of the Colombian unionists spoke Monday night at Georgetown University, in an event sponsored by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. (more…)

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Mother’s Day, May 9, is one of the biggest days in the year for flower sales. Yet thousands of women who pick most of the flowers, many of them mothers themselves, will spend that day working in egregious conditions for poverty wages and in hazardous conditions.

You can help these women fight for a better life by purchasing a special Mother’s Day card from the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP), an advocacy group promoting labor rights in Latin America. In exchange for a $35 donation ($20 for students or persons with low income) to USLEAP’s Flower Worker Economic Justice Campaign, your mother will receive a card in the mail featuring a photo of a Colombian flower worker with her child. The card will include a personalized message from you inside.

You can place your Mother’s Day card order here. The deadline is May 4 to guarantee delivery to your mother before next Sunday.  

More than 60 percent of the flowers sold in the United States comes from Colombia. Two-thirds of the nearly 100,000 flower workers in Colombia are women and one-third are mothers. According to USLEAP, the women often are required to work 12-to-15-hour days with few breaks, especially in the weeks before holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. As a result, many have been injured on the job and suffer health problems related to overexposure to pesticides and humiliating and degrading treatment by management. All toil for poverty-level wages.

Women applying for a job have often been illegally forced to take a mandatory pregnancy test, USLEAP says. Workers who become pregnant are often dismissed. Workers are prevented from organizing independent unions through tactics such as illegal firings, sub-contracting and blacklisting, USLEAP says.

In July 2008, Dole, which was the largest grower and exporter in Colombia, signed contracts with two flower worker unions in Colombia. It took the workers nearly four years of struggle to win these first contracts and hundreds of workers lost their jobs during the fight. Since then, Dole has sold their Colombian flower business altogether.

Sending this card will say to your mother that you care about her as well as the rights of all mothers.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog 

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

In an Oct. 1 editorial, the Los Angeles Times echoes the sentiment that the United Steelworkers union has been expressing for years – corporate supporters of paramilitaries in Colombia who murder trade unionists must be held criminally accountable. 

Specifically, the Los Angeles Times is applauding the order of a Colombian judge that top officials of the Alabama-based mining corporation, Drummond, be investigated as the intellectual authors of the brutal slayings of three union leaders in 2001. 

As the Los Angeles Times opines:

 “[i]t is troubling . . .  that when a defendant is convicted [in Colombia], it is generally a hit man or low-level thug and almost never the mastermind or shot-caller who ordered a labor leader’s murder.  That’s why it is significant that a judge in Colombia has asked the attorney general to launch a criminal investigation of top executives at Alabama-based Drummond Co., a multinational coal company.”

The Los Angeles Times explains:

 “[a]t issue is whether Drummond executives collaborated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC in Spanish), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to murder union leaders organizing the Drummond coal mine in La Loma in 2001.”

This issue arises in the context of an epidemic of anti-union violence in Colombia unprecedented in the world.  As the Los Angeles Times notes:

 “Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union organizer. In the last 17 years, more than 2,700 teachers, farmworkers, coal miners and other laborers have paid with their lives for seeking rights that Americans have long taken for granted, such as safe working conditions. During that same period, there were more than 4,000 reported death threats against labor leaders, 350 disappearances and kidnappings, and 75 cases of torture.”

It is in light of this problem of anti-union violence that Colombia, and the U.S. as well, must vigorously prosecute corporations that have supported paramilitary groups which in turn have gone on to kill literally thousands of innocent civilians.  According to Colombia’s Attorney General, Mario Iguaran, the support which Chiquita Brands International admittedly gave to the AUC paramilitaries over a 7-year period (guns as well as $1.7 million), facilitated the AUC’s murder of about 4,000 civilians.   And, while Chiquita was indicted and pled guilty to this support of a designated terrorist organization, it was merely fined $25 million which it was allowed to pay over a five-year period.

Meanwhile, just as the Los Angeles Times says, “ex-paramilitary soldiers are naming top Drummond executives as having requisitioned and paid for two of the murders,” top ex-paramilitary commanders have also fingered other U.S. multi-nationals for supporting the AUC over the years.   Most notably, Salvatore Mancuso, a former top AUC paramilitary commander who is currently in U.S. custody on drug-trafficking charges, has claimed that Del Monte, Dole, and Drummond have all made regular payments to the AUC over the years.

While there have been a number of civil actions against U.S. multi-nationals for their role in supporting paramilitary atrocities in Colombia, the Los Angeles Times rightly points out that there:

 “is no substitute for a criminal investigation in Colombia. The perilous environment for workers there exists not only because of the violence they face but the historical impunity of their attackers.” 

The USW would further submit that there is no substitute for a criminal investigation by the U.S., which has the tools to effectively investigate and prosecute corporations on its own soil for the wrong-doing they committed in Colombia.  Both Colombia and the U.S. should carry out such investigations and prosecutions to put an end to impunity for corporations which bankroll the killing of labor leaders and innocent civilians.

 

By Fred Redmond
USW Vice President Human Affairs

Four hours into the New Year, a political activist who was also a well-known trade unionist was celebrating at a party in the town of Montoso when a political opponent stabbed him numerous times in the chest.

As Adolfo Tique lay dead, his six children fatherless, police interrogated the assassin.

Then they let him go.

By American standards, it’s a shocking story. But in Colombia, where it occurred, it’s not. It’s the kind of story I heard repeatedly, heartrendingly when I visited Colombia last month with a delegation of British Parliamentarians and unionists led by the United Steelworkers and Unite the Union, which together last year formed Workers Uniting, the first transatlantic union.

The visit left us with no reason to believe Colombia suddenly had become worthy of a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., Canada or the European Union.

The fact that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists seemed to have made the same impression last year on Democratic candidate Barack Obama. In April of 2008, at an AFL-CIO convention, he promised to oppose the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement. He said, “The violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

This April, however, President Obama stung U.S. unions, which worked hard for his election and the FTA’s defeat. After Obama and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez sat together at lunch and spoke several times at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs announced that Obama had asked U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk to work on the FTA.

Say it ain’t so, Mr. President! Say you haven’t turned your back on unionists just because you shared a sandwich with another head of state. Tell us you won’t ignore Tique’s six orphans or 2,700 slain unionists over the past 25 years because of Uribe’s charming banter over soup.

Terrible, disquieting signs suggest it is so, however. Uribe bragged that he’d gotten Obama’s autograph with this note: “To President Uribe, with admiration!” And later Kirk would say Obama is a “great admirer” of Uribe and the strides he has made in reducing violence against union officials.

Also, Uribe bragged that he’d explained to Obama how his administration had protected unionists. He said that before he took office in 2002, there were only two convictions for the murders of workers, but since then there have been 184.

The most reliable source of such statistics, however, the Colombian National Labor School, provides radically different numbers.  Luciano Sanin Vasquez, the school’s director, testified before the House Education and Labor Committee Feb. 12, that the number of successful prosecutions was 91.  So either Colombia doubled convictions within the two months’ time between Mr. Sanin’s testimony and the Fifth Summit of the Americas, or Uribe exaggerated his success in beginning to deal with the 40-year blood bath his country has endured as right wing militias fought left wing guerillas with trade unionists and human rights activists and rural populations caught in the cross fire.

And even Uribe’s inflated conviction number is hardly impressive. It still represents a 99 percent impunity rate. Kill a Colombian unionist, and 99 out of 100 times you’ll get away with it – the police may question you, but then they’ll just let you go, like they did in the Tique murder.

At lunch with President Obama, Uribe wrangled himself an invitation to the White House. No big deal, really. Uribe had been to Washington before, and Bush had never been able to persuade Congress to pass the FTA.

But Uribe also persuaded Obama to drop by Bogotá the next time he’s visiting Latin America. This, however, is significant. This is a trip Obama should make.

Having just returned from Colombia, I believe this excursion could make all the difference in the Colombian FTA for President Obama. But only if President Obama makes his own schedule and does not adhere to some sham show tour set up by Uribe’s people.

Obama needs to meet with some of the Colombian people who spoke with my delegation, including peasant farmers, human rights defenders and trade unionists. While I was in Colombia early in April, Hernan Polo Barrera, the head of the teachers trade union, SITRAENAL, was shot dead in front of his house. Because he’d received numerous threats, he’d asked for protection, but the government refused to provide it. He was the 13^th trade unionist killed so far this year.

When Obama goes to Colombia, I want him to speak with Mr. Polo’s 16-year-old daughter, Liseth, who was standing next to her father when he was gunned down and who was wounded in the attack. She was rushed to the hospital as the killers escaped on motorcycles. They have not been caught.

I also want President Obama to spend some time with the six year old son of Arled Samboni Guaca, an active member of the Colombian agricultural workers’ trade union, FENSUAGRO, who had received numerous death threats from Colombian paramilitary groups. Father and son were walking to a shop on Jan 16 when two gunmen approached them and shot Mr. Samboni seven times. The gunmen escaped. The little boy watched his father die.

Then there’s José Jair Valencia Agudelo, an activist in the Colombian teacher’s union EDUCAL. President Obama should speak with this assassination-attempt survivor. He was shot six times Feb. 26 in the town of Filadelfia a week after authorities refused to give him the transfer and protection that he’d sought because he’d received death threats.

President Obama must speak with one more grieving unionist. He is Jorge Caicedo, leader of the health workers trade union ANTHOC in the Colombian region of Narino. Paramilitaries tried to get to him through is wife, Cecilia Montano. They shot her three times in the head in the town of Tumaco on Jan. 5^th.

Before the new president is drawn in by Uribe’s contention that Colombia should be awarded an FTA because fewer trade unionists and human rights activists and rural peasants are murdered each year now, Obama must hear from the victims. And he should remember what Human Rights Watch wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last fall:

“Free trade should be premised on fundamental respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded. In Colombia, workers cannot exercise their right without fear of being threatened or killed. Without concrete and sustained results in addressing this basic problem, ongoing anti-union violence and impunity would, as President-elect Barack Obama has noted, make a “mockery” of labor protections in the agreement. We believe that Colombia should be in compliance with such protections before the accord takes effect, as has generally been demanded with FTA commercial provisions.”