All is still well in Honduras. This week I'm supposed to be writing a 15 page paper on my theory of development. Depending on how it turns out, I might post it, but first I should probably write it...
Last week we visited a Chiquita banana plantation. Here's a little write up I did of our visit.
Historically, the banana industry has had the most workers rights protections of any sector in Honduras. This tradition of just employment goes all the way back to 1954, when Honduran plantation workers successfully won a strike against the Standard Fruit Company and United Fruit Company (present day Dole and Chiquita) to end the near slave labor conditions that had been implemented the last 60 years of the American businesses existence. However, since the early 2000s, the success and pull of banana unions in Honduras has been waning due to the establishment of a banana industry in Ecuador. Unlike its Central American counterparts, the Ecuador lacks basic worker protections, paying Ecuadorian plantation workers about a quarter of the wages ($56 a month) with no benefits (for example, the benefit of being able to work in an area of the plantation that is not being sprayed with highly toxic fungicide). This low wage allows the companies to be highly competitive with Central Amercian producers despite having to transport the bananas the extra distance to make it to American cities. Needless to say, this competition has put Honduran banana producers in a rough position, and many of the banana workers’ gains have been lost in Honduras, and the producers have even begun to implement labor practices similar to those found in Ecuador. We visited a plantation and saw the well-organized system that was being implemented in Honduras, and later visited the first banana union founded in Honduras after the 1954 strike, listening to the members tell us of their struggles and the abuses that workers were beginning to face more and more. I need to be cautious in saying this, because I am not a well educated economist, and am mostly speaking from a limited view of the issue. From what I understand of free trade, it may well be a wonderful thing for the world economy or for businesses, but the reality that I saw in the banana plantations (and the maquilas) is far from wonderful. Free trade expects grocery chains to look to Ecuador for bananas because the price of the commodity is lower just as much as it requires that they turn a blind eye to the labor abuses taking place on those plantations. Free trade then creates the new price for Honduran bananas, expecting them to reach their profit margins by whatever means necessary. Businesses may be growing, but workers are suffering, and I cannot think of a single moment where the ends should ever justify the means, especially when the means includes the degradation of human life and rights.
On another note, studying the banana sector, it becomes evident that given the workings of the world economy, in order to improve the situation of workers in one area, the situation has to be improved everywhere. Honduran banana workers are having their rights and wages stripped, but it may be true that the best way for their condition to be improved is to change the injustice that is occurring in Ecuador. In part, this is exciting, because it expands the areas in which change can come, and allows for the improvement of an entire sector of the economy; however, it also proves to loom a little daunting to recognize the size of the problem of labor violations, and to recognize just how large the effort needs to be to confront the problem. Looking to previous successes of the Honduran unions, to the successes seen in the maquila industry (more on this later), thankfully this is an effort that will produce results, and definitely is a cause worth standing for and defending.
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