WORKERS' RIGHTS

In one of the most stunning turnarounds in labor management history, Chiquita signed a landmark agreement in June 2001 with the International Union of Food Workers (IUF) and the Latin American banana workers' union group (COLSIBA), both long-standing antagonists. With the signing, Chiquita was the first industrial agriculture company to sign a workers' rights agreement. The company pledged to respect rights under the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, to work to ensure that independent suppliers also respected those rights, and to address long-standing worker health and safety concerns. The general secretary of the IUF, Ron Oswald, described the agreement as "historic in the truest sense, meaning that it offers the possibility for workers and employers to seek a new basis for a resolution of problems in an industry that has throughout its history been highly confrontational." A press release from the American labor activist group U.S./ LEAP stated, in part, "While Chiquita has far to go to implement the agreement, it has become the most transparent and engaged banana company with respect to its overseas operation and one of the most transparent of any multinational."

For most of the 20th century the plight of banana workers in Latin America has been an ongoing saga. As early as 1911 United Fruit in Central America employed some 40,000 English-speaking migrant Jamaican workers as plantation hands. The earliest workers' protests were in 1917 against United Fruit's operations in Honduras. A major strike in Cienaga, Colombia, in 1928 ended with a battalion of government troops firing on a crowd of demonstrating workers and killing thirteen workers. The massacre took on mythic proportions when Gabriel GarciUea Micrquez invented the number three thousand dead in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude. Micrquez later admitted that for dramatic purposes he had "to fill a whole railway with corpses so he chose three thousand dead..." and it was quickly adopted as history.

Labor unrest was a reality off and on right through the big banana expansion in Costa Rica in the late 1980s. Pesticide poisonings were increasingly an issue. In 1992, lawyers for 1,500 banana workers won the right to sue the banana company Castle & Cooke and a number of large U.S. chemical companies in a Texas court for causing sterilization of workers from chemical poisoning.

These are just a few examples of how big a gorilla the banana companies had to get off their backs. But of the three major companies, Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte, only Chiquita took a chance with the Rainforest Alliance's certification program. Steven Warshaw, the ceo of Chiquita during this period, says that the Better Banana certification gave the company the courage and understanding to reach out to its adversaries. This eventually led to the labor pact. Chiquita's critics at last have turned their sights on other companies.

  

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