press release from the GMB: letter to the Guardian
In your exposé of the activities of multinational banana companies there were claims from Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte that they were working with Latin American trade unions to address workers’ rights – with the implication that they all supported the principle of free collective bargaining.
The GMB has close ties with those trade unions and the reality of their members’ existence is rather different. At corporate level there is indeed dialogue between unions and companies, but agreements are routinely ignored at the workplace, where trade unionists are often sacked, blacklisted, threatened with violence or even murdered, as in the case of Sitrabi union executive member Marco Tulio Ramirez, who was killed on a Guatemalan plantation on September 23. Only this week, we received reports of a family being evicted from their home and a pregnant woman being left with a tent for shelter on a Chiquita plantation, in the midst of a campaign to intimidate and dismiss trade union members in Costa Rica.
The banana companies’ union-busting activities are motivated by a desire to control wages in the midst of a vicious price war between Tesco and Asda, who use their market strength to drive down the cost of the fruit at the suppliers’ expense. Tesco alone makes £1.5m per week profit on bananas and, despite advocating corporate social responsibility, seemingly cares little for the wellbeing of the workers on the plantations.
There is some hope for our Latin American colleagues in the shape of increased Fairtrade sales in response to demands from the British public, and it is high time that the corporate players in the banana industry lived up to their moral, as well as their legal, obligations.
