Children at a well in Guatemala City, where water can cost more than a week’s wages.

Just days after a year-long organizing campaign went public at two textile factories outside Guatemala City in July, union supporters were violently attacked and injured at work by a mob wielding rocks, bottles and other makeshift weapons in an assault that lasted for hours.

Union leaders who pleaded for help from the Korean management were told there was nothing they could do. In fact, union leaders charge that the managers themselves instigated the attack, pitting worker against worker with threats that if the union campaign succeeded, the factory would be closed and the employees blacklisted from ever getting work again. Minutes before the melée, workers reported hearing a supervisor say, “Today we’ll see who wins. It’s either us or them.” By the end of the day, 10 union leaders had been forced to resign; the July 18 attack ended only after the arrival of union, human rights and labor ministry representatives at the scene.

Paid between $150 and $180 a month—with many spending more than a quarter of their wages on potable water that’s sporadically trucked into the nearby shantytowns—the 1,200 workers at the Choishin and Cimatextiles corporate factories sew clothes that eventually bear the Liz Claiborne label. In 1998, after two years of negotiations with a local monitoring agency, Liz Claiborne took the rare step of allowing the independent monitoring of some plants and agreed that the agency’s findings be made public. Following the violent July 18 attack, Liz Claiborne sent a letter to union leaders in support of the right to organize, an unprecedented response by a major corporation.

But despite Liz Claiborne’s support, and the managers’ signed agreement to recognize the union, workers face continued threats, harassment and intimidation. One union leader says he wakes to find his house watched in the middle of the night. Other union supporters are followed home and receive threatening phone calls, even death threats. More recently, union supporters have faced more subtle forms of intimidation, such as being moved to work stations with faulty and aged machinery, thus decreasing their ability to meet work quotas and receive full pay.

Obstacles to organizing workers in Guatemala are not limited to the apparel industry. Across the board, Guate-malan union leaders come up against daunting barriers: brutal harassment from employers, a government that, at best, turns its back to blatant violations of labor rights, and workers terrified of joining unions for fear they’ll lose their jobs or even their lives.

Since 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup launched 36 years of bloody dictatorships and civil war—which saw Guatemalan union leaders brutally murdered and unions crushed—union membership, between 1 and 2 percent, has remained the lowest in Central America. In the mid-’90s, the government signed peace accords ending the internal conflict, a process still monitored by the United Nations, but workers in textile plants and agriculture regularly face violence when trying to organize. Since the peace accords were signed, the only successful union campaign at an apparel-export factory, Phillips van Heusen, was crushed after workers won a contract and the plant closed in 1998.

With 27 apparel plants closing between January and August 2001, union supporters at the Guate-malan maquiladoras, more than half of which are Korean-owned, know the threats are real.

Guatemala instituted a new labor code in May under pressure from the United States, which threatened to end Guate-mala’s favorable trading status if the country did not improve workers rights. Although the new code fell far short of the standards set by the International Labor Organization, and even those sought by the United States, Washington dropped its threats after the bill’s passage. The AFL-CIO, with the support of Guatemalan trade unions, has asked the United States to renew pressure on the Guatemalan government in the wake of the attacks on the Choishin and Cimatextiles workers.

The code was passed as military control—and paramilitary violence—is escalating. “The current government has a policy of harassment and intimidation—very direct physical harassment,” says Frank La Rue, director of the Guatemalan-based Center for Legal and Human Rights. By May 2001, he notes, “every single non-governmental organization” monitoring human and workers rights had been “broken into or threatened” in the previous six months.

The campaign at the Choishin and Cimatextiles factories would make the two plants the only maquilas in the country where workers are covered by a union contract. But as Guatemalan workers struggle to gain basic rights at the workplace despite increased government repression and a weakened labor code, the prospects don’t seem good. “We’re actually going backward in terms of labor rights in Central America,” says Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee, a U.S.-based human and workers rights organization. “We’ve seen wages drop so low they’re almost off the map.”

The situation in Guatemala shows clearly why linking workers rights to international trade is essential, says Lance Compa, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “Social justice is not a by-product of economic growth,” Compa says. “It has to be built into the international trade system with strong workers rights provisions and tough sanctions against companies and governments that abuse workers. And one aspect of that is international trade agreements that include workers rights.”

Tula Connell is editor of the AFL-CIO magazine America@Work.

Return to top of the page.