General Motors in Colombia: the Free Trade Agreement, the Abuses, the Corruption and the Resistance

by Carlos Cruz, WFP Colombia

The Association of Sick and Fired Workers of General Motors Colombia (ASOTRECOL)

Jorge Parra, the President of the Association of Sick and Fired Workers Of General Motors Colombia (ASOTRECOL in Spanish), started his makeshift tent city with fellow fired General Motors workers right across the street from the United Sates Embassy on August 1, 2011. Their reasoning was very clear: Since the U.S. government bailed out General Motors in 2008, the government and U.S. taxpayers became major stakeholders of this multinational corporation and assumed responsibility for its behavior in other countries, including Colombia.

From their tent city, they have launched a strong grassroots campaign that has attracted the attention of U.S. Congresspeople, Colombian trade union federations, nongovernmental organizations, opposition senators and hopefully the GM CEO.

These fired workers have shown incredible endurance, sleeping out in the cold and rainy Bogotá weather with metal rods in their spinal columns as a result of the surgeries they’ve undergone due to injuries acquired at the GM plant. Their endurance shows their determination to attain labor practices and standards that are fair and comply with the law.

Colombian Workers and the Free Trade Agreement

What they ask is for the U.S. government and General Motors in Colombia to comply with safety and labor standards supposedly guaranteed by Colombian laws and the 2011 Labor Action Plan between the Colombian and the U.S. governments.

The Labor Action Plan was geared to address the grave human rights abuses in Colombia in order to ratify the notoriously debated Free Trade Agreement proposed in 2006. There was fierce opposition from many sectors of Colombian society, including indigenous and afro-Colombian communities and U.S. trade unions and confederations, which stalled the FTA’s ratification for 5 years, and with good reason.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world to exercise labor organizing and unionizing rights. According to the AFL-CIO, 2,850 Colombian trade unionists have been killed in the last 25 years with almost complete impunity.

Colombian labor leaders face life and death situations and find abuse in almost all aspect of labor. Approximately three million Colombian workers are employed by subcontracting mechanisms that give a type of temporary worker status in order to break up unions, limit medical care, deny extra pay for over-time, weekends and holidays, and limit the right to a fixed contract. An estimated 300 to 400 workers in the GM plant in Colombia are hired under these exploitative schemes.

These and many more abuses resulting from subcontracting schemes are specifically addressed in the Labor Action Plan, but remain intact in Colombia when they shouldn’t.

In an environment of impunity, corruption and weak institutions, the newly-created Ministry of Labor and its labor inspectors, which have received $2 million U.S. taxpayer dollars in order to implement the Labor Action Plan, are working against the rights of workers.

The Abuses

Jorge and many more workers in Colombia, specifically in this case, endure precarious safety standards, long working hours, and don’t have adequate access to mechanisms to address these issues. Instead, workers are simply fired once they get injured or start working to address these labor violations. This is what happened to about 164 workers at the GM plant.

The fast pace, the heavy equipment and the lack of proper medical attention led to several injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, spinal injuries and hernias. Instead of taking care of its workers, GM management obtained their medical records and fired them, listing false claims so the firing wouldn’t be related to their injuries.

What is even more troubling is that these fired GM workers have been targets of persecution and harassment by private security firms contracted in secrecy. Members of the association have reported being fallowed and photographed outside their homes and their children’s schools. Even more alarming is that the Labor Action Plan’s protective measures for labor leaders are not being fulfilled; 51 trade unionists were murdered in 2011 alone, and 5 have been killed to date in 2012.

The Corruption

The far reach of multinationals and their deep political and economic ties more often than not sabotage, stall and hinder judicial processes in their favor.

Labor inspectors, called for by the Labor Action Plan, signed off on these illegal firings, protecting the companies instead of the workers. In a legal motion and investigation filed by ASOTRECOL, one corrupt labor inspector was actually sanctioned. The remaining concern is that the Labor Action Plan calls for roughly 400 of these officials.

The Resistance

The GM case is one of several in Colombia relating to labor abuses, exploitation, persecution and anti-union organizing. To highlight these issues, in early May, Jorge and other Colombian workers from the most exploited sectors of the Colombian workforce, who are specifically mentioned in the Labor Action Plan, will be going to Washington, DC, to express the ground-level reality of the Labor Action Plan. Their objective is to renegotiate the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement until the plan becomes a reality and not just an unenforced document signed over to the U.S. in order to implement the FTA.

Foreign Direct Invasion: What “Free Trade” means for small producers

By Riahl O'Malley
Witness for Peace International Team - Nicaragua

In Spanish, the verb “invadir” can mean a number of things: to encroach, to overwhelm, or to invade or attack. This is the verb that Maria Selina Valladares, co-founder of a small womens’ sewing cooperative operating out of Somoto, Nicaragua used to describe the role of big producers in Nicaragua under the Dominican Republic - Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). “Nos invaden,” she told me. “They’re invading us.”

Yesterday Congress passed three new Free Trade Agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea, respectively. These agreements follow the same model as DR-CAFTA. By reducing taxes on imports and exports and expanding the ability of companies to set-up abroad they are said to create “a level playing field for U.S. investors.” But since DR-CAFTA came into effect, María Selina has felt anything but level with large multi-national corporations.

Four years ago María Selina was one of 12 women in Nicaragua’s rural town of Somoto who decided to start a sewing cooperative.

“The idea was to generate employment, find the market and export our product abroad, to let them see that we have the capacity to work and to make a good product,” she said.

They received legal council, attended meetings with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Investment, Industry and Business, and even received a government grant to purchase their equipment. So far they have had few opportunities to sell their product. Even people in their own region would rather import than buy their local product, which ends up being more expensive.

“We have to charge the cost of the cloth, the thread, all of the materials plus our labor,” she explained. “We have very strong competition… The products that come from Managua don’t give us the opportunity to work.”

Foreign textile and apparel producers have been on the rise in Nicaragua since DR-CAFTA came into effect. They are said to benefit hugely from the agreement. Under DR-CAFTA, they can import a significant amount of cloth from a cheaper country like China, assemble it in Nicaragua and ship it duty-free to the U.S. in a box labeled “made in Nicaragua.”

It was mostly foreign companies from countries like the U.S. that were included in the negotiations that formed DR-CAFTA, so it is of little surprise that the agreement was designed for their benefit. Meanwhile, those who have little access to the same networks and resource as large multi-national corporations, like María Selina’s sewing cooperative, are, according to María Selina, “completely drowned out.”