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The campaign waged by the
government of Colombia to have the FTA approved by US Congress has led it to
pour significant funds into lobbies, targeting in particular House Democrats and
US businesses that regularly visit Colombia. The purpose of these visits is to
see how the reports sent by the Alvaro Uribe administration to promote FTA
approval measure up to the country’s actual state of affairs. These reports
maintain that progress has been made towards reducing violence against unionists
and effectively applying the ILO conventions adopted by the Colombian
government. An AFL-CIO delegation* arrived in Colombia to draw its own
conclusions.
The goal of the
mission is to meet with and interview national union federations, global unions,
national congresspersons, central government officials, business operators and
Human Rights NGOs. At the meeting with Colombia’s labor movement, held on
Tuesday, February 12 at the headquarters of the Colombian Teachers’ Federation (FECODE),
the AFL-CIO mission listened to numerous reports from union spokespersons
in the various industries and received updated statistical data proving that the
killing of unionists is still going on, that many other unions are still being
forced into political exile, that whole unions are being wiped out while
Collective Bargaining Agreements are eliminated, that efforts to create new
unions are continuously undermined by layoffs of workers and union leaders, and
that all of this occurs under the indulgent and complicit eyes of Ministry of
Social Protection officers, who through bureaucratic subterfuges repeatedly deny
the registration of new unions and, instead, facilitate conditions for the
widespread implementation of pseudo associated labor cooperatives, outsourcing,
and temporary employment schemes.
At the meeting,
the National Agro-Food Union of Colombia (UNAC) and the IUF’s
Latin American division, Rel-UITA, announced their political decision to
continue their involvement in the region’s international struggle against all
FTAs, both those already approved and those promoted despite the opposition
of unions and social and popular sectors.
These
agreements have had disastrous effects on the labor movement and on collective
bargaining, but most of all they have proved devastating in terms of the defense
of our natural resources and food sovereignty. Moreover, as in Mexico,
the rural sector is being displaced by mega agricultural projects implemented by
transnational corporations, through the expansion of green deserts for ethanol
production and transgenic agro-food imports from the United States.
The UNAC
and Rel-UITA
ratified their determination to continue their efforts to form a strategic and
political alliance between US labor organizations and their Latin American
counterparts, with the aim of preventing the destruction and impoverishment of
labor in Latin America and halting its increasingly rapid casualization in the
United States.
As we said,
FTAs in Latin America exacerbate the process of displacement
and annihilation of the rural working class, but that is not the only
consequence they have. It won’t be long before, as a result of the development
of FTAs, the United States government begins to gradually
dismantle the system of agricultural subsidies that ensures profitability for
farmers in the north.
In our
presentation, we also called on everyone to focus and step up the efforts to
organize workers in the informal sector and strengthen the unionization of rural
workers and family farmers.
At the end of
the union meeting, the AFL-CIO delegation ratified its will to continue
its open and frank opposition to the FTA with Colombia, both in
the political and labor fronts. It will go on denouncing and questioning the
Colombian government for its attempts to embellish the situation in the country
and conceal its political intention to continue encouraging the extermination of
unions and the implementation of labor reforms that strengthen the proliferation
of outsourcing schemes and pseudo associated labor cooperatives. It also
declared that US labor and Democrat legislators should demand greater efforts
from Colombia’s government and State to eradicate once and for all the violence
against all unionists, leaders, members and activists.
The AFL-CIO
mission is an encouragement and incentive to challenge the hypocrisy of the
government and the business sector, who participate in every instance of
dialogue and agreement proposed, but contribute nothing to find solutions. It is
a strategy to spruce up their social image with a thin coat of democratic gloss
for the benefit of the international bodies that monitor compliance with social
and human rights in international commerce.
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