Pubdate: Thu, 19 Oct 2006
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2006 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Joshua Goodman

COLOMBIAN WORKERS DECRY FLOWER-FARM LAYOFFS

They Claim Union Was Targeted, But Company Blames Bottom Line

FACATATIVA, Colombia - When workers at Colombia's largest flower
grower organized themselves into a union a few years ago, they won
protections against overly long hours, potentially dangerous exposure
to pesticides and other abuses.

But in an increasingly globalized economy, the effort may also have
cost the employees of Dole Food's flower division their jobs.

Last week, Estela Yepes was on her way out of work at the
Splendor-Corzo flower farm outside of Bogota, the Colombian capital,
when she was handed a one-page letter.

A slump in flower prices and new competition from China and Africa
were forcing a major restructuring of Dole Fresh Flowers, the letter
said. As part of the cost-cutting, the company was closing two of its
13 farms and laying off a third of its workforce in Colombia, some
2,600 employees in all.

A much smaller operation employing 900 in neighboring Ecuador is also
to be shut down.

The drastic downsizing immediately sparked fears of a domino effect
throughout an industry that employs 110,000 people in Colombia and
provides a whopping 5 percent of this cocaine-producing country's
legal foreign-trade revenue.

But to Yepes, who after 15 years on the job was earning just a few
dollars more than the monthly minimum wage of $170, the economics
lesson made little sense. Recounting what she considered the callous
way her supervisor defended the company's decision, her frustration
boiled over.

"He told us in Africa they work for a bowl of soup a day -- that in
Colombia we workers made too many demands," Yepes said angrily at an
informal meeting of soon-to-be unemployed workers.

Yepes and her co-workers, many of them single mothers living just
above the poverty line, insist their farm was singled out for closure
because of their success in organizing the industry's first
independent union, Untraflores.

Among the union's hard-fought achievements: the termination of an
incentive pay scheme that it alleges was manipulated by Dole to impose
a crushing workload and illegally deny workers much-needed overtime
pay.

Dole's layoffs in effect delivered a fatal blow to the combative
union, 75 percent of whose 1,200 members work at Splendor-Corzo.

Union members call the timing's announcement suspicious, coming less
than two weeks after the expiration of a collective bargaining
agreement that Untraflores was fighting to replace.

John Amaya, president of Dole's flower division, acknowledged to the
Associated Press that labor relations at Splendor-Corzo were
"conflictive."

But the Miami-based executive said the decision to close the farm, its
biggest and costliest to run in Colombia, was based solely on
bottom-line considerations. Fewer than half the jobs cut were
union-affiliated, he said.

The company hopes the restructuring will improve the cut-flower
division's annual cash flow by $35 million and reverse a trend of
losses that last year reached $5.1 million, on $171 million in revenue.

"We're losing money at this business and we had to do what was right
to turn our business around. There was no effort to single out any
union," said Amaya.

To be sure, as much of a raw deal workers complain they're getting,
it's not all a bed of roses for Colombia's flower industry, either.

The industry has been hard hit the past two years by a 25 percent
strengthening of the Colombian peso against the dollar, which has
directly affected labor costs, about half a farm's expenses. Rising
fuel prices for the four cargo planes that take off daily for the
United States, where 85 percent of production is sold, have also taken
its toll on the industry.

Dole is Colombia's largest grower, with a nearly 20 percent share of
the more than $906 million in annual exports. Its entry into Colombia,
through a series of high-profile acquisitions over the past decade,
did a great deal to invigorate the four-decade-old industry.

Colombia now supplies about 60 percent of the U.S. flower market and
the government counts on the industry to serve as an important
alternative to coca, the basis of cocaine. Flower exports were up 29
percent in 2005 over 2004.
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MAP posted-by: Derek