CT PHOTOS BY DENNIS O’CONNOR

German Zepeda, left, and staffers at the international banana union, Colsiba, pose outside their Honduras office.

Global solidarity, Cincinnati style

Archdiocesan delegation explores labor issues in Honduras

By Dennis O’Connor

EL PROGRESSO, Honduras — As we flew above San Pedro Sula, economic capital of this Central American nation, a broader picture of our recent trek through banana country came into focus.

Below, through the struts of the Islena’s Airlines ATR-42 turboprop, we could make out neat, green rows of the fruit "trees" leading to the Ulua River, now the source of irrigation for the massive Chiquita Brands International farms in Honduras and once the water highway that channeled the fruit to market via Puerto Cortez on the Caribbean coast. This birds-eye view provided yet another perspective on our delegation’s study of recent labor-relations activities at Cincinnati-based Chiquita, a multi-national corporation with thousands of employees engaged in the banana trade throughout much of Central America and parts of South America.

A Chiquita worker in Honduras demonstrates how to harvest a banana plant to members of the Cincinnati delegation.

Our group was an eclectic mix of folks on a twinning-exploration delegation from the archdiocese: two permanent deacons from the Diocese of Columbus (one, a retired aerospace engineer), a tax attorney (and candidate for the diaconate for the archdiocese), two students, a graphic artist, an office manager, a former police officer, a retired Procter & Gamble manager and his wife (who is finishing up her masters in Theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio), a couple journalists and Dr. Mike Gable, director of the archdiocese Mission Office. The presence of this Cincinnati entourage marked yet another "walk in solidarity" requested of the faithful in the United States bishops’ 1997 pastoral letter "Called to Global Solidarity: International Challenges for U.S. Parishes." Our challenge as a delegation was summed up in the first paragraph of the pastoral letter, which states that "Catholics in the United States face special responsibilities and opportunities. We are members of a universal church that transcends national boundaries and calls us to live in solidarity and justice with the peoples of the world. We are also citizens of a powerful democracy with enormous influence beyond our borders. As Catholics and Americans we are uniquely called to global solidarity."

As members of the Cincinnati church, we also were uniquely positioned to become engaged in a conversation with management and laborers at the Cincinnati multinational that has, over many decades, publicly embodied the struggle between a company’s responsibility to earn a profit for its shareholders, and the rights and well-being of the workers who make that profit possible. Since 1998, when Hurricane Mitch decimated banana fincas throughout northern Honduras and Chiquita came under fire for a plethora of issues related to the way it conducted its business then, many in Cincinnati — including members of the faithful concerned with those same issues — began to focus their attention southward to a region of the Western Hemisphere that once had been known for its "banana republics."

"As a result of my lay missionary work and group visits back to Honduras the past 35 years, I became friends with Jesuit missionaries working with banana workers and their unions," said Gable. The Jesuits, based in the northern city of El Progresso, asked Gable and others in Cincinnati "to stand in solidarity with some banana workers who believed they were being treated unfairly." From those initial efforts at solidarity by the faithful from the north, Gable said that the groundwork was laid for subsequent negotiations that were to produce higher standards of collaboration between labor and management on many fronts.

When Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras in November 1998, "there was a great outpouring of support from our archdiocese for those severely affected," Gable said. "Consequently, various archdiocesan offices, including Hispanic Ministries and the Mission Office, in 1999 formed the five-year ‘Global Solidarity: Focus Central America’ initiative to study and then educate all members of our archdiocese about the challenges Central Americans face in their own nations and in our area."

From those grass-roots beginnings, the initiative began to see the fruits of conversations with leaders in the region coming to Cincinnati, including peasant worker and organizer Elvia Alvarado, Guatemalan Bishop Alvero Ramazzini, as well as Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, all eager to discuss workers’ rights and the well-being of their fellow countrymen. More than anything else, it was an opportunity to further seal the bonds of friendship and solidarity between the people of Cincinnati and that region of the Americas, Gable said.

"Consequently, in our latest visit with banana labor leaders in Honduras and Chiquita leadership here, and there, our long efforts for solidarity and justice continue to promote profitable negotiations that benefit all stake-holders" of the multinational company.
In preparation for the July Cincinnati twinning delegation, Gable said he contacted key managers at Chiquita as well as union leaders with the international group called Colsiba, letting them know that the delegation would like to hear from both sides concerning current labor-management negotiations that would take place in August. Because of the obvious Cincinnati connection, the stories from both sides would provide the group with valuable lessons in globalization, and they would get a snapshot of how well Chiquita is keeping to its pledge of corporate responsibility.

The meetings would give us a unique opportunity to witness this give-and-take. We would see workers in action processing bananas; we would hear management’s description of Chiquita’s missions and we would sit down with union officials and hear their concerns.

The heat and humidity in July were nearly unbearable, even for those of us from Cincinnati. Welcome to one of the world’s best climates for growing bananas year-round! After trudging down a few feet into a banana field, we watched as sweat-drenched workers wielded machetes to demonstrate how a banana is harvested. A chop of the machete at the midsection of the plant, and it droops, allowing the worker to then grapple the fruit stem, loaded with several manos or "hands" of bananas. The stems are transported by workers hooking them to transport wires perched several feet off the ground that led to the processing center, a small factory where mostly women labored over the final product. Bunches of bananas are washed in a large pool, grabbed by the female laborers who deftly load them into boxes, each box holding several of the banana "hands." The boxes move down a conveyor system, where they are paletted and then pushed onto a shipping container.

The currency in this business is the box that is shipped. That cost is influenced by the yield of the year-round crop at Chiquita’s numerous plantations, each with its own quota. Insect infestation and a type of fungus that can plague the fruit are constantly battled, and even then, some loss is suffered in spite of treatments with pesticides and fungicides. The cost of producing a box of bananas determines whether Chiquita — or any of the other banana companies in the world — makes a profit or suffers a loss. In an industry that is as labor intensive as banana production, the worker is the most important part of the economic mosaic.

In 2001, Colsiba, the umbrella banana union that represented numerous smaller unions including those in Honduras, engaged Chiquita in a historic agreement that provided a framework for negotiations that was unlike any other multinational banana company, according to Stephen Coats, executive director of US/LEAP, a Chicago-based organization that keeps tabs on union activities in the Americas. After many years of wrangling, that agreement help lay the foundation for one of the visible changes from a twinning visit in 2004 and now: in Honduras, blue protective bags sealed around the fruit that contained a mixture of chemicals to help the crops had been replaced with an open, white bag, a concession Chiquita made to Honduran workers that the union said helped reduce workers’ exposure to risk from chemical poisoning — a common risk in agriculture. On our trip, the white bags seemed like small flags of victory for the union, given that context.

But issues such as the chemical bags were part of a package of concerns that were now out on the table between labor and management as the company sought to find more routes to profitability, according to German Zepeda, then-executive director of the Colsiba union.

That also came into focus for our entourage when we heard an ad hoc presentation from Victor Wilson, a Chiquita financial manager in Honduras, who noted that production costs remained a concern. Wilson noted that there remained deep worries about the long-term stability of operations in Honduras, where it was more expensive to produce a box of bananas than, say, Costa Rica, where the company continues to have trouble coming to terms with unions there, according to Manuel Rodriguez, senior vice president of government and international affairs and corporate responsibility officer, based in Cincinnati.

Wilson’s chief issue with the union’s position was that the company needed to link increased worker pay to productivity, and Zepeda countered that the company’s plan to have each person in production producing an increased quota of 60 processed boxes an hour "impossible to sustain." There, in one line item, was an example of where union and management were at odds.

"One of the great challenges at Chiquita is the ongoing struggle with the European Union’s quota change," which has effectively placed a barrier up to bananas coming into the European market from South America so that former European colonies in Africa can have first shot at the banana market, according to US/LEAP’s Coats. "It results in a downward pressure on prices, which trickles down to labor. Frankly, I don’t see that changing. I think the relationship between the unions and the company will continue to be tense and confrontational." Coats cited a trend in the industry he calls "the race to the bottom," in which competitors producing bananas are forced to cut their prices to remain competitive in the marketplace. Pressure from retailers such as WalMart, a company that systemically tells suppliers what it is willing to pay for the products it sells — and consumers’ demand for low prices — is felt at all levels in this agricultural milieu.

Still, as Gable has continually asserted, the only way for there to be a positive outcome in the relationship between workers and managers, there has to continue to be an open dialogue. Chiquita, according to Coats, has since 2001 been open to that kind of dialogue.

"When Colsiba went public with their concerns at Chiquita late in the spring of this year, Chiquita immediately held a series of meetings, including a regional meeting at the beginning of August in Honduras, with top leaders from Cincinnati and the unions from that area. They tried to resolve concerns country by country; that’s what the company has effectively done since 2001," he said.

"We had very successful meetings" in August with Colsiba and regional unions in Central America, Chiquita’s Rodriguez told some members of the Cincinnati delegation after the Honduran trip, at Chiquita headquarters in Cincinnati. Again, as Coats confirmed, at least the foundation has been laid to discuss how workers can address their concerns in a just fashion.

In the aftermath of the meetings, Gable, Sister of Charity Ruth Kuhn (who has worked with officials at Chiquita for nearly a decade in her role as corporate responsibility monitor) and others in the Cincinnati delegation agreed to keep tabs on how union and company will fare down the road in their negotiations.

Perhaps the most significant observation coming from the Cincinnati delegation’s foray into the union/management universe came from Thomas H. Graber III, the Greenville, Ohio, attorney who recently has been accepted into the archdiocesan permanent deacon formation program. Graber noted after the trip that "I have become more aware of how much one person can do to help others faced with struggles in their lives because of their political, economic or social position. I discovered a common thread running through ministry is helping other people help themselves."