El Salvador

Exploitation, Globalisation & Privatisation at Gunpoint

US PhotoJournalist David Bacon reports on the findings of an International Union Mission in support of San Salvador port workers & Truck Drivers

Long before the current debate over the Central America Free Trade Agreement, workers and unions throughout the region were under attack from economic reforms that have broken unions, privatized workplaces, and lowered wages. Few of the assaults, however, have been as sustained and sharp as those against the waterside workers of El Salvador.

Their experience echoes that of the dockworkers in Veracruz in 1991, Americas' first victims of privatisation at gunpoint. In El Salvador as well, the main port of Acajutla was occupied by soldiers. Using direct military force, new private operators took over the terminals. The Salvadoran dock union was smashed, and their efforts to reorganise it since have not only been broken, but the workers involved fired and blacklisted.

When the Maritime Union of Australia was invited to investigate this vicious attack on workers' rights and join an international delegation into El Salvador to report to the world, we were quick to respond.

Jamie Newlyn, South Australian Branch Secretary, joined the delegation in March representing the MUA. During the mission he interviewed the blacklisted union activists.

"What has happened to these union leaders, and to the rights and conditions of workers in Acajutla, would be a shock to longshore unions internationally, if they knew what has taken place." he said. "We hope to bring their case before the world, so that dock workers around the world can take action in solidarity to help Salvadoran workers win their rights."

Acajutla employs approximately 1,200 workers, including 480 longshoremen.

Until September 2001,their employer was the state port authority, CEPA, which owned the port property and administered terminal operations. The union for port workers, the Sindicato de la Industria Portuaria de El Salvador (the Union of the Port Industry of El Salvador), had a 50 year history of fighting for a fair standard of living in one of Latin America's poorest countries.

As a result, longshoremen employed by CEPA had a union contract with a set wage for every job. Working two shifts a day, four days a week, dockers could make $125 per day or $25,000 a year. ³The sons and daughters of people who couldn't themselves read or write, humble people, were able to go to the university,² says Carlos David Marroquin, Secretary-Treasurer of the old longshore union, and a former warehouse worker.

"During the civil war we worked 12-hour shifts," he adds, "unloading bombs and ammunition in very dangerous conditions. The government never complained about our willingness or ability to do the work."

Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001, within hours of the attack on the twin towers in New York, the Salvadoran government moved troops into the port and the airport. El Salvador's ruling party, a descendent of the rightwing ARENA party responsible for numerous death squad atrocities during that country's civil war, cited the New York attacks as evidence of a terrorist threat that made the move necessary. Both port and airport were placed under military authority for the first time in Salvadoran history.

But sending soldiers to assure the port's physical security was just the beginning of a much more ambitious plan. At the moment of the militarisation, 38 port guards were immediately terminated. The following January 600-700 workers were fired. By May the last 240 workers were also terminated. On January 23, the union was officially dissolved by the government, and thrown out of its office in the port. Union members haven't been let back into the building since then.

When the union sought to protect the jobs of port workers, the union contract, and its own existence, Francisco Flores, then-president of El Salvador, called union members 'terrorists' and 'guerrilleros.' While that language may seem extreme in any country, in El Salvador from 1978 to 1989 those people so labeled were imprisoned, and often just picked up on the street and 'disappeared.' While the country has formally been at peace for over a decade since, political killings still take place, and the epithets produce an atmosphere of fear and terror.

The operation of the terminals was privatized. Dockworkers are currently employed by seven private companies who operate terminals in the port:

OPSSA, COPESE, OyM, Neparsa, Remarsa, SYCSA and ServiPacific. privatisation was a gift from the Salvadoran government to at least one of the country's wealthiest families --one terminal operator, OPSSA, is owned by the family of Francisco Flores.

The government told workers they could reapply for their old jobs, but with the new private operators. ³The told people they'd be liquidated, but they'd get jobs with the private operators,² Marroquin says. ³But they didn't say how much they'd be paid.² The new wage was $12 per day--cutting the daily income of longshoremen by more than 90 percent.

Following its gunpoint expulsion from the port, and its official dissolution, the longshore union made three attempts to reorganise.

On May 7, 2002, its leaders called a meeting of all former members working in the port. Salvadoran labor law stipulates that if 25 percent of the former members had attended, the union would have regained its legal status.

But an atmosphere of fear had already been created by the presence of soldiers, by the firings, and by the dark meaning of labelling activists as ³terrorists.² To intensify the fear, the union's former members were told by CEPA officials that if they went to the meeting, they would no longer be allowed to enter the port area, and would therefore lose their jobs.

Workers found the treat easy to believe. Since disbanding the former union the port authority has refused to permit 25 of its former leaders to enter the port area, including Marroquin and Eduardo Fuentes Ordoñez, former chief grievance officer and dock worker. As a result, the required number of workers did not attend.

The next reorganisation attempt was made in September 2003. During the election campaign that year, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), El Salvador's leftwing electoral party, and former guerrilla movement, made a public commitment to demilitarise the port and recognise the union. FMLN deputies in the Salvadoran Congress tried to get these changes adopted by the National Assembly. The party publicly denounced the violations of labor rights in the port. But their proposal was only supported by the party's own delegates, who were not a majority. After the election, no further effort was made to introduce legislation reinstating the union and its members.

"That's when we decided to organise a new union," Ordoñez explains.

On December 6, 2004, 41 workers, all employed at the time by the terminal operators, signed a notarised document stating that they were constituting a new union, the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Portuaria de El Salvador (the Union of the Workers in the Port Industry of El Salvador).

They had a meeting to officially form the union. Under Salvadoran labor law, if 35 workers in the same industry sign such a statement, the union has the legal right to exist.

On December 7, the workers presented the documents to the Ministry of Labor.

On December 13, the Ministry notified the terminal operators that the legally required number of employees had signed documents forming a union.

On December 14 the employers responded that the workers who had signed the petition were not employed by them. That morning, when those workers had presented themselves as usual, they had been denied work. The companies told them this was because they'd formed a union.

Finally, on February 14, the Ministry of Labor denied legal status to the union, saying that the workers who signed the documents were not employed by the terminal operators. Since the firings, 36 of the 41 have been blacklisted and denied work by the terminal operators.

According to both current and former port workers, conditions have deteriorated, along with wages. In the course of eight hours, a crew of workers will unload 120 boxes, with a crew of four longshoremen, two lashers and one crane driver, who uses the crane on the ship. They say they don't receive overtime pay, despite a law requiring an overtime premium after seven hours. There's no fixed payday, and workers get paid 20-30 days after they work. Dockworkers are told they can't eat during the workday, despite the fact that employers are required to provide a half-hour meal break.

They sometimes have to work three straight shifts without eating, if the operator is in a hurry to unload and load a ship.

Salvadoran employers are required to make payments to the Social Security health care system, including money deducted from workers' wages. According to dockers, however, when they get sick and go to the Social Security hospital, they discover that the terminal operator employing them hasn't made the payment, and instead has pocketed the money. Workers injured on the job have discovered they don't have health insurance even for emergency, workplace injuries, and have to cover the doctor bills themselves.

The wharves are a high-risk environment, but dockworkers labor without gloves, hardhats, masks, safety belts, nets or even ladders. When they have to climb a stack of containers, they have to climb up the containers themselves or a spreader hoists them up. They have to work in this dangerous way even when it's raining. According to the blacklisted workers, one man, Manuel Manzilla, broke his leg while working on a Sunday morning in March. He wasn't even taken to the Social Security hospital, because the companies try to hide the people who get injured.