Thirty-eight-year-old Gloria Isabel Ramírez has worked in Colombia’s flower industry since the age of 14. Today, the single mother of one makes $10 a day, works seven days a week and lives in her town’s poorest neighborhood, located less than an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, Bogotá.  

“I want you to remember her name and her picture,” longtime reporter Stephen Franklin told the audience gathered at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting yesterday. “Her story is very much emblematic…of what is happening in Colombia.”

After 24 years of hard work in flower houses, Ramírez’s hands are “like stones,” aching constantly and barely able to grip anything firmly.

The former Chicago Tribune labor and foreign correspondent yesterday shared some of his findings from his three-week stint in Colombia before an audience at the non-profit journalism organization in Washington, D.C.

Ramírez is one of about 150,000 workers in Colombia’s flower industry, says Franklin. And like 90% of these workers, she’s a woman. And like about 2% of them, she belongs to a union. In a nation of some 45.7 million people, the percentage of unionized workers is only slightly higher, about 4%. Twenty years ago, it was 15%.

During the holiday season in the United States, where 90% of the flowers sold come from the South American country, Colombian flower workers can work up to 20 hours per day with only a two-hour break in between 10-hour shifts, Franklin says. Flowers were among the first Colombian products to enter the U.S. market after a free trade agreement between the two nations went into effect in May 2012.

Ramírez also happens to live in the world’s most dangerous country for union activists, where, according to Franklin, about 2,900 union members have been killed since 1986, and where more than nine out of 10 of these murder cases remain unsolved. Some sources estimate the number of murders to be even higher, around 4,000.

“The dangers faced by union members and human rights activists mirror a long-lasting vortex of violence propelled by guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels, criminals and, according to human rights groups and others, military and government officials as well,” Franklin writes in the introduction to his project “Death Stalks Colombia’s Unions.”

As part of this project, Franklin plans to continue publishing articles further detailing his experience in Colombia. Expect them to appear in various progressive and labor publications in the near future, including the AFL-CIO Now blog.

You can watch video of yesterday’s entire Pulitzer Center presentation here.