Just south of Guatemala City, the shanty town of Alioto sprawls for miles, thousands of tin and wood shacks tumbling over each other and stretching up the side of the hill across dusty, treeless land. Eight years ago, this asentamiento (squatter settlement) did not exist, but now is crowded with more than 55,000 people who have come from rural areas in search of work. Many, like Gloria, are employed in one of the nearby maquila plants.

Past rows of indistinguishable corrugated metal and cement walls and behind an eight-foot cinder block fence topped with strings of barbed wire, Gloria’s daughter Marisol, 25, lives with her uncle and two children in a one-room shack her mother helped build. A freestanding cabinet acts as a partition between the kitchen and the corner of the room with bunk beds. A single electric bulb dangles above the table, but as in the rest of Alioto, there is no running water—except during the four-month rainy season, when the house regularly is flooded.

Sitting at a table festively decorated even in May with Christmas-themed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoon characters, Gloria (who requested only her first name be used) describes her 11-hour days at a Korean-owned textile factory, where she sews clothes that ultimately bear the Liz Claiborne label.

“Work hours are supposed to be from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., but normally, we don’t get out until 7 p.m.,” she says. “When we say we work extra hours, they say, ‘no, it’s voluntary,’ but it’s really obligatory, because if we don’t work, they don’t give us our cards back.” Without the cards, akin to time sheets, workers would be docked the entire day’s pay.

Gloria, who shares her own nearby one-room shack with her four youngest children, is allowed only one bathroom break during the entire workday—and frequently finds her paycheck does not include overtime or bonus pay for exceeding work quotas. Making the equivalent of $78 every two weeks for a workweek that includes Saturdays, the family lives on beans and eggs and scrimps on water, which they purchase by the barrel at roughly $1.50 per day—more than one-fourth of Gloria’s wages.

But Gloria is among a handful of women in Guatemala’s booming textile industry taking part in a daring experiment—organizing a union.

	New friends: AFSCME Local 35 member Judy Lowe celebrates her birthday with three children in Antigua, Guatemala.

“I would want to get a raise, or at least get paid what we’re owed,” Gloria says, describing her goals for a union organizing campaign that, if successful, would make her factory the only unionized textile plant in Guatemala. Nearly 90,000 workers, most of them women, are employed in maquilas, more than half of which are Korean-owned. The only other union campaign at an apparel-export factory, Phillips Van Heusen, was crushed after workers won a contract and the plant closed in 1998.

Working among the 1,000 workers at the plant, Gloria is developing union contacts and support that ultimately will enable the workers to go public with the campaign. Her efforts—and those of two organizers for FESTRAS, the federation overseeing the maquila organizing project—are receiving assistance from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center and STITCH. A network of U.S. women, funded in part by the Diane Middleton Foundation, STITCH backs women’s organizing for fair wages and dignity on the job in Central America. As part of that support, 11 women— ranging from age 20 through their fifties—traveled as part of a nine-day STITCH delegation to Guatemala in May, where they talked with maquila workers like Gloria, studied Spanish and met with a range of union leaders, human rights experts and migrant support groups.

Among the participants, who came from union, community, student and human rights organizations across the United States, AFSCME Local 35 member Judy Lowe, 48, says she was able to sign up with the delegation because of the South Central Iowa Federation of Labor. The Des Moines-based labor council funded her travel as part of its outreach among community groups and its work in an anti-sweatshop coalition with the American Friends Committee.

Nina Lessin-Joseph, 20, a student at the University of Massachusetts who comes from a union family—her mother works at the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and her father is a member of the state affiliate of the National Education Association—joined the group because of its direct relevance to her participation in the union movement through anti-sweatshop efforts and as an intern with the Steelworkers. The trip also bolsters her Latin American Studies major and her interest in developing leadership among union women.

	Group action: Women from a broad spectrum of union, community and human rights organizations took part in the 2001 STITCH delegation to Guatemala, including Katie Eident, Joanne Orosz, Janine Easter and Nina Lessin-Joseph.

Seeking to build expertise in Central America and to expand her study of women’s issues, Laura Moye, 25, a southern regional representative for the human rights organization Amnesty International, took part in the delegation because, she says, it’s necessary for human rights groups to expand their focus to include broader socio-economic concerns: “Human rights are labor rights,” says Atlanta-based Moye.

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As dusk falls, the smell of smoke from open fire pits drifts across Alioto. Sitting with the STITCH delegation, Gloria explains how she had been disciplined that week for speaking up to her supervisor. “The supervisor wanted to make an example of me— I only stayed until 6 p.m., not 7.” Suspended without pay for five days—after the supervisor told her she was ‘an animal with no brain’ and locked her in an office for hours—Gloria was followed when she left the plant. Terrified, she hid in a store until her follower went away.

It’s then that Marisol, who has hovered protectively over her mother throughout the interview, bringing her water to ease the coughing fits brought on from constant exposure to fine fabric particles, breaks into tears.

“She has all of our support, but we’re very afraid,” Marisol says between sobs. “We support her, but we only have one mother.”

History of Fear

		From America@work, August 2001.

Marisol’s fear of unions, shared by hundreds of thousands of workers across the nation, is grounded in the country’s bloody, 36-year civil war, in which more than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, including hundreds of union leaders and members, almost all by paramilitary forces, according to an international commission charged with investigating the atrocities.

Between 1944 and 1954, Guatemalans had lived under a new constitution and labor codes that gave them collective bargaining rights, required employers to withhold union dues from paychecks and required equal pay for men and women in the public and private sectors. After a 1954 coup that launched years of bloody dictatorships, the government immediately outlawed union organizing, cut wages by as much as 50 percent and made it illegal for unions to participate in politics. In one year, union membership dropped from 100,000 to 27,000, with some trade unionists murdered.

By the 1970s, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, author of the book Trade Unionists Against Terror, says the horror had reached the point where the new military president declared if it was necessary to turn the entire country into a “cemetery in order to pacify it,” he would not hesitate to do so. Some trade unionists fought on, but by then, the banners they carried in the rare demonstration had only one demand: “For the Right to Live.”

Government Interference

The signing of the 1996 Peace Accords, ending the armed conflict by the government and opposition forces, brought new hope to union leaders—yet since then, groups have become more passive and the government is trying to weaken or eliminate unions, which represent only 2 percent of the workforce, says Homer Fuentes, coordinator of a Danish trade union-funded project to organize maquilas in Guatemala.

In addition to recent massive privatization of government services, Fuentes cites more direct government interference: “Sometimes they provoke unions to take action, then legally fire workers and the union disappears.” The government also offers money to union leaders, already desperately poor, to leave their unions, says Fuentes, speaking to the STITCH delegation at a meeting over dinner in Guatemala City. Outside the restaurant, one of the nation’s ubiquitous camouflage-attired guards—holding a semiautomatic weapon—casually paces in front of the window.

Creating An Organizing Culture

Even while under attack by a hostile government, unions also face another challenge: Changing their structure to adapt to organizing. Historically, unions in Guatemala have relied on workers coming to them for help in joining a union. When they do, union leaders repeat the nation’s labor law requirement: Sign up 25 people (no matter the size of the worksite) who want to join a union, then register with the government, says Marion Traub-Werner, STITCH’s staff person in Central America and delegation coordinator.

“The next day, they hold a rally,” says Bob Perillo, a Guatemala-based representative of the U.S./Labor Education in the Americas Project. “Management identifies them and fires them—and the union won’t be able to organize for another 10 years.”

The basic components of a U.S. organizing campaign—making home visits, keeping lists of addresses and evaluating the level of workers’ interest in supporting a union—all are tactics Guatemala unions still must learn.

	Breaking barriers: As a union organizer, Marie Mejia says on of the biggest obstacles she faces is to show that "even though I'm a woman, I can do the job."

Through the help of STITCH, the Danish maquila project and the Solidarity Center, FESTRAS recently has become the only federation in the country to train paid organizers. The move was especially significant for FESTRAS because it also marked the first time the federation—which represents an almost entirely male membership—reached out to a primarily female workforce.

“The majority of people who work in maquilas, they live in subhuman conditions,” says FESTRAS board member Manuel Zetino. “Workers have very little formal education and don’t know what their rights are. For us, it’s an important new project to have this organizing team.”

Organizing women also means hiring women organizers—an unheard-of role for a woman in a country where, until maquilas began flourishing 10 years ago, women rarely worked in the formal sector.

Marie Mejia, one of two FESTRAS organizers, says her family opposed her decision to become a maquila organizer. Now, she faces another obstacle: “Being in FESTRAS, it is a challenge to show even though I’m a woman, I can do the job.”

A former maquila worker, Mejia endures a grueling two-hour bus ride to Villa Nueva, the area that encompasses Alioto, and often must visit workers at night—dangerous even when accompanied by a male organizer because of the high crime rate.

Once at the women’s homes, she must request permission of the husband to speak to his wife. “If the husband refuses, I ask the woman separately if I can talk with her. Sometimes she says ‘yes,’ sometimes, ‘no.’”

The globalization of Maquilas

A few miles from Alioto, inside the sleek glass and concrete office building of Guatemala’s export trade association Agexpront, representatives of the textile industry have prepared a slick, 20-minute PowerPoint presentation. Images of clean, well-lit factories and healthy workers are accompanied by English text that describes the main objective of its 250 members: to become the center of operations for the apparel and textile industry in the region by 2005.

That goal would get a big boost with passage in the U.S. Congress of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, now being crafted by corporate chieftains throughout the Western Hemisphere. The President Bush-backed extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement would cover 34 countries in North, Central and South America. With FTAA in place, Guatemala and all of Central America increasingly would become magnets for foreign-owned companies that seek to maximize profits through the FTAA’s reduced tariffs, says Steve Coats, U.S./LEAP director.

	A long struggle: Textile workers rally outside a Phillips Van Heusen plan in 1997.

FTAA is another component in the global corporate effort to transfer work to countries where labor and human rights regularly are violated—and the reason U.S. workers are pushing the U.S. Congress, World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund to make those rights part of enforceable international trade rules. To ensure workers are aware of their rights—including the right to collective bargaining—unions worldwide launched a campaign in May to distribute a poster bearing the International Labor Organization’s “Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.” (To download a copy of the poster and a screen saver, go to www.aflcio.org/iloposter/iloscreensaver.)

At the same time, lending policies of such entities as the World Bank require countries to enact brutal fiscal restraints to qualify for funds—policies that disproportionately affect the poor. In Guatemala, the World Bank is “one of the principal actors in the development of fiscal policy in the country,” says Mario Jorge Salazar, a researcher at the Investigative Counsel for Central American Development. Guatemala’s proposed 2 percentage point sales tax increase—from 10 percent to 12 percent—is “supported by the World Bank,” Salazar says. While the bank pushes taxes onto the consumer, he says, it “discourages any collection of tariffs or taxation on production.”

Calling for debt relief and fighting for trade policies that don’t exploit workers, global activists now are focusing on the FTAA, which as structured would compound obstacles women face seeking to support their families. Under NAFTA, export processing zones have employed large numbers of young women—between the ages of 16 and 25—who earn 20 percent to 30 percent less than men. Women like those who work alongside Gloria.

“The STITCH delegation visited women in the early stage of organizing a union,” says Traub-Werner. “The workers we visited felt encouraged by our visit—it was proof that they are not alone. We hope that participants return to their unions and organizations and spread the word about women workers’ lives and struggles in Central America.”

Making it Happen at Home

For the activists who took part in the STITCH delegation, taking action is the natural follow-up to an intense nine days of listening, observing and learning. Throughout the trip—which began in Guatemala City and extended to the Spanish colonial capital of Antigua, the high mountain city of Quezaltenango and the sweltering border town Tecun Uman—group members repeatedly asked how U.S. women leaders could help. They wanted to know whether their actions to boycott labels, urge corporate responsibility for companies contracting with maquilas and educate consumers made any difference.

Several participants were surprised when Guatemalan union leaders and others said it did.

“You kind of feel like you’re isolated and think, ‘What good are you really doing?’ thousands of miles away, as a group of 20 people standing in front of a store, saying, ‘Don’t buy this brand of clothing,’ ” says Lowe. “You feel it doesn’t make a difference—and what we’re hearing is that, at least in a small way, it does.”

For Moye, “It’s so important to meet people who are experiencing these violations, so we can see how to be helpful and not just treat them as charity.”

Even before she had her plane ticket, Lowe had lined up 20 groups—including her church, human rights organizations and union-related committees—where she planned to make presentations based on her trip. Moye says she foresees leading workshops, as Amnesty’s southern region expands its expertise in Central America.

A college sophomore, Lessin-Joseph says she “has an obligation to learn more.” She plans to build on her experiences in Guatemala, which reinforced her awareness that “what workers are facing in the U.S. is directly related to what workers are facing in Central America.”

“I was totally shocked by their demands—workers just want what they’re supposed to get,” says Lessin-Joseph. “A year ago if I had come here, I’d be so sad. Now I’m mad. How often can you cry? It’s more effective to be angry about a situation and do something about it.”