Informal Workers and Collective Action

A Global Perspective

Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman, Martha A. Chen

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501707957
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Informal Workers and Collective Action features nine cases of collective action to improve the status and working conditions of informal workers. Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman, and Martha A. Chen set the stage by defining informal work and describing the types of organizations that represent the interests of informal workers and the lessons that may be learned from the examples presented in the book. Cases from a diverse set of countries—Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Liberia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uruguay—focus on two broad types of informal workers: "waged" workers, including port workers, beer promoters, hospitality and retail workers, domestic workers, low-skilled public sector workers, and construction workers; and self-employed workers, including street vendors, waste recyclers, and minibus drivers.These cases demonstrate that workers and labor organizations around the world are rediscovering the lessons of early labor organizers on how to aggregate individuals' sense of injustice into forms of collective action that achieve a level of power that can yield important changes in their work and lives. I nformal Workers and Collective Action makes a strong argument that informal workers, their organizations, and their campaigns represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century.Contributors
Gocha Aleksandria, Georgian Trade Union Confederation
Martha A. Chen, Harvard University and WIEGO
Sonia Maria Dias, WIEGO and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Adrienne E. Eaton, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Mary Evans, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Janice Fine, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Mary Goldsmith, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco
Daniel Hawkins, National Trade Union School of Colombia
Elza Jgerenaia, Labor and Employment Policy Department for the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs, Republic of Georgia
Stephen J. King, Georgetown University
Allison J. Petrozziello, UN Women and the Center for Migration Observation and Social Development
Pewee Reed, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Republic of Liberia
Sahra Ryklief, International Federation of Workers' Education Associations
Susan J. Schurman, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Vera Alice Cardoso Silva, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Milton Weeks, Devin Corporation

Part I
FORMALIZING OR REFORMALIZING DISTANCED EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS

1

PORT WORKERS IN COLOMBIA

Reinstatement as Formal Workers

Daniel Hawkins

The privatization of Colombia’s port sector in 1993 inaugurated a process of pervasive employment flexibilization. The thousands of port workers, previously unionized on a mass scale and protected by collective bargaining agreements and indefinite employment contracts, witnessed a rapid transformation in their working conditions, highlighted by the explosion of nonstandard work contracts, informal hiring and firing, and the gradual asphyxiation or transformation of labor unions. In Buenaventura, home to the country’s busiest seaport terminal, the flexibilization of labor relations took on a decidedly robust form. A multitude of large, medium, small, and even one-person firms sprang up within the port, many of which specialized in nothing more than creating and expanding lines of labor intermediation: hiring out low-paid, temporary workers to the formally constituted port operating firms.

In response to the changing conditions at the port, the embattled labor unions, bereft of space for collective bargaining and faced with a dwindling pool of formally contracted workers, began to mimic many of the labor intermediation practices of other firms. Before long, the conversion process was complete: for all practical purposes these unions had become intermediaries themselves, and their registered members merely workers supplied to other firms under service contracts. As this small Pacific coast town grew at a staggering rate, unemployment reached untenable proportions. Intermediary labor firms responded by intensifying the exploitation of workers, lowering wage rates, hiring workers on day-based or even tasked-based oral contracts, most of which were entirely informal and did not adhere to the laws regarding social security benefits.

Faced with such deplorable working conditions, a group of longtime port workers in Cartagena came together eight years ago to discuss the founding of a new and novel union, one that would represent workers by pressuring the principal port operating firms—in Cartagena, Santa Marta, Barranquilla, and Buenaventura—to end labor intermediation and directly hire workers via fixed-employment contracts with all the associated legal social security benefits. This union, Union Portuaria (UP), formed with the support of the US-based Solidarity Center, began with a double-pronged campaign to affiliate port workers and also pressure for the formalization of work at the port. The year 2012 saw the recommencement of worker protest and strike actions, leading to the direct hiring of approximately eighty previously subcontracted machinery operators and the promise of future employer-union negotiations. But the employer response has been both furtive and assertive. New types of companies replaced the now outlawed, fictitious cooperatives, while leading firms continued their anti-union practices, seeking to fire or blacklist any worker affiliated with the UP.

At the same time, the long-stalled free trade agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the United States provided the political impetus necessary to begin a major reshuffling of the manner in which the Colombian state regulated the labor market. Pressured to more assertively protect and guarantee union rights and worker protections, the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, signed a Labor Action Plan with President Obama in April 2011. Along with various normative reforms, this plan focused on improving the situation for workers in five key economic sectors, one of which was the port industry.

This chapter describes the multiple forms of contracting and resultant labor relations present at the Buenaventura port, focusing on the still prevalent anti-union tactics adopted by many port-based firms and the ambivalent role adopted by the Colombian Labor Ministry. The chapter first provides a brief overview of the economic, social, and labor contexts in Colombia and then illustrates the manner in which labor intermediation takes place, both normatively and in practice. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the UP’s worker protest campaign for the formalization of work contracts and the termination of anti-union practices at the port. The chapter concludes with reflections on the successes, failures, and limitations of the UP-led worker formalization campaign.

Colombia’s Economy and Labor Market

In recent years, the economy of Colombia, Latin America’s third most populous country, has displayed a worrying trend of sustained economic growth, measured by an increase in its gross domestic product (GDP), alongside a labor market plagued by high levels of unemployment and informality. Indeed, while the economy grew 4 percent and 4.7 percent in 2012 and 2013 respectively, the unemployment rate was 10.4 percent and 9.6 percent for the same period, rates that are way above the regional average.¹ Alongside such high and ingrained levels of unemployment, the massive amount of labor informality throughout the country has meant that unprotected employment² and “indecent work” have become the norm for many of Colombia’s workers. According to the National Department for Statistics (DANE),³ in Colombia’s thirteen metropolitan areas in 2013, 49.4 percent of all economically active people worked in the informal economy. If DANE included rural areas and used a more inclusive definition of informal work, this level would increase substantially.⁴

The Colombian Labor Movement

Today, after decades of extreme repression and state-condoned harassment, Colombia’s union movement finds itself in a period of relative respite and even sees a glimmering of newfound possibilities for renewed organizational strategies. Nevertheless, in order to more accurately locate this recent flicker of opportunity, a brief synopsis of the systematic exclusion of Colombia’s union movement, both from the workplace and the formal spheres of politics, must be offered.

In Colombia the union movement has experienced historical constraints of a severity more pronounced than in any other country of the world. While many unionists across the globe face harassment, employer and even state repression, and the structural hostilities wrought by neoliberal labor market flexibilization processes, unionists in Colombia have had to confront these issues in a socio-political and cultural climate of extreme anti-union practices. The number of trade unionists killed in Colombia is more than double that for the rest of the world combined. Between 1979 and 2010, 2,944 Colombian unionists were murdered, 229 disappeared by force, and a further 280 had attempts made on their lives.⁵ Workers must contend not only with fear of losing their jobs when they embark on union organizing, but also fear for their personal safety.

In the face of such victimization, the Colombian union density and collective bargaining coverage have declined precipitously in recent decades. In 2014 the unionization rate came to only 4 percent of the economically active population, one of the lowest union density rates in the hemisphere. Furthermore, the vast majority of Colombian unions are small and therefore face huge obstacles when it comes to collective bargaining. Eighty percent of all unions⁶ have fewer than one hundred members, and only a little more than 627,000 workers are covered by some form of collective contract,⁷ a figure that comes to only 3 percent of the total workforce.

The industrial relations framework in Colombia offers little space for effective union organization. To create a union, there must be a minimum of twenty-five workers in the firm, and unions are not permitted to negotiate collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) by industry or sector, a factor that significantly lowers the rate of CBA coverage across the economy and the unions’ ability to take wages out of competition.

The union movement in Colombia is institutionally divided into three confederations: Unitary Confederation of Workers (CUT), General Confederation of Workers (CGT), and the Confederation of Colombian Workers (CTC). The CUT is the largest of the three and was founded in 1985–1986.⁸ The CUT is the most politically leftist of the Colombian union confederations and groups together some of the largest union federations of Colombia. The CGT, created in 1971, is numerically the second largest confederation and groups together twenty relatively small union federations. Lastly, the CTC, the oldest confederation, was created during the initial period of welfare-like political openings during the first Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo government (1934–1938). The CTC has seventeen affiliated union federations, all of which are relatively small both numerically and in terms of their political influence.

Recent Developments

Following the trend to advance the global integration of economies, the first-term government (2002–2006) of President Alvaro Uribe launched an agenda that included the negotiation of various free trade agreements (FTAs), with emphasis on the world’s largest and most prosperous economies, especially the United States, Europe, and Canada. Even though the Colombia-US FTA negotiations ended in February 2006 and the agreement was signed by both parties in November of that year, it took nearly six years before it received both US congressional approval and US presidential ratification.⁹

The principal reason for the slow passage of the FTA was the vociferous opposition to an FTA with Colombia, given the country’s deplorable human and labor rights record. Indeed, the vehement opposition to the ratification of this and other FTAs by local and international unions and by social movements brought together, under a consolidated union front, a transnational advocacy network (TAN),¹⁰ which simultaneously opposed the ratification of the FTA while also calling for concrete improvements to be made to both the Colombian legal framework and the state’s effectiveness in enforcing its labor laws.

During Uribe’s two presidential terms, there was little concrete improvement in the protection of labor rights. First, the Uribe government accorded the newly created Ministry of Social Protection the power to negate the registration of 253 unions between 2002 and 2007, in clear violation of the 1991 Colombian Constitution and the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 87. Second, the Uribe government implemented a state-funded criminal web of espionage, harassment, and murder of numerous unionists, other human rights defenders, and leading figures of the Colombian opposition. Numerous unions and their leaders were illegally spied upon by the State Department of Security (DAS), and a list of twenty-two unionists was handed to paramilitary leaders by high-level DAS officials.¹¹ Last, the regime propelled a prolific expansion of associated work cooperatives (CTAs), legal entities that made a mockery of the historical conception of the cooperative movement inspired by Robert Owen in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

CTAs in Colombia

CTAs in Colombia have a long legal history dating from 1931. It was not until the present millennium, however, that they really took hold, just as their “social objectives” became tainted. Initially, perhaps, CTAs were promoted as true cooperatives, offering workers the possibilities of forming collective associations of mutual benefit. Nonetheless, especially during the Uribe governments, this conception of workers’ cooperatives was set aside by a double drive to cut business costs while simultaneously crippling union activity.

CTAs were not bound by the Substantive Work Code (CST) because the “associated workers” were simultaneously workers and, in theory, owners of the cooperative. “Workers” in a CTA were thus not paid a salary but rather received “compensation,” which did not include any of the protections provided by the CST.¹² Firms took advantage of the legal status of CTAs by outsourcing work to them.

Under Uribe, the number of CTAs expanded from 710 (with 54,000 “associates”) to 4,000 (610,000 associates).¹³ The expansion of CTAs during the Uribe period, especially the hundreds that obtained contracts with public entities,¹⁴ opened up a new sphere for political influence and enrichment. At the same time, congressional proposals to reform the CTAs were unceremoniously dropped.¹⁵

Alongside the opportunities for patronage and corruption, the CTA model allowed businesses to save substantial money on wage costs. There were no requirements to pay parafiscal costs,¹⁶ weekend pay rates, night rates and, prior to the 2010 and 2011 reforms, social security contributions, which created savings of up to 50 percent in overall labor costs. The Colombian port sector was one of the industries most plagued by the expansion of CTAs, especially after the privatization process the sector underwent during the 1990s. In 2011, it became illegal for CTAs to use personnel for permanent core business activities.

The Transformation of Work in Colombia’s Port Sector Firms

The firm at the top of the ladder at Buenaventura’s main seaport, and the one under discussion in this chapter, is the regional port firm of Buenaventura S.A., Sociedad Portuaria Regional de Buenaventura S.A. (SPRBuen).¹⁷ This firm was constituted in December 1993, after the privatization of the state-owned port firm Colpuertos (in 1991). The SPRBuen originally signed a contract for the concession of the Buenaventura port with the general superintendent of ports for a twenty-year period. In 2008, the Ministry for Transport of Colombia extended the concession until February 2034. The SPRBuen is constituted in the following manner: 83 percent private funds (importers, exporters, port operating companies, naval line operators, export workers, and other “natural” people); 15 percent belonging to the Mayor’s Office of Buenaventura; and the remaining 2 percent belonging to the Ministry of Transport. According to a study undertaken by the Superintendence for Industry and Commerce, it transports 60 percent of Colombia’s foreign commerce.¹⁸ The SPRBuen also has controlling shares of a number of port operating firms including TECSA (Terminal Especializado de Contenedores de Buenaventura S.A.), ZELSA Ltda (Zona de Expansion Logist...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Broadening Labor’s Repertoire?
• Part I FORMALIZING OR REFORMALIZING DISTANCED EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS
• Part II SECURING RECOGNITION AND RIGHTS FOR THE SELF-EMPLOYED
• Conclusion: Expanding the Boundaries of Labor Organizing and Collective Bargaining
• Notes
• Notes on Contributors
• Index