Central American Labor Pact Stirs Strong Emotions

Workers Find Fear, Hope in U.S.-Backed Free-Trade Deal

GUATEMALA CITY -- For 18 years, Sara Adela Rosales sat behind a small, black sewing machine in a factory here piecing together pants. Six days a week, she carefully sewed seams and hems and passed the trousers down an assembly line of about 25 other women. The factory she worked for, Automatizaciónes Industriales, then shipped the garments to their clients, mostly U.S. retailers.

Rosales, 62, said she often earned about $150 a month, less than the country's minimum wage, and was sometimes forced to work 12-hour days without full compensation. After losing her job recently, she was left with no savings, hundreds of dollars of unpaid property taxes and no hope of getting out of debt.

"For all the work we did, the salary wasn't fair," Rosales said. "They had us work sometimes into the night if they needed us to increase production. Sometimes they would pay us more, but it is what they wanted to pay. They aren't going to lose [money]. The worker loses."

Complaints by Rosales and other central American workers about abusive labor practices lie at the crux of the debate over the Central American Free Trade Agreement, an accord that would sharply reduce and in many cases eliminate trade barriers between the United States, five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic. While other recently-negotiated trade agreements with countries such as Australia, Singapore and Chile moved smoothly through Congress, CAFTA faces an uphill fight.

Sitting in her sparse cement home in a town on the outskirts of the capital here, Rosales, like many other Central American workers, has found herself intertwined in an intense trade debate with great political implications. CAFTA was negotiated with poor countries that have dismal histories of worker treatment. The pact's critics say it does not sufficiently protect the rights of workers like Rosales and as a result would provide incentives for companies to migrate to countries with the lowest wages and weakest unions. Its backers counter that by giving Central America assured access to U.S. market, workers such as Rosales would be more likely to have jobs. Rosales is also torn.

"There are advantages and disadvantages," she said of her factory job and the trade agreement that could create more such employment. The textile factory she worked for became one of 20 in Guatemala to shut down in recent months. It went broke because it could not compete with factories in other parts of the world where people work equally grueling schedules for even less.

Out of work for nearly six months now, Rosales believes more employment is what her country needs. Working at the factory helped Rosales leave an impoverished country town in the mountains outside of Guatemala City and build a life in a simple home with a corrugated roof, electricity and an eight-inch television in her bedroom. Outside her door are similar square homes with metal doors that belong mostly to others who work in the factories surrounding Villa Nueva, a town with paved streets and fast-food restaurants that grew because of the apparel industry.

Rosales also believes, however, that she and other garment manufacturers should be paid more. The average pay for manufacturing-sector workers in Guatemala was about $244 a month in 2002, according to the International Labor Organization's latest report.

Never before has the United States negotiated a free-trade deal with countries so poor. The nations that have struck free-trade agreements with Washington in recent years come mostly from the "middle income" or wealthy ranks. Even Mexico had income per capita of about $4,200 when NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was negotiated in the early 1990s, said Sandra Polaski, a trade specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. By contrast, income per capita in Nicaragua is about $400, while the comparable figure in Honduras is about $900, slightly less than levels in El Salvador in Guatemala.

Union leaders and labor activists here say their efforts to organize workers are often thwarted by powerful business owners. Union affiliates are sometimes threatened or fired and have their names placed on blacklists that make it difficult for them to find other jobs.

"The right that seems to be violated most often is the freedom to associate and organize," said Mary Bellman, a Guatemala-based coordinator for Stitch, a women's labor rights organization. "All of the repercussions and the ways companies respond are almost always illegal. The implementation of local labor law is so poor."

The region has a long record of hostility to unions. Last year a U.S. union official organizing workers in El Salvador was killed. No independent trade unions have been registered there in the past four years, said Mark Levinson, chief economist of Unite Here, a union representing U.S. workers in the apparel and other industries. In Guatemala, two collective-bargaining agreements exist in the country's more than 200 textile factories.