Workers at a Guatemala City clothing factory signed a collective bargaining agreement in August with Phillips-Van Heusen, the plant's U.S. owner. The union contract, the first in Guatemala's maquila sector, represents a victory both for the workers involved as well as for an emerging style of labor organizing.
     The Guatemalan government first certified in 1991 that workers at the Camisas Modernas plant had organized a union. Yet it took six years of struggle against a militantly anti-union management to achieve the August contract.
     Key to the workers' victory was support from labor and solidarity groups that put pressure on P-VH in the U.S. The fact that P-VH CEO Bruce Klatsky sits on the board of directors of Human Rights Watch helped immensely. Activists challenged HRW to conduct an independent examination of P-VH's Guatemalan operations, to which reluctantly Klatsky agreed. The resulting report, issued in March, corroborated workers' complaints of mistreatment and union-busting, and Klatsky finally agreed to recognize and negotiate with the union. August's contract was the result.
     In Nicaragua, after five years of struggle, workers in March signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Taiwanese-owned Fortex maquila. The victory came after the U.S.-based Witness for Peace twice asked supporters to fax the Nicaraguan Ministerio de Trabajo and plant owners, demanding the union be recognized.
     Such "cross-border organizing," which combines local union activism with pressure on parent companies abroad, may be the only way that maquila workers can claim their fair share in the economic bonanza that the textile assembly industry has brought to the region in the last decade.
     Regional governments, seeing maquilas as a magic solution to unemployment, haven't gone out of their way to help workers. Labor inspectors are usually unwilling or unable to force companies to comply with labor codes. As a result, maquila managers have a free hand to respond to union organizing, and have resorted to repression when they deemed it necessary. At least one Guatemalan maquila organizer has been murdered. Others have been raped, beaten, or threatened, and countless numbers have been fired.
     Organizing by male-dominated unions has made little difference in the lives of the more than 270,000 workers, most of them young women, who labor in maquilas in the five Central American countries. Many traditional unions have seen the maquila workers more as a source of dues than as workers needing organization and representation.
     When workers do organize, plant managers can simply pull out. Two different U.S.-owned maquilas pulled out of Guatemala in the last two years, owing hundreds of workers several weeks of salary and severance pay. When workers took their protest to the steps of the U.S. embassy, diplomats made empty promises to help.
     In recent years, as word of workers' mistreatment reached northern consumers, apparel companies like Levi Strauss and Nike began adopting codes of conduct to govern overseas operations they owned or with which they contracted. Other types of businesses also adopted codes, such as the yuppie coffee giant Starbucks, which set standards for its suppliers in Guatemala. Maquila associations in El Salvador and Honduras, catching the image wave, adopted their own codes earlier this year. Yet a U.S. labor organizer working in Central America reported that "lots of codes are simply public relations gestures."
     Moreover, the company officials or private auditing firms that monitored compliance with the codes were not very demanding. "Even the most respected monitor in the world, if paid by the company being monitored, is not independent," commented Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees President Jay Mazur.
     The most successful monitoring program in the industry was established in March 1996, when the Independent Monitoring Group (IMG), a mostly church-based committee, began monitoring Mandarin International, a Taiwanese maquila in San Salvador that sews garments for The Gap, a San Francisco-based clothing retailer. Since the IMG began its work, fired union activists have been rehired, bathrooms have been unlocked, and workers report their human rights are being respected.
     In Guatemala, a coalition of church, human rights, and women's groups has been meeting privately for months to set up a professional team that will be ready to provide monitoring when called upon.
     In Honduras, human rights activists announced an independent monitoring program in June. Representatives of the Comite para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras (CODEH) and the U.S.-based National Labor Committee (NLC) set up monitoring at the Kimi maquila in La Lima, whose Korean owners were reportedly about to lose contracts with J.C. Penney, Macy's, and Bloomingdales because of bad publicity about the plant's repression of union organizing.
     The Honduran monitoring program provoked other maquila owners to complain that the arrangement violated national sovereignty and demand that the government throw out the foreigners involved.
     A foreign labor organizer in the region, who praised the IMG's work in El Salvador, criticized the Honduran program as a "paternalistic" deal between factory owners and monitors established without involvement of workers at the plant. He said it represented the "worst case scenario" of independent monitoring. 
     Julio Cesar Rodríguez, secretary of the Federación Independiente de Trabajadores de Honduras (FITH), the union that had long been organizing inside Kimi, admitted the FITH wasn't consulted ahead of time. "They set up the monitoring behind our backs," said Rodríguez. Only after CODEH and NLC officials showed up later to explain the arrangement to union officials did workers finally accept the monitoring as worthwhile.
     Activists insist that cross-border organizing has limits. They argue that independent monitoring shouldn't do the work of government labor ministries, nor should monitors organize workers themselves nor mediate on their behalf. "International solidarity can tie consumers in the north with those who sew their clothes in the south," said Sharon Hostetter of Witness for Peace. "Codes and monitoring aren't the end goal of what we're doing. Rather, it's empowering the workers to organize and negotiate and thus solve their own problems."

Sidebar: Maquila workers losing hope 
for fair treatment

     Maria Ofelia del Cid spent 11 months assembling designer jeans in a Honduran maquila. "From the beginning the treatment was bad," said del Cid, "but we thought we could get used to it. It didn't turn out that way."
     Del Cid said supervisors in the Chikorh factory, a joint venture of Honduran, Chinese, and Korean investors, would yell at any of the plant's 250 workers who made mistakes or worked slowly. "And if we spoke back to them they yelled at us that we lacked respect," she said. "They couldn't talk to us girls without yelling and insulting us at the same time."
     Del Cid, 18, said any request from a worker was dealt with harshly. "I once asked for permission to leave work early because I was sick," she said. "And they suspended me for three days without pay as punishment."
     Along with other maquila workers interviewed here, del Cid said compulsory overtime was common. 
     On January 24, del Cid began her regular shift at 7:30 am. But work didn't end at 4:30 pm as it normally did. Instead, according to del Cid, plant supervisors told the young women they would have to work all night to finish an overdue order. "They gave us some cold plantains and rice for dinner, but I didn't want to eat it," she recalled.
     She and three coworkers decided to leave the plant at 6:30 pm, unwilling to work into the night. When she returned the next day, she was told she had been fired. She protested and waited outside the plant gate. Two hours later, plant officials told her she was only suspended for three days, without pay.
     Del Cid said that she and her three coworkers, who were told the same thing, did not accept their punishment. So they went to the Ministerio de Trabajo and returned to the plant with a government inspector the morning of January 27. Del Cid said the inspector was told no one could attend him until the afternoon. When the group returned at 2 pm, they were told no one would be available all day. Del Cid said the inspector then typed up an official memo regarding the workers' complaints and the maquila's response. And there it ended. The government did nothing more. Score one for the maquila.
     Because she claims she was fired unjustly, Del Cid said the maquila owes her 2,000 lempiras (about $150) in back pay, indemnification, and unpaid vacation allowance. Another worker, Maria Aristides Mejia, who is pregnant, believes she is owed over 8,000 lempiras.
     Del Cid said she faces three choices. She can wait for the government to act. "But they aren't going to do anything," she said. "They just play with you."
     Alternately, she can hire a private attorney who will take half of whatever award she wins. Or she can accept the maquila's offer of 900 lempiras if she signs a paper stating that she voluntarily quit her job.
     Although she doubts the maquila will make good on its promise to pay that sum, del Cid is ready to settle. "I've lost hope," she said despairingly. 
     According to Cristina Arias Rodriguez, another of the fired workers, the women's situation is made worse "because no one helps us. We can't form unions because we're too afraid of being fired and blacklisted. And in the plants that have unions the union leaders have all sold out. They've given up being union leaders in exchange for getting rich. That's why people don't believe in unions anymore."
     Asked about del Cid's treatment, Chikorh President Daniel Quinto said that if a worker "doesn't collaborate with our internal work rules, they can be punished." Explained Quinto, "If the company misses shipping an order on time, it loses a percentage, it loses credibility, and there's no work. Where does that leave us? For four people we cannot risk 250 people."