July 2003

The Salvadoran Labor Minister has rejected an application from telecommunications workers to grant them legal recognition as an industrial union, SUTTEL-SITCOM. The union states that the Ministry rejected the application in late May on spurious grounds and has appealed the decision. SUTTEL earlier fought a two-year battle to eventually achieve recognition as an enterprise union while also fighting against the privatization of the Salvadoran telephone company. The new application seeks to form an industrial union before further privatization of the telecommunications industry in El Salvador. At presstime, the union's appeal was still pending.

Within 72 hours after banana workers filed requests for contract negotiations on June 20, 2003, companies owned by Ecuador's richest man, Alvaro Noboa, fired all the workers who signed the petitions. While the Ecuadorian Labor Ministry has declared that the June 23, 2003 firings improper, the government has no legal authority to require reinstatement of the fired workers. Noboa can instead opt to pay the workers severance and perhaps a small fine. The workers are nevertheless demanding reinstatement and have periodically blocked access to the plantations. The workers are being supported by FENACLE, the Ecuadorian campesino group leading banana worker organizing

The Matamoros Garment factory in Puebla, Mexico that closed in March 2003 shortly after workers began organizing remains shuttered. The operator of the factory, which supplied Puma and others, is accused of counterfeit labeling and has fled the scene. Hopes that the factory might reopen have faded. Some of the workers have taken jobs at nearby Mex Mode (formerly Kuk Dong), where workers won a major victory with a contract in September 2001 after an international campaign led by USAS and directed at Nike.

Workers producing brand-name apparel for U.S. consumers in maquila factories in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have recently achieved or are on the verge of achieving several major victories for worker justice and basic rights.

The number of assassinations of Colombian trade unionists has decreased since President Alvaro Uribe took office last fall. In the first four months of this year 16 trade unionists were murdered compared to 97 in the same time period last year. Analysts believe that this welcome development is nevertheless further evidence that paramilitary groups are responsible for the assassinations of Colombian trade unionists. Dr. Carlos Franco of the Presidential Human Rights Program in Colombia has explained that paramilitaries are interested in Uribe's offer to negotiate with them. They are especially interested in receiving amnesty for past crimes and are therefore attempting to maintain a somewhat lower profile. Yet they are still attacking civilians, including trade unionists, and other human rights violations have reportedly risen as paramilitaries have turned to less violent forms of persecution such as death threats, detentions, forced displacement, and harassment.