Banana Worker Justice

While friends, families and couples celebrate Valentine’s Day, Colombian workers, unions, and NGOs are joining together to commemorate something different this February 14th: the International Day of the Flower Worker.

Thugs entered the Guacarí flower plantation in Colombia yesterday and suppressed striking workers. In response to increasing violence and financial pressure, every permanent Guacarí flower worker resigned and was replaced by subcontracted labor. Strikes continue on at least three other Floramerica-Sunburst plantations.

Hundreds of flower workers in Colombia have gone on strike to protest the failure of the country’s largest grower to pay wages and legally-required benefits. The recent strikes began on November 16 when flower workers at the Guacarí plantation in Zipaquira, Colombia, near Bogotá, went on strike in response to Floramerica’s labor rights violations.

After more than twenty days on strike, members of UNTRAFLORES continue to occupy one of the Benilda plantations because the company has not paid all of their August salary or what it owes in healthcare for the workers, leaving many without health services.  The company, owned by one of Colombia’s wealthiest families, is also pressuring its 500 contracted workers to accept partial sever

On the May 6th, 2009, workers from the newly formed union SINTRAFLORES, who are employed by two flower companies, Camino Real and Degaflores, went on strike because their employers had not paid their salaries or benefits.

Colombian flower workers affiliated to the independent union organization UNTRAFLORES won their fourth collective bargaining agreement

As part of the Economic Justice for Flower Workers Campaign, USLEAP kicks off its worker tour "A Mother's Day Story."

Shortly after two major contract victories on Dole flower plantations in Colombia in July, Dole Fresh Flowers announced plans to sell its global flower operations.

Workers at two Dole plantations are celebrating today after signing contracts on the Splendor and La Fragancia plantations last week.

When a small union formed at the Bochica Farms plantation in La Ceja, Antioquia in January of 2007, workers immediately began to receive death threats.