Turn Valentine's Day into International Flower Workers Day: Take Action Now!

This Valentine’s Day, take action to support flower workers in Colombia who tend, cut, pack, and ship flowers to consumers in the U.S.  Flower workers, most of whom are women, are right now working 16- to 18-hour days for poverty-level wages to send flowers to the U.S. market for February 14. Turn Valentine’s Day into International Flower Workers Day and take action to support flower workers and other workers in Colombia who are demanding fair wages, equal treatment, justice, and dignity.

Act Now: Send a letter to the Colombian Labor Minister!

Flower workers in Colombia

Sixty percent of all flowers bought in the U.S. come from Colombia, where nearly 100,000 workers, mostly women, are right now working long days to cut and ship flowers for Valentine’s Day. Workers don’t earn enough to support their families, work long hours, suffer sexual harassment, and are fired when they try to organize to improve wages and conditions

The Cactus Corporation and Colombian unions commemorate Valentine’s Day as International Flower Workers Day in order to expose the conditions that face flower workers. Workers in Colombia are not asking you to stop buying flowers this Valentine’s Day, as that won’t help them. Rather, send a message to the Colombian government to crack down on employers who violate the law, who fail to respect worker rights and fail to treat their workers with dignity and justice.

Even after workers lose their jobs, employers violate their rights: the largest flower operation in Colombia, Floramerica, still owes back pay and severance to hundreds of workers it dismissed a year ago. It took 200 days of a 24-hour sit in for workers at one plantation, Splendor, to win their back pay in June 2011, but hundreds of workers remain unpaid.

The Cactus Corporation is a non-profit organization in Colombia that has been supporting flower workers for over a decade. They initiated International Flower Workers Day in collaboration with Colombian unions and this year released a series of videos available on YouTube, in Spanish with rough English subtitles. Cactus requests the support of the international community, especially the U.S., which imports 90% of Colombia's flowers, to support flower workers, particularly the struggle for justice fought by hundreds of workers who lost their jobs when FlorAmerica dismissed them and closed plantations in 2010 and 2011. For background information on women workers in the flower sector, see USLEAP’s report Gendered Injustice and the International Labor Rights Forum Fairness in Flowers campaign.

Labor Rights, Colombia, and Free Trade

Colombia is notorious for worker rights violations, with more trade unionists murdered in Colombia every year than any other country in the world. The Colombian government has promised to respect worker rights as a condition for entering into a new Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., passed by the U.S. Congress in October 2011. It signed a Labor Action Plan in April 2011 that addressed violence and impunity and recognized that the flower sector requires special attention to ensure compliance with the law and respect for worker rights.  Although worker rights advocates and unions consider the Plan inadequate, the Colombian government should achieve the objectives of the Plan before the Obama Administration implements the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.

One major source of violations in the flower sector are employers who evade the legally-required benefits and basic rights by treating permanent employees as short-term workers, using a variety of practices including subcontractors, temporary agencies, and “cooperatives.” Under the Labor Action Plan, the Colombian government agreed to hire hundreds of more labor inspectors and reform its laws and practices to address this problem.

The flower sector is only one of many sectors where worker rights are violated. This alert and the letter to the Labor Minister focus on two others:

(1) Oil Workers at Pacific Rubiales

Pacific Rubiales is a Canadian-based oil company with operations in Colombia. The company and government’s failure over many years to address long-standing worker complaints led the workers to form a union, but 1,000 workers have been fired (500 were fired just after the signing of the Free Trade Agreement in October 2011) and 3,000 more workers were forced to resign from the union of their choice, USO, and join a company-backed “union” or lose their jobs. Union supporters have been threatened by security forces aided by government security. The government recently announced a paltry fine of $65,000 against company contractors for failure to pay overtime and health and safety violations, but the government has not addressed the more fundamental worker rights violations. A recent Latin America Working Group delegation revealed that Colombian human rights defenders, including unionists, continue to face illegal government surveillance, threats, violence, and assassination. 

(2) City Workers in Cali

Workers in the city of Cali have faced violence and oppression for years for exercising their basic rights to form a union and improve conditions. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, over 15 members of SINTRAEMCALI have been forced into exile, 8 killed, and more than 100 were threatened since 2004. The lawyer in charge of their case was fatally injured in May 2011. A court ruled in October 2011 that the city must reinstate 51 fired workers but the city has refused to do so.

Take action - send a letter to the Colombian Labor Minister today!