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IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, 2004, 33 WOMEN BANANA WORKERS FROM COLOMBIA, ECUADOR, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panamá, Costa Rica, and all over Honduras gathered in a modest beachfront hotel in Puerto Cortés, Honduras, for a women's conference of the Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions (COLSIBA). The first day, the women, who'd all brought copies of their union contracts with them, broke up into groups to compare clauses in their contracts regarding women's concerns like maternity leave or equal pay. They identified clauses already in place and then strategized about which they wanted standardized across their seven countries and three transnational employers, Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita.
Over the course of the next three days the women also heard presentations on flexible labor systems and on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and got to go on a tour of Puerto Cortés itself, the largest port in Central America. In between, they strolled along the beach, lolled about in their hotel rooms laughing and watching TV, and even went out dancing one night.
After the conference was over, I asked Telma Gomez, a young rank-and-file activist in a new union representing Chiquita workers in Honduras, what her favorite part of the conference had been. Without a second's hesitation she shot back: "That presentation on the free trade agreement. Now I really have it down."
Telma Gomez's preference for political economy over partying, her presence at an international conference of women banana union activists, and her strategizing about how to insert women's demands into contracts spanning seven countries and three megacorporations-not to mention the emergence of her own new union near El Progreso, Honduras, boasting the first woman president of a banana workers' union in Latin America history-offer a few clues that something exciting is going on in the banana labor movement of Central and South America.
Since the mid-1980s, beginning slowly and carefully on the North Coast of Honduras, and spreading in the late 1990s and 2000s throughout the region, women banana workers and their male allies have inspired a new understanding of the gender politics of Latin American labor. Through workshops at the local level, on themes ranging from women's leadership to domestic violence to globalization, through new "Secretaries of Women" and "Women's Committees," and through...