Palm Oil and Outsourcing: SINTRAINAGRO's Struggle in Colombia

Posted to the IUF website 27-Apr-2009

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Colombia's rural workers'union SINTRAINAGRO has voted for strike action should negotiations for a new collective bargaining contract in the banana sector deadlock. The union - which has had over 440 members and officers murdered since it's founding - has always been caught in the crossfire of Colombia's many-sided civil war. In a wide-ranging interview with IUF Latin America, SINTRAINAGRO President Guillermo Rivera puts the difficult collective bargaining situation in the context of new threats to the union and to rural society in the banana region: massive job destruction through the expansion of palm oil, and pressure to decimate the organized banana workforce through bogus "cooperative" schemes.

Read the interview here.