Dockers and banana workers have good reason to work together, says Alistair Smith on Banana Link.

A delegation from the British general workers’ trade union GMB and the NGO Banana Link visited Costa Rica, Britain’s biggest tropical fruit supplier country, in October 2006.

As well as meeting several hundred banana and pineapple workers, we spent time in the major Caribbean port of Limón, which is responsible for over 85 per cent of all exports and imports into Costa Rica. The newly elected leadership of SINTRAJAP took us into both the public and private docks, which had been under police control for three weeks, following a work-to-rule action by the union.

The dockers’ action was in protest at the proposed privatisation - or "concession", as the Arias government prefers to call it - of the public docks, which have suffered deliberate and drastic under-investment, as we were able to witness from the sight of an idle giant crane.

Determined not to be bullied

SINTRAJAP was clearly determined not to be bullied by the police occupation into giving in and had joined the national labour and social movement coalition fighting the ratification of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the US. The pro-business Costa Rican government is absolutely determined to push through the CAFTA, at whatever cost.

Following a strong national campaign and international support from both ITF and IUF, government met all the unions’immediate demands, and pledged not to harass or persecute workers or trade union leaders. Strike action was called off after the deal was struck.

Although the dockers earn two or three times as much as the average banana or pineapple plantation worker, SINTRAJAP has pledged its solidarity with the struggle to enforce decent labour standards in the workplaces that keep the port busy.

Resistance to free trade agreement

On 12 December, just before midnight, the foreign affairs committee of the parliament approved the CAFTA ratification by six votes to three. In January it will be discussed and voted in a plenary session. All the votes of the far right Libertarian Movement members will be needed to approve the CAFTA. The trade union and social movements are well organised and mobilised to stop this happening. But they face the prospect of intimidation in doing so. Outside the parliament building on 12 December several hundred people had already gathered as the Committee was in session, but were met with a barrage of very heavily armed police.

Trend to "militarise" the police

This may be the only country without an army, but the US backed and Israeli-trained police certainly fill that gap under the regime of Nobel Peace prize-winner Oscar Arias. Indeed this recent trend to "militarise" the police and deploy them against citizens’ peaceful demonstrations led to a formal request being sent to the Nobel Foundation to withdraw the Prize from Arias.