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Show Your Love for Working Mothers this Mother’s Day |
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Mother’s Day, May 10, is one of the biggest days in the year for flower sales. Yet thousands of women who pick most of the flowers, many of them mothers themselves, will be working in egregious conditions for poverty wages.
More than 60 percent of the flowers sold in the United States come from Colombia. Two-thirds of the nearly 100,000 flower workers in Colombia are women, many working mothers. They often are required to work 12-to-15-hour days with few breaks, especially in the weeks before holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. As a result, many have been injured on the job and suffer health problems related to overexposure to pesticides and humiliating and degrading treatment by management. All for poverty-level wages.
This Mother’s Day, U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP), an advocacy group promoting labor rights in Latin America, is bringing the story of the Colombian flower workers to American consumers. Along with the International Labor Rights Forum and Jobs with Justice in South Florida, USLEAP is sponsoring “A Mother’s Day Story” tour. Amanda Camacho, a Colombian flower worker and union leader, is touring various cities in this country to raise awareness about labor rights violations in the cut-flower industry, especially during high-selling seasons like Mother’s Day.
In July 2008, Dole, which was the largest grower and exporter in Colombia, signed contracts with two flower worker unions in Colombia. It took the workers nearly four years of struggle to win these first contracts and hundreds of workers lost their jobs during the fight. Since then, Dole has sold their Colombian flower business altogether.
In conjunction with the tour, USLEAP also has designed two Mother’s Day cards, each featuring a photo of a Colombian flower worker and her child. In exchange for a $35 donation ($20 for students or persons with low income) to USLEAP’s Flower Worker Economic Justice Campaign, your mother will receive a card in the mail with a personalized message from you inside.
On the back of the card, she can read about women who work in the flower industry in Colombia and their efforts to form effective unions on their plantations.
You can place your Mother’s Day card order here. Sending this card will say to your mother that you care about her as well as the rights of all mothers. Click here to learn more about USLEAP’s flower campaign.
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In Colombia you can find some flower places that treat their employees well, provide free daycare for the mothers and issue protective gear for working with chemicals. Unfortunately those places seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Though Colombia does not meet all the International Labor Organization laws they do have some laws to protect workers. Unfortunately corruption in both government and private sectors is so massive frequently those laws are not worth the paper they are written on. Additionally the country has lead the world in murders of union members for over a decade, 2008 had an increase of those murders over 2007, and there is less than a 3% arrest rate for the killers. Nothing to very little is being done to combat the massive corruption in the country. It is obvious that even the best labor laws written into an FTA will be useless in protecting workers. Boycotting flowers will not help the workers. The rich will only abuse the workers more to make sure they maintain their own income. History has shown that Colombia only makes progress when denied outside money. Americans need to demand that no FTA be signed with Colombia until the country shows concrete and sustained results. Just putting laws on the books or talking about what you are doing is not concrete results. Union member murders going up 25% after a few years of going down is not sustained results.