Colombian Workers Pay High Price for Flowers
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This Mother’s Day, remember the mothers in Colombia who grew, cut and trimmed the flowers you receive. Six days a week, Amanda Camacho and thousands of her co-workers at flower plantations in Colombia cut and trim at least 350 flowers an hour. In the weeks before holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, the work extends deep into the night—all for about $8 a day, less than the cost of a bouquet of carnations in the United States.
Speaking today at a brown bag luncheon at the AFL-CIO in Washington, Camacho, a Colombian union leader and activist, said the mostly female flower workers in Colombia are treated like slaves and the flower companies’ claims that they are treating their workers well are simply “lies.’
Camacho begins a national tour next week sponsored by the International Labor Rights Forum’s (ILRF) Fairness in Flowers campaign, Jobs with Justice (JwJ), the Coalition of Labor Union Women and U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP).
Show Your Love for Working Mothers this Mother’s Day
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.
Labor Website of the Year
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has won LabourStart’s 2009 Labor Website of the Year. LabourStart, the labor news service, has sponsored the competition every year since 1997. Trade union websites from around the world compete, and individual union members vote online to decide which is the best union website
As trade union use of the Internet grows, the competition grows as well. This year, 170 sites were nominated, nearly twice as many as last year. LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents from around the world voted for the best ones and winnowed the list down to 12 finalists.
The runners-up, in order, were Union Songs, Our Times, USLEAP and New Unionism Network.
