Oil Palm Workers Confront a Fatal Blow Against Unions in Colombia

On November 1^st, 2019, Indupalma, one of the pioneer companies in the Colombian palm oil industry, announced its voluntary dissolution. This company is not bankrupt and owns 10,000 hectares of productive oil palm crops. Why does a productive and financially-viable company decide to enter a voluntary dissolution process?

In Colombia, palm oil corporations have implemented, with State support, a diversity of anti-union strategies, ranging from direct physical violence to more concealed ways of weakening labor power. Indupalma’s apparent dissolution is only one instance in a long history of labor exploitation strategies by palm oil corporations, but one that may deliver the final blow to oil palm workers’ unions in Colombia.  

The oil palm industry took off in Colombia at the end of the 1950s, when the government promoted this crop through loans, tax exemptions, and even direct investments. The pioneer oil palm companies that benefitted from this support systematically committed labor abuses, without State control. A farmworker indirectly employed by Indupalma, in the municipality of San Alberto, at the time recalls they “earned about 600 pesos but received only 400 or had to sign a blank form. Sometimes your name wouldn’t even appear on the form”. In addition to arbitrary discounts and wage theft, workers had no equipment or social security protection to collect heavy and spiny oil palm fruit bunches. Meanwhile, their labor made the industry grow. Between 1950 and 1974, oil palm crops in Colombia went from being almost non-existent to covering 23,000 hectares, or about 1,200 times the area needed for a family farm in the region where Indupalma is located.

Faced with labor insecurity and abuses, workers organized several strikes and unionization attempts. This wasn’t easy. In 1971, after the first strike attempt at Indupalma, the company demolished the union’s headquarters with a bulldozer. Members of the union board were charged with the murder of the company’s head of human resources. They were absolved of this crime after spending five years in prison. These types of attacks radically undermined workers’ possibilities for demanding decent working conditions.

In the late 1970s, both the oil palm industry and workers’ unions were growing. By 1978, oil palm crops in Colombia covered more than 33,000 hectares. Simultaneously, union organizing opportunities expanded. In 1977, a National Civic Strike voiced widespread popular discontent over rising living costs produced by the government’s free market policies. Popular support for the strike forced the government to raise the minimum wage and to recognize unionization rights. In this context, palm companies were forced to recognize unions.

From the late 1980s onwards, oil palm workers faced violent retaliation. This pattern is common in Colombia, where according to labor researchers “collective actions in order to achieve minimum working conditions, aimed at overcoming ‘primitive’ relationships, almost immediately provoke violence from the opposing party, in this case somewhat lagged”. Between 1988 and 2005, at least 1,714 unionized workers were murdered in Colombia. Ninety of them were oil palm workers. A different database shows that, in the same period, more than 60 unionized workers from Indupalma, including five union presidents, were killed or went missing, and hundreds more were violently displaced.

While this was an intensely violent period in Colombia, paramilitary violence was particularly directed at Indupalma’s workers, possibly with support from the company. According to the United Nations Development Program, “the palm company with the most workers killed, disappeared or otherwise victimized is Industrial Agraria La Palma (Indupalma S.A.) ” and testimonies from former paramilitary group members suggest that Indupalma’s representatives collaborated with paramilitary groups.

But the extensive violence in Colombia masked targeted anti-union violence, and the possible acquiescence of the State, as if this violence was part of the wider armed conflict in the country. Indupalma repeatedly used the context of generalized violence to argue that violence against their workers was the result of workers being perpetrators, not victims, of the conflict. Several workers recall receiving frequent accusations, by company managers and army officials, of being guerrilla collaborators. For Indupalma’s unionized workers, State support to the violent attacks they experienced was evident in everyday life. Unions were not only considered internal enemies by the official doctrine of the military forces. According to Indupalma’s workers’ testimonies, the existence of a military base surrounded by the company’s plantation did not stop from happening several murders that occurred inside the plantation.

Meanwhile, Indupalma and other companies benefited from the violence exercised against farmworkers. In 1995, Indupalma made Sintraproaceites, it’s workers’ union, renegotiate working conditions in a context of attacks and death threats. During the negotiations, a paramilitary group attacked the union’s headquarters, burned the houses of three union leaders, and kidnapped and forcibly disappeared one of them. Members of Sintraproaceites recall that “the collective fear was evident, due to the force of the events, in the midst of that violence, no one wanted to continue making our claims.” So, “we had to accept the start of associated work cooperatives. Accept the change of employment contracts for many people. We just had to.”

While the name might suggest workers’ ownership of a company, in reality, ‘associated cooperatives’ are a hiring mechanism that allows palm oil corporations to expand their crops without incurring in labor costs. Under this scheme, workers receive payments based on harvest results. They have to pay for their own tools and social security. If the plantation is not productive, the company is not required to pay a minimum wage to cooperative workers. Associated cooperatives were declared illegal by the Colombian government in 2012, but in the late 1990s palm oil corporations were expanding through this hiring mechanism.

The conditions that Sintraproaceites and similar unions were forced to accept, in the midst of violent attacks, had long-term effects on job stability throughout the oil palm industry. Apart from associated coops, the newly negotiated labor conditions enabled Indupalma to lay off more than 200 workers. This situation produced job insecurity, weakened labor unions, and boosted profits for palm oil corporations. After having more than a thousand members a few decades before, towards the year 2000, Sintraproaceites had only 170 members. Indupalma, on its part, was a lucrative company.

With unions decimated, the oil palm industry continued introducing new hiring mechanisms. Since the late 1990s, oil palm companies in Colombia shifted their expansion strategy towards incorporating small-scale growers. This strategy was made possible by a policy named ‘Productive Alliances’. This policy was designed by Carlos Murgas, the owner of one of the main palm oil producing companies in the country, who served as minister of agriculture in the late 1990s. With this policy, the government subsidizes the integration of workers and small-scale farmers as suppliers of oil palm fruit for large companies. Although the subsidies are given to small-scale producers, the buyer-drive power of palm oil mills allows corporations to capture these subsidies.

Many other government policies have allowed the Colombian palm oil industry to position itself as the fourth largest in the world. Around 2005, the government implemented a biofuels policy that requires a minimum percentage of biofuels –produced largely with palm oil– in all diesel fuel. This policy secures internal demand for palm oil. In 2013, the government appointed the then manager of Indupalma, Ruben Darío Lizarralde, as Minister of Agriculture, who expanded the policy of Productive Alliances. The support that different governments have afforded the palm oil industry has become a State policy allowing this industry to position itself as a lucrative and competitive activity at a world scale.

As mentioned earlier, despite the success of the industry, Indupalma, one of leading companies, announced its voluntary dissolution on November 1^st, 2019. This was a surprising decision for many, as the company is not bankrupt and it is a key link in the provision of palm oil for its business conglomerate, the Grasco Group.  Additionally, the approximately 10,000 hectares of palm crops that Indupalma owns will continue to be productive for many more years.

Today, more than a year after the dissolution announcement, Indupalma’s crops continue its operations, but now with the labor of external contractors. In this context, the approximately 70 direct workers who are formally employed by Indupalma wonder why the company insists on terminating their contracts, if their labor is needed in the company’s crops. According to local testimonies, Indupalma’s plantation continues operating with workers hired by a logistics managing company. Meanwhile, Indupalma’s formal employees are facing severe uncertainty. The company requested permission from the ministry of labor to do a massive layoff and started a judiciary process to lift union protection of Sintraproaceites’ board members. 

Indupalma’s workers continue to struggle to keep their jobs, but today this seems like an unlikely possibility. Workers have asked the company to use an ‘employer substitution’ mechanism when selling their crops. This mechanism implies that whoever buys Indupalma’s crops in the company’s dissolution process, would agree to hire the 70 farmworkers currently employed by Indupalma. This possibility would allow those workers to maintain some labor security and the new crop owner to hire experienced labor. 

However, as it stands, the dissolution process looks like a façade to get rid of the union, like another step in the long story of anti-union attacks in the Colombian palm oil industry. This time, possibly a final step. As Indupalma’s crops continue operating with external contractors, the company does not seem so much interested in a dissolution process as in using this process as an excuse to get government authorization for a massive layoff. Today, it’s unclear what the ministry of labor will decide. But given the current political environment in Colombia, it seems unlikely that the government will protect workers’ rights. Even more concerning is the fact that if Indupalma is successful in its plans to dissolve the company and, as workers fear, continue operating under a different name just to get rid of the union, other companies may follow. While Indupalma’s apparent dissolution is only one instance in a long history of labor precaritization strategies by palm oil corporations, it could be a crucial step in oil palm company’s efforts to wipe out workers’ unions in Colombia.  

Many aspects of the Colombia palm oil industry have changed since the 1950s, including the size of its crops and labor-hiring mechanisms. But farmworkers’ struggles for labor rights continue until today. 

Sintraproaceites’ members are facing a hard battle and are looking for international solidarity to put pressure on the government. There are many ways to express your solidarity with palm oil unionized workers in Colombia. If you would like to support Sintraproaceites in their current struggles for labor rights, please get in touch with Angela Serrano at serranozapat@wisc.edu. 

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the farmworkers who have participated in my research. I would also like to thank Miryam Nacimento and Boaventura Monjane for the very useful comments that helped me improve this piece. This research has been possible thanks to support from the Rural Sociological Society and several grants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

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