Bush to Press Free Trade in a Place Where Young Children Still Cut the Cane (NYT)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/americas/12guatemala.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=7faf7dd877148365&ex=1173844800&pagewanted=print

March 12, 2007
Bush to Press Free Trade in a Place Where Young Children Still Cut the Cane
By MARC LACEY

CHIMALTENANGO, Guatemala, March 11 — Work starts early for the people of the Guatemalan countryside, sometimes as early as 5 or 6. Not the time, the age.

Guatemalan children shine shoes and make bricks. They cut cane and mop floors. At some factories exporting to the United States, they sew and sort and chop, often in conditions so onerous they violate even Guatemala’s very loose labor laws.

“They like us young people because we don’t say anything when they yell at us,” said Alma de los Ángeles Zambrano, 15, who recently quit after 18 months at a food processing plant to work part time for an organization trying to improve conditions for young workers.

President Bush is likely to miss this side of Guatemala’s labor market when he comes to this rural area on Monday to visit a thriving agricultural cooperative that sells products to Wal-Mart’s stores in Central America. The president will meet with Mariano Canú, the leader of a United States-backed co-op that hopes to take advantage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Canú is doing well enough that his children are in school preparing for Guatemala’s new economy.

Opening up trade, Mr. Bush argues, will ultimately raise wages and improve working conditions in Central America. “My message to those trabajadores y campesinos,” Mr. Bush said last week, using the Spanish words for workers and peasants, “is you have a friend in the United States of America. We care about your plight.”

But this country’s young workers, most of them poor indigenous people, say they often feel that nobody cares about them: not their parents, who send them off to the work force; not their stern bosses, who treat them like adults; not the dysfunctional government off in Guatemala City.

“It’s a major concern,” said Manuel Manrique, Unicef’s representative in Guatemala. “Child labor keeps children out of school. The numbers are very high and there’s a social acceptance in this country that child labor is O.K.”

None of the child workers interviewed around here said they had yet felt any benefits of Cafta, as the trade pact is known, which Guatemala signed nearly two years ago and which slipped through the United States Congress by a hair. One provision in Cafta, which is intended to increase trade by eliminating tariff and nontariff barriers, requires companies to adhere to local labor laws and commits the United States to helping improve inspections.

FULL story at link.

[Zodiak]

1. Kick

because people should at least read this even though there is a bunch of other important crap going on.

[Solon]

2. Opening up trade? No, its opening up exploitation...

I've seen the working conditions of the working poor in many of these countries, and I don't see a bonus for them just for the Corporations that sub-sub-sub-contract with their employers.