Colombia’s Capitalist Communes

Colombian flower farms (photo: Mike Freedman-Schnapp)

Colombia’s flower farm workers have for some time been benefiting mightily from industrial support communities, which practice heavy nongovernmental social investment in workforce collectives. Many of the workers in these communities outside Bogota and Medellin are essentially resettled refugees from the war in the countryside. The community support in the form of daycare, retraining, and counseling have rescued many workers lives.

But they’re in trouble, as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement with the US –which congress is holding up on grounds of Colombian worker rights– can have profound implications if unsigned. The effects:

“If tariff exemptions are canceled on account of not signing the Free Trade Agreement, we would immediately be leveraged between six and seven percent to enter the U.S. market,” said flower consultant Felipe Arango.

“We’d disappear.”
(Reuters)

But there is an alternative view on that. As Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown might put it, Colombian flower workers need to understand that in order to avoid “shortchanging” them, their jobs and communities have to be destroyed:

“For the sake of both of our nations, the United States should not sign a trade deal with Columbia that shortchanges workers, that rewards polluters, and that gives businesses the same power as sovereign governments. And we should absolutely not sign a trade deal that forgives treachery toward labor leaders,”
(Teamsters)

I can only recoil from that argument, given the suffering it would induce as policy, and echo Fausta:

The USA needs to show its support of this progress, and must approve the free trade agreement with Colombia. As Ambassador Shapiro said, it’s good for Colombia, good for the US, and good for our national security.
(Fausta’s Blog)