Colombia: General Motors’ hunger strike ends

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The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service of the United States (FMCS) announced that it was going to intervene to resolve a labour conflict involving 68 former workers at General Motors in Colombia which has been on-going for over a year and resulted in seven activists going on hunger strike for 22 days in the capital, Bogotá.

The conflict began in August 2011 when the group erected a tent in front of the American Embassy to denounce the alleged offences by GM Colmotores, an in-country subsidiary of the American multinational. They claim that they were fired because they were suffering from work-related injuries sustained when working as car assemblers.

The conflict worsened at the beginning of August when seven of the former workers decided to sew their lips together and begin a hunger strike because in their opinion, neither the company nor the government were addressing their demands. Although they suffered from dehydration and are in poor health, only one of them had to be temporarily hospitalised.

The company rejects these claims and reiterated that the health and well-being of their employees is their priority. A press release stated that “GM Colmotores as a company respects the law and has never jeopardised the health and well-being of any of its employees and on this basis, we can state that no worker has ever been dismissed on health-grounds”

According to the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of General Motors Colmotores (Asotrecol) approximately 200 workers have been dismissed in a 3 year period on account of work-related injuries caused by handling heavy machinery and repetitive strain injuries. The company maintains that these dismissals were legal and has refused to compensate or reinstate the workers.

“It is not only bullets that murder Colombian workers, they are also victims of a slow and agonising death brought about by the indifference of what we have personally suffered” stated Jorge Parra one of the activists camped in Bogotá.

The impasse was only broken when the largest trade union centre in the United States, the AFL-CIO wrote a letter to the Colombian President demanding a solution to this conflict. The statement called on “The Colombian Labour Ministry to carry out an in-depth examination of the health and safety practices in General Motors and the implementation of the collective agreement in the country to comply with the national legislation and the labour-related standards in the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement”.

The former workers would like to be reinstated and retrained for jobs that they can do with their physical limitations. They are also demanding compensation for their injuries and an invalidity pension for those who can no longer work on account of their illness.

Asotrecol asked the FMCS, a US government labour mediation agency to intervene to end the hunger strike. According to the agency, mediation by the Colombian Labour Ministry and other national bodies has failed and they were not offering any guarantees to remain neutral in the conflict.

(Information supplied by the Agencia de Información Laboral Colombia)