For as long as there have been factories, workers have stood outside plant gates asking for charitable donations. But not at the Bridgestone-Firestone plant in LaVergne, Tenn. On Feb. 22, the company stopped workers at the plant gate from collecting donations to help struggling rubber workers in Africa.
“We’ve stood for years at the same locations collecting for members who are ill or other locals on strike. Most recently, we collected to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina,” says Lewis Beck, president of United Steelworkers Local 1055.
But this time, Beck and his co-workers, were collecting to support rubber workers who toil on Bridgestone-Firestone’s giant rubber plantation in Liberia. The United Steelworkers’ website explains the Liberians’ plight:
A decade-long civil war has ravaged the country and workers there, including thousands employed at Bridgestone-Firestone’s one-million acre rubber plantation, are struggling to provide for their families.
Local 1055 is the first of eight USW-represented locals scheduled to participate in the gate collections for the Liberia workers. Over there, BFS workers labor from dawn to dusk and receive about $3 as a daily wage. Recently the workers went on strike to protest the company’s withholding of more than one-third of their pay for unexplained deductions.
The Inter Press Service Agency reports that Bridgestone-Firestone, Liberia’s largest foreign investor, is being sued by an international human rights group over its alleged use of child labor and toxic pesticides.
Here’s how InterPress describes the conditions at the plantation:
…workers begin their day at 4:30 in the morning in order to make their daily quota of tapping some 750 trees—a quota that can only be met if children join their fathers and in many cases, mothers by working from dawn to dusk.
Jason Flomo, who has been living with six others in one of Firestone’s housing quarters on the plantation, said there are no toilets, running water or electricity.
“Situations like this remind me why our contract negotiations are so difficult. I think the company sometimes forgets that its workers are people trying to take good care of their families,” Beck says.
