Costa Rican police took over the SINTRAJAP union hall in May.

Jennifer Sargent, communications director of the  International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s (ILWU) Coast Longshore Division, reports on the union’s complaint against Costa Rica under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA).

The ILWU hopes a recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Labor is responding to a trade complaint against Guatemala for labor violations bodes well for its own recent filing of a complaint against Costa Rica.

On July 20, the ILWU Coast Longshore Division charged Costa Rica with “serious and repeated failures by the government of Costa Rica to effectively enforce its own labor laws” in an 18-page complaint with the Department of Labor’s Office of labor and Trade Affairs (OTLA). Less than a week after the ILWU’s filing, the Department of Labor took steps to initiate its first ever case under DR-CAFTA against a trade partner for labor rights violations by responding to a petition the AFL-CIO filed against Guatemala in 2008 DR-CAFTA.

“We hope that the announcement that the United States government wants Guatemala to take specific and effective action to curb labor rights violations is just the first of many steps that the Obama administration will take to pursue the failure to enforce labor laws among trade partners,” said ILWU President Robert McEllrath.

The AFL-CIO’s petition to the Department of Labor sat for more than two years without action. The ILWU’s petition against Costa Rica should be dealt with swiftly and decisively, in order to protect workers from further abuse, and to stop the systematic elimination of the labor organizations that protect them.

The ILWU’s recent complaint was filed in conjunction with two Costa Rican unions: the Sindicato de Trabajadores de JAPDEVA (SINTRAJAP) and Asociación Nacional de Empleados Públicos y Privados (ANEP).

You can download a copy of ILWU’s complaint here.

Among other violations, the Costa Rican unions’ complaint charges

The conduct of the Costa Rican government includes a government-run media campaign to discredit the union, removal of the democratically elected leadership of the union and imposition of a government-backed employer-run board of union directors, freezing of the union’s bank accounts, militarization of the ports in the run up to a complete takeover of the union, directing the police to raid and occupy the union’s business office, and entering into an unconstitutional multi-million dollar deal with the government-backed employer-run board of union directors to entice workers to leave the union and accept privatization of the ports.

The ILWU’s Coast Longshore Division has been assisting the SINTRAJAP longshore union since shortly after the government replaced the democratically elected leadership of SINTRAJAP in the middle of a two-year term and replaced it with a government-backed group in February. The Coast Longshore Division has placed full-page advertisements in Costa Rican newspapers to inform Costa Ricans of the government’s abuses,. It also sent a delegation to interview workers, meet with public officials, and document the abuses.

American longshoremen work for many of the same major shipping carriers and stevedoring companies as the ones operating in Costa Rica.

Dockworkers at Costa Rica’s Pacific port of Caldera were subjected to a similar privatization scheme in 2006 and are suffering mightily for it,” said McEllrath.

Ninety percent of longshore workers lost their jobs, those remaining saw their pay cut by two-thirds, and precarious working conditions have led to 46 waterfront deaths. Costa Rica must be held accountable for its ongoing and deliberate abuse against workers and their union rights.

Another 131,000 jobs were lost in July, and the U.S. unemployment rate remained at 9.5 percent, as in June. The new data out this morning from the Department of Labor reflects a lack of private-sector hiring and large numbers of jobless workers returning to the market. Private-sector hiring increased by 71,000 but was offset by the 143,000 decrease in temporary federal Census employees who completed their work. The unemployment rate was unchanged only because another 181,000 workers left the labor force.

The number of people who are underemployed, which includes those who are too discouraged to look for work or are working part time out of economic necessity, is 16.5 percent. Some 26 million U.S. workers are without jobs or full-time work.

Manufacturing employment increased by 36,000, health care by 27,000 jobs and mining by 7,000. Construction employment decreased by 11,000, with 10,000 out due to strikes. People of color continue to suffer disproportionately, with 15.6 percent of black workers unemployed and 12.1 percent of Latino workers jobless.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said today the economic recovery “is still far too weak to power the job growth we need to offset the almost 8 million jobs lost since the recession began.”

Meanwhile, 14.6 million workers are formally unemployed, and nearly half of them have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks. Yet every effort to dig us out of our 10.5 million jobs hole has faced enormous opposition from Republicans who choose to vote against good jobs and working people for cheap political points. This is inexcusable.

Economists say if monthly private-sector employment gains are 50,000 or fewer, it’s an alarming sign of a weakening economy. Even if employment growth reachest the fastest level in the recovery from the two 1990 recession, economists project that the nation may not reach pre-recession levels of unemployment until 2015. As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) puts it:

The much slower rate of growth seen in recent months suggests that without additional policy action, unemployment will remain high for years to come.

In fact, without the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other public policy responses, the nation’s unemployment would be nearly 16 percent today, with 8.5 million fewer jobs, according to EPI.

In an economy still suffering from high unemployment and sluggish growth, it can be easy to lose sight of the enormous progress that has been made since late 2008 and early 2009 when the country was losing close to 750,000 jobs per month.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill took another good step yesterday when the Senate passed a bill to help states maintain hundreds of thousands of jobs—fire fighters, teachers, police and others—and the House is returning from recess next week to move the bill. (E-mail your representatives now—urge them to vote for the state jobs funding.)

One of the most troubling parts of the nation’s jobs crisis is long-term unemployment. Of the 15 million workers now unemployed, nearly half have been unemployed for more than six months. In July, the Senate overcame a Republican filibuster to extend unemployment insurance (UI) through November for the nearly 7 million workers who have been jobless for six months or more—and they will need to extend it again, because there are five workers for every one job.

The ramifications of this massive joblessness are widespread: Unemployment is now a leading cause of housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcy. Four million homeowners are in foreclosure proceedings or delinquent on their loans and this year, there likely will be even more than the 1.4 million personal bankruptcies suffered in 2009. In May, a record 40.8 million Americans received food stamps, the 18th straight record-setting month and 19 percent higher from a year earlier.

Yet some reactionary anti-worker lawmakers are resisting calls to address the nation’s jobs crisis, and instead are raising a red flag about the nation’s budget deficit. Yet as EPI Research and Policy Director John Irons writes, aggressive deficit reduction could short-circuit the progress the economy has made to date. Irons said major deficit reduction should wait until the unemployment rate has been at or below 6 percent for six straight months. In fact, reducing federal funding too soon could imperil an economy that still has seven million fewer jobs than it did at the start of the recession.

As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the federal budget deficit commission in June, the solution is not to further squeeze the hide of U.S. workers.

There is no good economic policy reason that requires fiscal contraction at this time—neither concerns about inflation (which is practically non-existent), nor about long-term interest rates (which are extremely low by historical standards), nor about the crowding out of private investment (because so much labor and capital is unemployed), nor about the long-term debt (on which short-term stimulus has a small impact).

In other words, we can do something about the jobs crisis if we choose to. But we do have to choose—between providing more stimulus, on the one hand; or causing more joblessness, more wage cuts, more poverty, more inequality, more foreclosures, more waste of human potential, and more suffering, on the other.