business & economy

Also in this section:
SUNTRACS goes to the mat over job safety, company unions
PTP wins a big early court round over Bocas oil spill but the argument isn't over
Environmentalists, historic preservationists gain the upper hand over Clayton woods

Mining companies prompt protests in three provinces

Taboga up in arms about oil pipeline and refinery proposals

The Panama News readership in July
Business & Economy Briefs

Unsecured sides of the excavation at the accident site

SUNTRACS takes disputes over job safety, company unions to the streets

by Eric Jackson, photos by SUNTRACS

People who want to get cynical about it might say that the militant SUNTRACS construction workers' union is just ratcheting up their standard street confrontations in anticipation of the arrival of a US congressional delegation that will meet with Panamanian lawmakers to discuss changes Panama needs to make before Democrats in the US House of Representatives will consider ratifying the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement. There definitely is a timetable of protests set out that may culminate --- or escalate --- at an August 19 FRENADESO protest march.

However, that jaded point of view can hardly explain the timing of the July 26 deaths of four construction workers at the Torre 7400 high rise condo project in San Francisco. The workers there, employed by Grupo Corcione, which is headed by former President Ernesto Pérez Balladares's cousin and keeps SUNTRACS out via a company union, were obliged to work in a pit whose earthen sides had not been properly shored up. There was a cave in and when they dug the four workers out, 30-year-old Isaac Pérez and 50-year-old Juan Ramos were dead at the scene. Jose Boniche, who was 20 years old, and 27-year-old Luis Mena died later at Santo Tomas Hospital. With those deaths the toll of Panamanian construction workers killed on the job so far in 2007 went up to 17.

SUNTRACS attributed the deaths to the company union arrangement, which it said "was created to elude the country's labor laws," and took to the streets of the capital to block traffic and demand the criminal prosecution of the Grupo Corcione management. Members of SUNTRACS also exchanged jeers, insults and threats with the company union officers who allowed the workers they purportedly represented in a manifestly unsafe pit.

The Panama City building inspectors slapped Grupo Corcione with a $100,000 fine and there were reportedly some investigations underway by various branches of the national government. The Torre 7400 construction site was shut down by order of the city and work at several other Grupo Corcione projects was stopped or slowed by SUNTRACS members besieging them.

But even before the deadly accident, SUNTRACS was riled up about company unions. With SUNTRACS having struck the Isla Viveros luxury residential and resort community project in the Perlas Islands over contract issues like overtime pay, the Grupo Viveros management, headed by Colombian developer Gustavo de la Cruz, brought in a Colombian-owned construction subcontractor, MAQTEC, SA, which uses a company union. Also brought onto the island with the strikebreakers were a number of armed men, and the confrontations with SUNTRACS became violent.

In declarations to local officials and in La Prensa, the Colombian declared that if SUNTRACS was not removed from the area --- where most of the people who had been working on the project before MAQTEC was brought in actually live --- then "there could be five or ten deaths." Instead of throwing the Colombian out of Panama for the death threats, the Torrijos administration sent in the police to support the developer.

A bit of investigative journalism by Okke Ornstein's Noriegaville may have uncovered at least part of the reason for the government's fondness for Colombian gangster labor relation tactics. It seems that one of the Colombian developer's partners is none other that PRD legislator Héctor Alemán --- who was Martín Torrijos's campaign manager in 2004 and for awhile served as minister of government and justice in the Torrijos administration. Also behind the Isla Viveros project is one Andre Beladina, a Frenchman whom, Ornstein reports, has been convicted of embezzlement and fraud committed against a bank for whom he worked. "We're talking about a mafia business that hires hit men and strikebreakers," SUNTRACS concluded about Grupo Viveros.

So SUNTRACS was already protesting in the streets over Isla Viveros when Torre 7400 caved in, but neither of these emergencies for the construction workers' union are the main event. The Brazilian-based Norberto Odebrecht SA, which has obtained the concession to build the Panama-Colon toll road and is in the running to win the bid for the huge Cinta Costera Panama City landfill and road contract, and is also expected to bid on some of the canal expansion work, has played the company union card. To the SUNTRACS point of view the union is fighting for its life against a government tipping the scales to crooked businesses that use scab labor. Torre 7400 and Isla Viveros are tiny compared to the autopista, the Cinta Costera or especially the canal expansion and SUNTRACS, which has a master contract with the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC), seems set to draw the line well before the biggest prizes.

Where the four men died

For photos of one of the SUNTRACS protests, this one on the Pan-American Highway in Panama Oeste, click here to go to our travel section.

SUNTRACS goes to the mat over job safety, company unions
PTP wins a big early court round over Bocas oil spill but the argument isn't over
Environmentalists, historic preservationists gain the upper hand over Clayton woods

Mining companies prompt protests in three provinces

Taboga up in arms about oil pipeline and refinery proposals

The Panama News readership in July
Business & Economy Briefs