Strike Over At Firestone Liberia Plantation?

The strike action at Bridgestone Corp’s Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia has reportedly come to an end. The news has yet to be confirmed, but workers are said to have returned to work after government officials spoke to them. “The strike was provisionally called off. The workers have agreed to resume work after my intervention along with some other officials,” the Minister of Labour-designate told FrontPageAfrica.

Only two months after the Washingtion-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) filed a slave and child labour lawsuit against the company, they have another PR disaster to deal with. Anywhere between 600 and 3000 workers are refusing to work, having gone on “general strike.” While this may sound like an exaggeration, the plantation is Liberia’s largest employer and the Harbel plantation is said to be the largest of its kind in the world. Whatever the legal definition of the situation, it is clear that workers’ morale is at rock-bottom and, for the time-being at least, rubber harvesting has been interrupted.

“Workers of the Firestone Rubber Plantation Company are angry, discontented, desperate, and obsessed with a raw quest for better working conditions, better education for their children and increased wages,” Liberian journalist Gibson W Jerue wrote in the midst of the strike. According Monrovia’s Analyst newspaper, Firestone management sources are equally run-down, and described the strike as: “A 100 per cent paralysing force majeure that took management unawares despite recent company public relation blitz that created the impression that all was well on the plantation.”

According to reports workers are demanding a 37.5 per cent deduction from their salary is repaid – they claim Firestone has withheld and/or denied them since 1992. Though the intricacies surrounding the 37.5 per cent deduction are far from clear.

The Analyst reports that Liberian Labour Minister Kofi Woods and Agriculture Minister Dr. Christopher Toe visited the site to hear the workers complaints, although (at the time of going to press) to no avail. “The government came here and appealed to workers to go back to work so they could look into their grievances,” the plantation’s industrial relations manager Feay Roberts, told Reuters adding: “Some of them wanted to [return] but they were prevented by some of their colleagues.”

Workers told the Analyst that in the past they used to tap 400 trees per day to complete a “task” (quota) but this the task has increased by 250 trees which means each person has to tap 650 trees per day. The management disputes this. Firestone Plantations Company’s public relations manager Edwin Padmore told the newspaper: “The fact of the matter is that Firestone has done well for our people; it is still doing well and there is always enough room to improve the condition of workers.” Furthermore Firestone is reported to have recently increased wages from US$3.19 to US $3.38 per day.