El Salvador Perspectives

Each September, the restaurant chain Mr. Donut in El Salvador has a month long 2-for-1 promotion on its donuts.   The annual sale has become a major event, with long lines of customers at every Mr. Donut location waiting to carry out boxes filled with the frosted donuts. This donut sale even attracted attention in  the US press.  A  2014 article in the New Yorker  described September at Mr. Donut: Every fall in El Salvador, at the height of the wet season, a fast-food chain called Mister Donut offers a two-for-one deal that lasts a whole month. From morning to night, long lines form outside the more than thirty locations in the country. Residents of the capital, San Salvador, brave its public-transit system—a fleet of decaying American school buses and overcrowded vans—clutching flat boxes of doughnuts, then leap off at their destinations, hunched protectively over their cargo. For 2019 Mr. Donut adopted a "Donut Wars" theme for the September promot...

Throughout El Salvador, you will come across large industrial parks and free trade zones where  thousands of workers are employed in more than 200 textile factories.   Here are a few facts about the sector: According to the industry trade association CAMTEX , the entire textile sector exported $2.5 billion in 2018 and represented 46% of El Salvador's total exports.  The industry produced 84,448 direct jobs , with an average wage of $524 per month.   The minimum wage in the sector is $295.20 per month or $1.23 per hour.  The leading exports from El Salvador's textile maquila factories are cotton t-shirts and nylon socks . Hanes and Fruit of the Loom are the leading brands, together representing approximately 20,000 jobs in El Salvador.  There are frequent reports of abusive working conditions in the maquila factories, especially with regards to the treatment of women.

US consumers may look on tags on their underwear and find that it is "hecho en El Salvador" -- made in El Salvador.  El Salvador garment factories have long been a source of underwear for the US market and that trend is continuing. An article on an apparel industry website today notes that HanesBrands is investing to expand its factories in El Salvador where underwear for the US market is sewn:  According to an article in Just-Style, the garment manufacturer will invest a total of $10.4 million on its facilities here and increase employment by 430 jobs. HanesBrands decision to increase investment in El Salvador is attributed in the article to a new customs union among Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as well as the country's decision to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan.  You can read HanesBrands public relations pieces about its operations in El Salvador here . Balance those public relations pieces with a 2010 inspection report by the Fair Labor Association...

As noted previously in El Salvador Perspectives, the government of El Salvador recently passed a significant increase to the minimum wage in both the manufacturing sector and in agriculture.    But  the business sector is not content to simply pass along the wages.   Danielle Mackey, writing in Equal Times , describes the backlash from factory owners:  Since the beginning of this year, the salaries of maquila workers have increased by nearly 40 per cent, from US$211 to US$295 per month, while coffee and cotton workers have seen their wages more than double, from US$98 to US$200 per month. In addition, other rural agriculture workers have seen their pay rise to US$224 per month, while employees of commerce, service and industries now receive a minimum of US$300 per month.  Nevertheless, the wage increase has provoked a strong backlash from what has been described as El Salvador’s “rabidly anti-union private sector”, with business lobbies issuing legal ...

On this May 1 international labor day, marchers of the FMLN, clad in red, marched through the streets of the capital city to show their support with the working classes.   For the day, El Faro published a set of statistics which illustrate the state of affairs for the Salvadoran worker.   El Faro begins by noting that El Salvador's government has calculated the monthly cost of a basic market basket of food, goods and services for an average family of 4.5 people is $590.    Compare that basic fact to the following figures: The average salary in the private sector of the formal economy is $505 monthly. 30% of the employees in the private sector earn less than $389. The recently increased legal minimum wage ranges from $200 monthly in parts of the agriculture sector and $300 in the manufacturing sector. In the public sector, the average monthly salary is $700. 53% of women do not participate in the workforce, while only 20% of men do not participate in the ...

Call centers are big business in El Salvador employing thousands , many of whom are English-speaking Salvadorans deported from the US. A bill recently introduced in the US Congress might threaten the growth of the call center industry, however:   Introduced by Congressmen Gene Green from the Democratic Party and Republican David McKinley, the US Call Center and Consumer Protection Act would deter companies from shipping American jobs overseas and incentivise them to locate them in the US by creating a public list of “bad actors” consisting of those that shipped all or most of their service work overseas.  “Being on the list would make these actors ineligible for federal grants or guaranteed loans, would require overseas call centres to disclose their locations to customers, and would require them to comply with US consumers’ request to be transferred to a service agent physically located in the US,” the two lawmakers said. The measure is supported in the US by the Comm...

El Salvador's government yesterday increased the minimum wage for the country's workers. The increase in minimum wages ranges from a 20% increase in service and industry jobs to more than a 100% increase for certain agricultural jobs. Wages in the countryside for those working in the fields with coffee, sugar cane, cotton, and other crops will range from $200 to $224 monthly.    Wages in services, industry and factories will be $300 with a slightly lower wage of $295 for workers in textile and sewing maquila factories.  Minimum wages are calculated on an 8 hour day and a 44 hour work week The government says that these sizable increases will benefit more than 235,000 workers in the county.

In the Christian Science Monitor today, Whitney Eulich provides news of some initial attempts in El Salvador to change the working conditions in sugar cane fields as a way to combat chronic kidney disease and other work related illness: While scientists and health organizations around the world work to identify the root causes, a handful of power brokers here – from a top businessman to government officials and community leaders – are starting to take action to reverse the trend, based on what they know. Masariego is part of the first scientific intervention among sugar cane workers aimed at determining if work-related conditions such as dehydration or heat stress play a part in chronic kidney disease (CKD). And the achingly simple changes being tested here could serve as a model for other employers and governments across Central America, helping to raise awareness of worker protection and human rights.    “We need to do more research to find the causes, but meanwhile we...

Researchers from Penn State University released a report last week documenting abusive labor practices in El Salvador's garment industry.  Factory owners are systematically abusing the rights of workers and thwarting workers' ability to organize.   The report is titled Unholy Alliances: How Employers in El Salvador’s Garment Industry Collude with a Corrupt Labor Federation, Company Unions and Violent Gangs to Suppress Workers’ Rights .   Among the report's findings: Following the end of the civil war in 1992, private employers found new ways to thwart union organizations. The use of “blacklists” proliferated among Salvadoran garment sector employers during the 1990s and continues to this day.10 Employers circulate blacklists with the names of union activists and/or factories that have had a strong union presence. Unionized workers thus have trouble finding employment in another company following their dismissal from the factory where they joined...

There is an epidemic of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in El Salvador and Nicaragua.   It has been a mysterious disease without enough study and data to determine its causes.   Many of the victims have been sugar cane workers in the Central American countries. A new study from researchers at Boston University suggests that working conditions in the cane fields, rather than exposure to agrochemicals, may be the main cause.  A report from NPR describes some of the study's findings: Now a new study from Boston University finds a clear connection between the disease and the work these men are doing.  "The decline in kidney function during the harvest and the differences [in kidney function] by job category and employment duration provide evidence that one or more risk factors of CKD (chronic kidney disease) are occupational," the report says.  In 2011 the study followed 500 sugar cane workers at one plantation, El Ingenio San Antonio in Nicaragua. The rese...

Yesterday I pointed to the blog of the spouse of a US Embassy staffer reflecting on his two years in El Salvador.   Today I'm recommending for a different view you take a look at the blog of essays written by students of a Jesuit college prep school, Brophy College Prep, in Phoenix.   These essays reflect on the students' recently completed summer immersion trip to El Salvador.   Through the eyes of these high school students we learn, for example, of economic injustice in the form of harsh working conditions in maquiladora factories : To start, I would like to give a quick overview of the social and economic situation that Maquila workers struggle with. The vast majority of Maquila workers are women, and the average salary of those working at a Maquila is $187 a month. That breaks down to $6.25 a day, $0.78 an hour. This becomes even more devastating when one considers that 45% of the homes in El Salvador are entirely dependent on the income of the mother. Women are fo...

The International Trade Union Confederation released a report this week regarding the status of labor rights and working conditions in El Salvador. There is an English language summary at this link . This is an excerpt regarding conditions for women workers in the maquiladora sector: A new ITUC study on core labour standards in El Salvador reports that many of the 67,000 mostly women workers employed in the country’s 15 export processing zones suffer from appalling treatment ranging from verbal abuse and threats to physical abuse and sexual harassment. There is a clear anti-trade union policy and dismissal of workers planning to join or form a union. Many consider that working conditions in export processing zones can be assimilated to forced labour. The complete report in Spanish is available here . In a troubling development, human rights and labor leaders have condemned the recent murder of Victoriano Abel Vega, a leader of the municipal union in Santa Ana: According to the info...