Nicaragua
How Sugar Workers Think
François Houtart
Numbering some 13,000 full-time and seasonal laborers, sugar workers are the single most important industrial work force in Nicaragua. In the last two years, this sector has been fraught with inter-union conflicts as well as strikes and other labor actions linked to salaries, working conditions and the privatization of the state sugar complexes (see "The Month," this issue, for details of a 10-day strike in March that virtually paralyzed the sugar harvest).
Given their important role within Nicaragua's working class, it is critical to know how sugar workers think, where they line up. In 1991, the National Workers' Front, an umbrella group of Sandinista union federations, solicited such a study from the University of Central America's Center for Socio-Cultural Analysis. The survey, designed and directed by François Houtart and Geneviève Lemercinier, is based on interviews with 475 permanent workers from the six refineries in the western half of the country.
Workers' class consciousnessWorkers who consider themselves totally dependent on nature's elements, or on a God "on high" who allows no changes in the social environment, may be able to participate in a specific protest when their very subsistence is at stake. But they will not easily become involved in building a permanent workers' movement if its logic goes beyond such issues and aims to challenge society's very structures.
In pre-capitalist societies or among colonized peoples of virtually every continent, peasant protests have typically had a religious base, such as the messianic movements of Brazil. While these movements opposed specific effects of oppressive socioeconomic structures, they lacked the ability to analyze causes or develop strategies of struggle based on real and feasible mechanisms of change.
The first series of conditions necessary to move collective action beyond such limited protests only appear when individuals become conscious of themselves as part of a larger social class. Class consciousness implies two additional elements of what can be called a "world view": a minimum knowledge of how nature and society function, and a subjective position that human beings are actors in society.
The survey of sugar workers was based on a questionnaire that aimed to provide indicators of various aspects of their worldview. The resulting differences were processed according to the analytical methodology of factorial correspondence. The factors studied were occupation, age, educational level, religion and political and union sympathies.
Sugar workers' world viewThe first thing to note is that just under half of all permanent workers at the refineries see human beings as actors in society. That group, in turn, is almost equally divided between those who emphasize their role as individuals or as socially oriented. Another 43.5% expressed a dependency vision characteristic of traditional rural society, and just under 7% demonstrated a world view that is in transition between the two.
Among the differentiating factors studied, occupation within the sugar industry clearly plays a role in shaping one's worldview. As Table 2 illustrates, field workers are most inclined toward a vision of dependency. Since the majority of them live in rural districts, it is not surprising that their mentality would be similar to that of peasants. This also explains why those who do define human beings as actors in society put the accent on individual rather than social orientation; it is a view typical of small farmers, with whom field workers often have family ties.
Administrative employees have the most developed view of human beings as actors, since they are most removed from the rural environment and have a higher education level. They are also much more individualistic than the other categories of workers.
Industrial workers and operators have a very similar profile. At least 50% of each group view human beings as actors, whether individual or " social. The proportion of those with a socially oriented view is nearly double that of white-collar workers and almost triple that of field workers. Those in a transitional stage are more numerous than in other worker categories.
This suggests that there are two ways to acquire a consciousness of human beings as actors. One is through an administrative career, which presupposes study, and the other is through industrial or operational work, which introduces a person into socialized work relations in the most visible fashion, and requires a certain kind of rationality.
With regard to the age factor, the revolution's influence can be seen in the youngest two age groups. Both have a high level of social orientation, but a dependency view is higher in the youngest bracket. This could indicate that the new generations were less influenced by the socio-cultural changes brought by the revolution in the first years.
Education appears to be quite central to the transformation of one's worldview. An erosion of the dependency view is evident among workers with more education. It does not appear to be the key factor that ushers in a social versus an individualistic view, however. As we verify below, religious, union and political party leanings also play an important role.
With respect to religion, the Protestant group (5.5% of the total) has the highest dependency view. The majority of these workers belong to new evangelical groups that reject Catholicism's traditional grassroots forms of dependence such as promises to saints, but they have only replaced them with new content of the same nature. Since dependency is typically linked to certain types of traditional religious beliefs, this view is found among very few of those who say they have no religion, which means no religious affiliation and not necessarily atheism.
Of those with no religion (16.7% of the total), the majority reflects a social orientation. This illustrates the difficulty of reconciling a religious vision with social commitment and progressive politics if there has been no transformation.
The near parity of the figures both for dependency and for people as actors (combining social and individual) among union and political party members indicates that differing world views do not constitute a determining factor for joining organizations, although there does appear to be a relationship between party membership and actor orientation. Two-thirds of those interviewed who are affiliated to a party were FSLN members.
There were significant differences regarding the union sympathies of the workers interviewed: 47.6% were favorable to the CST, 22.5% to the Social Christian-oriented Nicaraguan Workers Federation (CTN) and 7.3% to the CUS, which has links to the AFL-CIO. Another 22.2% had no particular leanings toward any union. The dependency vision is much stronger among CTN and CUS members than among those of the CST, as is the tendency toward a vision of people as individual actors. The higher level of transition consciousness found among those sympathetic to the CST seems to indicate that union membership really is linked to a change toward a vision that emphasizes social issues.
The difference in worldview between those who identify with Nicaragua's two main political formations—FSLN and UNO—is glaring, particularly with respect to the predominance of a social versus an individual orientation of human beings as actors. Two-thirds of those who declared any political sympathy favored the FSLN and the other third favored UNO.
Summarizing this first part of the study, it can be concluded that about 25% of the workers have a foundation—although not a sufficient one—of the conditions necessary for joining a workers' movement with a long-term commitment. To constitute this foundation, other factors must come together. In this social group, a worker's educational level seems to be the most important factor in overcoming the traditional rural model. One's position in the production process, however, is more determinant for emphasizing the social over the individual. Union and political party membership, in turn, are both the cause and the result of a new world view.
Workers' ideologyWe understand ideology as referring to the way in which social relations of production are explained and legitimized. There are those who think that the existence of social classes is a natural and unchangeable phenomenon, while others think that they result from the organization of the economy. Some believe that the boss' authority comes from God, while others reject that idea. While some workers say that the cause of poverty lies in bad economic organization and in the political system, others blame the poor themselves for not wanting to work. Some see the factory or office as one big family and others as the location of boss-worker relations. Some workers favor privatization and reject all state interference in the economy; others have the opposite opinion. All these are ideological indicators.
Over three-fourths of the permanent workers interviewed either liken social relations in the refineries to family relations or have a perspective that could be classified as collaboration between social classes, positions that are quite similar from an ideological point of view. Of the latter group, 18% gave religious reasons for their attitude. A smaller but significant percentage expressed what could be called a socialist position and a much larger percentage than in the previous set of questions had no opinion.
Recalling that over 43% of these same workers have a dependent world view, nearly 50% see people as actors and just under half of those have a social orientation, we can see that there is not a direct correlation between ideology and world view. This is precisely why a certain worldview is a necessary condition for a class consciousness, but it is not in itself sufficient.
As with their worldviews, workers' ideologies differ according to their various characteristics. The one that plays the main role in ideology is neither educational level or age, but occupation. While 76% of all workers interviewed are found in the first two categories (enterprise as family and class collaboration), the combined percentages for those two categories in the breakdown by occupation is even higher for all except field workers, which was also the group in which the largest percentage did not know how to answer this kind of question.
The differences can be measured still better in the "socialist" category. Here industrial workers are stronger than the others, although a not insignificant percentage of field workers hold similar views.
We cannot say with any precision what role union or political party membership plays in the construction of ideology, but there is a noticeable relationship in both categories, particularly with regard to the presence or absence of socialist inclinations and of a clear opinion in general. Since a strong inter-class ideology of one type or another prevails in all categories of union and party sympathy, this position clearly does not hinder either leanings toward or membership in the CST or the FSLN.
Responses to neoliberalismThe sugar sector is today rife with tensions, given the current government's commitment to neoliberal economic policies. This traditionally important agroexport is endangered by foreign competition, particularly from El Salvador. In addition, most of the refineries are in seriously deteriorated condition, and the current government's tendency is to drain them even further. Salaries are very low, and a number of social subsidies provided by the previous government, such as the monthly packet of basic foodstuffs, have been stopped.
Privatization, a focal point of the new economic policy, is also on the agenda for the refineries. This made it particularly important to know how the workers express their economic and social needs and their opinion on both privatization and the government's periodic forum known as concertación, which tries to harmonize worker-business interests through negotiation.
Needs and aspirationsOf all the suggestions made by the sugar workers—including, in this case, the seasonal cane cutters—the wage issue is clearly seen as a priority by the majority. Wages topped all other forms of direct income among permanent workers and actually doubled them among seasonal laborers. What we have identified as elements of indirect income (known as a "social wage" during the Sandinista government) appear very dispersed and are often linked to particular problems in a given refinery. Personal economic problems of sugar workers are so acute that general issues of labor policy are in a distant third place among their concerns.
Among the workers' specifically social needs, health is in first place, followed for seasonal workers by housing and for permanent workers by collective equipment. (A diverse range of collective equipment was mentioned: sports, drinking water, electricity, a dining hall, transportation and a store.) As in the previous breakdown, immediate problems were seen as so critical that long-range policies or those linked to working conditions lagged far behind.
One way of uncovering the workers' economic aspirations was by asking what they would do if they won the big prize in the lottery. Their aspirations divided into three kinds of needs: long-term, immediate and what we have called solidarity (helping the poor or giving to the church or another institution). The two main specific needs mentioned were a house and the desire to leave wage labor entirely, to become independent individual farmers or artisan producers. It is interesting that the reference to the future centered on traditional individual economic organization, which appears to be the only alternative form of subsistence that the concrete experience of these workers allows them to consider. While it is also perhaps the only realistic alternative under the circumstances, this kind of subjective response to their objective situation does not contribute to or reflect the creation of class consciousness.
PrivatizationWorkers were asked to give their opinion to the following proposition: "Privatization is the best way to organize the country's economy." The result was a wide split of opinions. Among the permanent workers, 40.2% said yes and 44.2% said no. Although differences exist according to occupation, they are not as big as in other cases. We should add that 81.9% of the workers favored participating in the administration of the refineries, while 5.8% opposed it and 17.4% had no opinion. This means that for the vast majority privatization implies worker participation.
ConcertaciónThere are various ways to think about the concertación process between business, labor and the government. The workers were asked whether they thought it was a negotiation process, a way of applying the principle of reconciliation, a weapon of struggle for the bourgeoisie or a concession by the workers. The differences of opinion are only significant between the field hands and the other workers, and then mainly due to the high percentage of abstentions by the former group, which explains its lower percentages in all the other possible options. Discounting that factor, a largely consistent pattern of responses to each of the options can be discerned.
For the vast majority of workers, concertación appears as an opportunity for negotiation and an expression of reconciliation, both of which are concrete considerations. When more abstract ideas are taken up (bourgeois weapon of struggle or concession on the part of the workers), the uncertainty becomes greater and the opinions more divided. The white-collar workers and industrial workers have the highest degree of clear answers, but their division into two totally opposed groups regarding the more abstract definitions is notable. Neither these two groups nor the operators are homogenous. In all three groups, between 40% and 50% view concertación as a bourgeois weapon and only some 10% fewer in each group see it as a worker concession.
It is interesting to compare the answers by occupational group to those by union sympathy to the option that concertación is a bourgeois weapon. Of those who say it is, 53.2% identify with the CST, 12.2% with the CTN and 5.6% with the CUS. A similar pattern emerges with respect to political party leanings: 53.8% of those sympathetic to the FSLN and 14% of those who identify with UNO.
Opinions about unionismNearly 98% of the workers believe that unions are necessary, which indicates an extremely high level of union consciousness. But this does not contradict either a dependent worldview or a class collaborationist ideology. In the main, it can be interpreted as a practical attitude given the workers' concrete situation.
A strong 71% want union unity, and 58% state that unions divide the working class. Of those holding the latter view, 79.4% work at the San Antonio refinery, which has a history of inter-union strife. The proposition that one role of unions is to fight against the bosses received various responses. Some 58% agreed that this should be the case. It is possible that state ownership of the sugar refineries is at the origin of these opinions.
General image of the unionsIn the judgment about the general orientation of union activity, one notes that the proportion between positive and negative appraisals is three-to-one for the CST, two-to-one for the CTN and almost neck-and-neck for the CUS. In the case of the CUS, the opinions that it has sold out to the bosses or is linked to imperialism are slightly higher than the opposite opinion. While these proportions are for all workers and not just members of the respective union, it should be remembered that there are twice as many sympathizers of the CST in the sample than of the CTN and seven times as many CST sympathizers than those of the CUS.
Regarding internal organization, 43% said that the CST was independent while 38% responded that it was not; 26% said it was bureaucratic and 47% said it was not. The CTN received the same criticisms, but in proportionally stronger terms, since the figures were almost equal between positive and negative responses. Opinions were also nearly equally divided regarding the bureaucratization of the CUS (10.9% said no and 11.6% said yes) and regarding its effectiveness (13% said it was not effective and 12% said it was).
Image of one's own unionMembership in or sympathy with a particular union federation unquestionably influences workers' opinions about the other unions as well as about their own. Using the same set of questions, we separated out the image of the union federations among their own sympathizers so as to eliminate the external factors that could influence that image.
We can say that in general workers who belong to the CST have more confidence in their federation than the other workers have in theirs. The concept "politicized" seems to be interpreted in relatively positive fashion by those in the CST and CUS and only partly so by those in the CTN.
The relatively strongest internal criticism of the CST (28%) was a lack of independence (presumably from the FSLN). Of its own members, 20% accuse it of being bureaucratic and 8% of being corrupt. Only 5% of the CTN affiliates say that their federation suffers from bureaucracy, but 25% accuse it of corruption and lack of independence (more than 20% had no opinion about its links to imperialism). Among the CUS sympathizers, 6% say it is corrupt (a strong 27% said they could not answer the question) and 12% say it is not independent.
The great majority of all union affiliates find the federation of their choice effective and say that it defends the workers well. The CUS was a bit more criticized about its defense of workers (6%).
Media preferencesMedia contribute to reproducing or transforming ideas. According to the survey, an estimated 70% to 75% of the permanent workers have access to newspapers and 90% to radio.
The final table shows the figures of radio and print media preferred according to union, religious and party preference (figures for FSLN sympathizers are nearly identical to those of CST sympathizers and are thus omitted). While all media in Nicaragua are highly identified with some point on the political spectrum, the stated preferences indicate nothing about what kind of articles or programs attract the worker.
Social consciousness, class consciousness and union activityThis study also undertook to study the level of social and class consciousness among the sugar workers. Our first conclusion is based on the workers' consciousness about whether they are historic actors or not. Such consciousness is linked to the development of the productive forces (technical capacity and knowledge). Our second is based on notions of social relations of production and on a capacity, at least implicit, to analyze society.
Sugar workers are characterized by their dispersion in different regions of the country. There is no industrial concentration to help create a common consciousness, either among the different sectors of production or among the various refineries. This restricted workspace favors the perception of collective life to a micro-dimension—the enterprise level—to the detriment of a broader perspective. To the extent that such a broader perspective is found among the workers, it is due to other factors: media, education and union activities.
The objective factor of these workers' working conditions leads to a personalization of the social relations of production, in the sense that the boss or his/her delegate is perceived as a person more than as the representative of the class that possesses the capital (or of the state). It also means that the enterprise is seen by an appreciable part of the workers as one big family. This would seem to be a transposition of the hacienda image to the industrial system, despite the fact that the Sandinista government nationalized the refineries. That nationalization produced structural changes, but had few direct consequences on worker consciousness. It is a well-known socio-cultural fact that mental customs are not transformed rapidly.
In addition, a majority of workers live in a rural environment and come from families in which agricultural activity has always been predominant. If the permanent workers depend on the enterprise for their economic livelihood, a large part of their social reproduction at the level of family, children's education, daily social relations and cultural and religious customs are carried out in rural districts or small towns. For the seasonal workers, particularly the cane cutters, this situation is even more marked, given that not even their economic base depends exclusively on the refinery. The union discourse, inspired by a more developed social consciousness, is often superimposed on popular culture, without really penetrating it.
Since this traditional cultural model is characterized by a vertical structure and a sacred vision of the universe, it plays a certain role in consolidating the relations of production. The relation is usually direct; in other words, a certain type of culture is created that gives a "natural" character to social phenomena. Although only a minority attributed a divine origin to the authority figure, top-down relations remain at the foundation of thinking and from there are reproduced and validated.
Such a situation illustrates what we could call a cultural transition belonging to a capitalist economic system that uses pre-capitalist forms of organizing production: refineries stuck in rural regions and a work force only partially integrated into the capital/labor relation (the seasonal workers). In this way a proletariat and semi-proletariat are created that are objectively incorporated into capitalist production relations, but that reproduce cultural features of precapitalist societies. They live socially inserted into the traditional structures of the rural family, the rural district, the rural town, which constitute the foundations of their social and cultural reproduction. Obviously these are not rigid; they can be transformed slowly under the influences of geographic mobility or education, but they do not lead to the acquisition of a class consciousness typical of industrial workers.
Ten years of Sandinista revolution brought a new transition element to Nicaraguan society: the tendency toward a socialist organization of the economy. Not all of society was ever integrated into these new relations since the system was based on a mixed economy. In the sugar industry, however, social relations of production were changed by the nationalization of the refineries. But this new system never influenced the sugar workers' mentality in a fundamental way. In fact, these new relations remained very theoretical for the workers. Of course there were social improvements in the working conditions, as there were for the rest of the labor sectors, but the country's economic limitations and the lack of prepared new cadres prevented a profound change in the workers' daily lives.
It is worth adding that the general conditions of the social environment did not change. Workers continued living in their rural districts or in the poor shacks of the refinery. The fundamental organizational structure of work did not change and the boss was simply replaced by a state-appointed director. There was never co-administration. In addition, given the CST's links to the FSLN, its role as the main union was never autonomous. At the same time, it had to defend workers' interests and support the transformation of society put in place by the Sandinista government. Given this, the CST often found itself facing contradictions created by the economic orientations of the government, which, for its part, was hamstrung by the war and the need to favor agroexports.
The only refinery that was different was Timal, or "Victoria de Julio," built by the Sandinista government with significant Cuban financing and new working conditions—particularly mechanization of the harvest. The source of social and political consciousness of the personnel, which largely came from other parts of the country, was outside of the workplace.
Finally, the survey also shows that many sugar workers have adopted a modem individualist worldview. We should remember that a bit over half of the workers have a nontraditional ideology. The transition is from tradition to individualism, which corresponds to the entrance into a worldview of a neoliberal or consumer society. This tendency is even a bit higher among the white-collar workers.
It is not a question of stating that individual values are in themselves negative, but they often conflict with social concern and with a commitment favoring a transformation of society in benefit of the majority. This general picture of sugar workers' social consciousness is not contrasted with concrete militancy regarding labor demands. In reality, the analysis of the groups shows that the cane cutters—who do not have an articulated worldview as a group and have strong illogical ideologies—show even more combativeness than the permanent workers. This means that practical attitudes and actions, directly linked to visible interests, can exist without a more necessarily internalized thinking by those who lead these struggles. This is confirmed by the fact that among CST or FSLN sympathizers, one finds large numbers of workers with a traditional mentality. In other words, the spirit needed to defend legitimate demands does not require class consciousness nor is it a sufficient indicator that a more advanced class consciousness exists.
Class consciousnessThere is a difference between social consciousness and class consciousness. The latter includes not only a modem analytical world view that has shaken off tradition, but also a kind of ideology able to see the structures of society as made up of social classes that have their own objectively opposed interests, the basis of which lies in economic organization. Some concrete elements, such as the conviction of belonging to a certain class and the expression of solidarity with elements of that same class in other sectors of the economy, complete class consciousness.
Class consciousness, in the full sense of the word, is thus not very developed among sugar workers. According to our study, only between 10% and 15% have it. This obviously does not mean that the majority are not capable of organizing a strike in their own sector or even that they will not participate in a general strike. These reactions enter into the logic of practical attitudes, important for the workers' struggle, but they are not sufficient to assure a long-term movement for social transformation. This statement is not an undervaluing of the social qualities of sugar workers; it only makes evident an objective situation that can be explained by the historic and current social conditions of their collective existence. This situation offers raw material for union activity.
The function of unionismFrom this perspective, at least two questions can be proposed to the unions. The first concerns the kind of action they can undertake, and the second the key groups with which they should develop that action.
Union activity can be defined as demanding workers' rights. It is a concrete organization for workers' struggles in the various sectors where workers' interests are at stake. Wages are unquestionably the primary right, as workers are the first to recognize. But it would be important to ask whether other objectives, such as working conditions, health and housing, should not be considered more as a part of union activity than they are.
It is the job of the unions to define whether the promotion of class consciousness is also an integral element of their activity in the workplace. It is not an issue of a simply demagogic position, or of using a radical vocabulary which often lacks concrete content, much less of promoting an unwinnable battle. It is rather about proposing the conditions for a change in society and the place for the working class in this process. It is perfectly possible that unions do not consider this their role, but if they believe that it is, their work would evidently have to go beyond the defense of workers' claims.
If the general social conditions of sugar production do not themselves lead to the development of class consciousness, the initiative must come from institutions parallel to that process, such as unions or other forms of worker organization. Such an undertaking does not begin at a mass level, but is initially directed to small groups and with an appropriate pedagogy.
The formation of class consciousness cannot follow an academic model of teaching. Consciousness grows out of class practice, and in this sense the activities of workers in defense of their own rights in the workplace play a pivotal role in its formation, although there must be a dialectical relation between practice and reflection.
Reflection, in turn, requires a theoretical understanding of social mechanisms. If certain unions define the formation of workers' collective consciousness as an essential part of their mission, they must also develop an active methodology that is appropriate to this task. Any non-academic methodology must begin with the social group's own cultural reality, so that its members can transform themselves. It is useless to directly or even indirectly attack the cultural characteristics of the target group, whether those characteristics be local customs, religious beliefs or life style. The job is to help transform those characteristics so that slowly but surely what does not help explain the world, motivate personal or collective action or fit within the definition of a better society worth fighting for falls away on its own.
The first element to define for long-term educational activity is the group or groups that are most likely to become promoters of this consciousness and those that are likely to be objective obstacles to it. According to the survey, the industrial workers seem closest to this perspective and the field workers furthest from it. Within each group, however, there are differing potentials. These have to be studied and contemplated. Only by doing a careful and scientific soil test can one determine what nutrients need to be added to be sure the seeds grow strong and the harvest is more bountiful.
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America