Evictions, Broken Strikes, Soldiers, and the AFL-CIO

A fourth characteristic of the Dominican Republic model, related to the preceding, is effective government pacification of the labor force, a crucial requirement for an appropriate "climate of investment." As noted above, the systematic police terror since 1965 has returned the large urban proletariat and sub-proletariat to the desired state of passivity, and the countryside has been more easily kept in line by periodic violence and threats. The Dominican Republic advertisement section in the New York Times of January 28, 1973, has a heading entitled "Industrialists Dream of Chances Like These," featuring the low, low wage rates, running between 25 and 50 cents an hour. The ad stresses the role of the law in fixing hours and wages and allowing the free import of foreign technicians. There is no mention of any trade unions, but employers will properly read between the lines that unions have been broken and pacified (with the assistance of George Meany and the AFL-CIO). Of special interest is the regular use of government troops and police to break up independent unions. The agricultural union Sindicato Unido, which operated the fields now owned by G & W was broken by police action in 1966 and 1967, and a number of its leaders, including the union lawyer Guido Gil were arrested and killed by the forces of law and order.
Another major foreign enterprise, Falconbridge Nickel, also successfully broke a union with army and police assistance in 1970. A Wall Street Journal report of September 9, 1971 states that "when a union attempted to organize construction workers at a foreign-owned ferronickel mill project last year, Mr. Balaguer sent in the army to help straighten things out. While the soldiers kept order, the contractors fired 32 allegedly leftist leaders...The strike was broken in eight days." Matters had not changed much in the mid-70s. An ad hoc human rights group that visited the Dominican Republic in 1975 reported that "working people have been prevented by nearly every conceivable means from forming and joining trade union organizations." A union organizing effort in the G & W free trade zone in the mid-1970s was broken with the help of the police in arresting, jailing, and deporting labor organizers, and with the use of "troops in full combat gear armed with submachine guns" to break up organizing meetings. Flannery states that: "Officials of the Dominican labor ministry told organizers that—contrary to the paper guarantees of the republic's laws—workers would not be allowed to form a union in the industrial free zone." On the matter of labor unions, the 1977 State Department Human Rights Report has the following "information": "Labor unions are permitted to function and numerous labor unions exist including some associated with opposition parties, but under some government controls." That exhausts that topic.
In containing unions and rendering them docile the Dominican elite has had the steadfast support of the top echelons of the AFL-CIO, which has long cooperated closely with the CIA and international business firms in this unsavory operation. Its arm CONATRAL actually helped destroy the pro-labor Bosch regime in 1963 and has steadily supported its totalitarian and anti-labor successors."' Presumably their blind hatred of Communism and radicalism in general has led Meany and his close followers to sell out systematically the interests of labor in the Dominican Republic and in other U. S. satellites.
Meany and some other labor bosses actually have a more direct interest in the pacification of labor in the Dominican Republic. Meany, his number two man Lane Kirkland, Alexander Barkan, director of COPE, the AFL-CIO political arm, and Edward J. Carlough, president of the sheet metal workers, all are stockholders in the 15,000 acre Punta Cana resort and plantation in the Dominican Republic. In order to clear the ground for this enterprise designed for the Beautiful People a large numbers of squatters were evicted by the army.

Chomsky