Settling the Social Debt Owed to Retired Sugarcane Workers in the Dominican Republic

We remember President Abinader's trip to the province of San Pedro de Macoris, the heart of the sugar-industry bateyes in the east of the country, five weeks after taking office in mid-August 2020.

President Luis Abinader pledged that Saturday to resolve the situation of thousands of cane workers who for years had been demanding a state pension after spending most of their lives working in the sugar mills. The president made the statement after meeting with representatives of the Ingenio Porvenir cane workers on Saturday morning as part of his agenda in that province, which had begun at 9:00 a.m. with a meeting with the local bishop.

Ramon Perez Reyes for Listin Diario, September 26, 2020

San Pedro de Macoris, DR

Nearly two years after that firm commitment, two recent publications shed light on the current situation for elderly workers as supposed beneficiaries of this presidential promise. On the one hand, we have part of the master's research of Dominican scholar Micely Diaz Espaillat, a summary published by FES in its Perspectiva series and titled Work and Social Justice: barriers to access to pensions for Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic.

In summary, she explains the following: this research addressed the causes, mechanisms, and effects of the social injustices faced by the cane-worker population in accessing social security. The causes include colonial history, lack of political will, the economic interests of sugar companies, and the discretion exercised by Dominican authorities. Institutional barriers serve as mechanisms for the denial of rights and include the high cost of regularization, the long list of requirements to obtain a pension, and the centralization of the process. Police repression, repatriation, and the violation of labor rights also serve as means of control. Decent work and freedom of association remain absent, and cheap labor for the economic elite continues to be guaranteed. The sugar sector benefits from the complicity of the political elite, which systematically blocks access to other rights. The economic, social, and emotional consequences faced by sugar-cane workers include mental health problems and untreated chronic illnesses. These effects exclude them socially and impact their families, who must face the intergenerational transmission of poverty, racial discrimination, and statelessness, while seeing their opportunities for human development limited. In the face of this scenario, political will can be decisive in adopting anti-racist practices that guarantee social justice (FES 2022).

On the other hand, journalist Indhira Suero Acosta produced a gem of investigative journalism that was published in Gatopardo on June 2, 2022 under the title Bitter sugar. The struggle of Haitian cane workers. It agrees with many of Micely Diaz's findings. At the end of her article, she refers to the visit of U.S. congressmembers to the country in May, concerned about labor conditions in the cane fields from which the United States imports sugar. In a future OBMICA bulletin we will continue reporting on what the congressmembers observed during a follow-up visit and the debate stemming from their press release and the serious concerns expressed there.