and won better labor conditions, job security, old age pensions, and health insurance. In Colombia, young men and women could find work in the booming textile industry in Medellín. Company unions and paternalistic employers created a rising standard of living, infrastructure improvement, and stable work. The Pató Consolidated Mining Company in the Lower Cauca and the Chocó Pacific Mining Company in the Chocó did the same in the mining regions of the Lower Cauca River and the San Juan with their company towns and schools for the children of the workers. In the town of Andágoya, on the San Juan river near Istmina, the mighty Chocó Pacific employed hundreds of people in a segregated workforce: North Americans and foreigner employees had their tennis courts and screened in porches on one side of the river; on the other side of the river a black town. Men could find unions jobs with good pay and pensions on the electric gold mining dredges. The good jobs did not last. The reasons are well known: In North America and Europe, the downsizers, the outsourcers, and the forty-year neoliberal war on working people gutted a manufacturing base and destroyed millions of jobs. Wages have remained stagnant, and the few remaining provisions of the welfare state had been under sustained attack for years. In Medellín, the textile industry, once the pride of Colombia, imploded. Colombian companies could not compete with foreign textile manufacturers: Most folded. The few which survived, modernized their equipment and fired their workers. Just as the city’s industrial base disappeared, the urban population grew by hundreds of thousands, as people migrated to Medellín to look for work and escape war in rural areas. In the Chocó, the Colombian government nationalized the US owned Chocó Pacific Company in 197?. Gold prices fell, political pressure grew, and gold production declined, so much that the nationalized Chocó Pacific went bankrupt in the early 1980s. While a handful of
and won better labor conditions, job security, old age pensions, and health insurance. In Colombia, young men and women could find work in the booming textile industry in Medellín. Company unions and paternalistic employers created a rising standard of living, infrastructure improvement, and stable work. The Pató Consolidated Mining Company in the Lower Cauca and the Chocó Pacific Mining Company in the Chocó did the same in the mining regions of the Lower Cauca River and the San Juan with their company towns and schools for the children of the workers. In the town of Andágoya, on the San Juan river near Istmina, the mighty Chocó Pacific employed hundreds of people in a segregated workforce: North Americans and foreigner employees had their tennis courts and screened in porches on one side of the river; on the other side of the river a black town. Men could find unions jobs with good pay and pensions on the electric gold mining dredges. The good jobs did not last. The reasons are well known: In North America and Europe, the downsizers, the outsourcers, and the forty-year neoliberal war on working people gutted a manufacturing base and destroyed millions of jobs. Wages have remained stagnant, and the few remaining provisions of the welfare state had been under sustained attack for years. In Medellín, the textile industry, once the pride of Colombia, imploded. Colombian companies could not compete with foreign textile manufacturers: Most folded. The few which survived, modernized their equipment and fired their workers. Just as the city’s industrial base disappeared, the urban population grew by hundreds of thousands, as people migrated to Medellín to look for work and escape war in rural areas. In the Chocó, the Colombian government nationalized the US owned Chocó Pacific Company in 197?. Gold prices fell, political pressure grew, and gold production declined, so much that the nationalized Chocó Pacific went bankrupt in the early 1980s. While a handful of