C ceres said such means would reach more than 25,000 farm families, more than all the private banks put together. These mothers have a family average of 4 children. They were sometimes much longer, even up to 24 hours or more. All complained of the common practice of being forced to strip on supervisors' suspicion that they might be smuggling company property out of the plant. Although Nicaraguan workers have been more successful than most in organizing themselves into unions, they are currently suffering a major union-busting drive.
Workers claim the government does little or nothing about their situation.
Rather, when Martha McCoy, until recently executive secretary of the trade zones, sought meetings with the workers to discuss their conditions, FTZ companies complained to President Aleman and she was removed from her post. The workers, camped in protest outside the National Assembly, demanded the passage of a bill allowing them to take their case against Shell Oil, Dole, Chiquita and Standard Fruit before the international justice fora. The bill, stalled since 1996, accuses more than ten companies of using pesticides based on the chemical known as DBCP, which has savage effects on human beings, including sterility, blindness, skin and bone cancer, heart and respiratory damage, drastic weight loss and skin lesions. Some of these are passed on genetically to workers' children. Nemagon was used extensively on plantations during the Somoza years, and workers' leaders likened its long-term effects to the dreadful legacies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.