The Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: Part Five, Kids Working in the Banana Trees; Parents on Strike

In 1997, I went to the Philippines to document child labor on the banana plantations producing for the Dole Corporation. The next year activists carried the information to Seattle to confront the global meeting of the World Trade Organization.

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Editor’s note: We’re delighted to share the fifth of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s photographs and writing from over the past thirty years capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library. 

Part Five tells of his visit to the banana plantations of Mindanao, in the Philippines, where Bacon  found children working in the trees, and a strike by members of banana cooperatives against the Dole Corporation. 

In 1997, I went to the Philippines to document child labor on the banana plantations producing for the Dole Corporation. In the Compostela Valley on Mindanao, I found many children doing this work. Later, in Carmen, outside of Davao I took photographs and interviewed workers who were on strike against the low prices paid by the Dole Corporation, which forced many families to take their children to work with them.

At the Soyapa Farms plantation, a huge operation set up in 1992 by Stanfilco, a division of the Dole Corporation, it wasn’t hard to find the children—they were everywhere. In one corner, I found five children from eleven to seventeen years old chattering as they flattened out and recycled sheets of plastic, coated with chemicals, that are inserted between banana bunches as they grow. 

From the shed, I walked into the banana groves. The roof of broad leaves overhead created a hot green shade underneath, and the ground was slick with the dead and rotting material cut from the trunks of the trees. Here I found the youngest children, including Alan Algoso, nine, wielding a large sharp sickle he used to cut away the dead layers. 

Other children I found in the groves had stopped going to school. Benedicto Hijara, at fifteen, had been working for three years. 

After I returned from San Jose Compostela I went to see Coronado Apuzen, a lawyer who was helping agricultural workers set up cooperatives using the Philippine land reform laws enacted after Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship ended in 1981. Apuzen had worked with the National Federation of Labor, and many of the coops had grown out of unions that had formerly negotiated with Dole. 

Workers in four big coops had been on strike against Dole for weeks. Before forming coops, they had worked for Dole as employees for decades. Although they had gained ownership of the land, But Dole controlled the export market, without which the coops couldn't survive, and used its leverage to force them to accept a low price. Under Dole's price, daily income dropped from 146 to 92 pesos, and workers lost all the medical and other benefits they had as direct employees. Faced with virtual starvation, the banana workers refused to continue to pick bananas.

Instead of finding workers inside the plantations themselves - after all, they now owned them - I found them in Occupy-style encampments under the trees just outside. Dole had hired guards and expelled the workers from their own land, even shooting one striker. 

One of the hardest things to hear was the frustrated dream of the freedom they expected to gain from land ownership. Jesus Relabo, a rank-and-file leader, told me, “Owning the land is forever. It’s something you can give to your children.” Instead, workers had been forced to pull their children out of school. In some cases they’d gone to live with other relatives. And in other families they’d gone to work, as had the children in San Jose Campostela. 

With the photographs and interviews, I first stopped in Honolulu and talked with Guy Fujimura secretary-treasurer of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 142, which still, at that time, had thousands of members working on Hawaiian sugar and pineapple plantations. For many years the big companies shifted work from Hawaii to the Philippines and Central America. A lost strike in Mindanao would mean that agricultural labor there would become even cheaper. Guy ran the photographs and stories in the union newspaper so that his members, many of whom are Filipino, would understand the connection.

Back in California, the San Francisco Chronicle put the story and photos on its front page on Christmas day. The Institute for Food and Development Policy and its arm for political campaigns, Food First, turned the photographs and interviews into a background paper. The next year activists carried it to Seattle to use in the debates that led to the confrontation in Seattle in which protestors shut down the global meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Photos 1-3: Jane, eleven, Alan, nine, and Dini, fifteen, clean the trunks of banana trees. Alan and Jane got 50 pesos a day, and Dini, being older, earned 71. At the time one U.S. dollar was worth forty pesos.

Photos 4-5: Danilo Carillon, sixteen, had stopped going to school after the third grade. For 86 pesos a day he climbed a bamboo ladder, pulling a plastic bag over each bunch of bananas. The bags are treated with a pesticide, Lorsban. Carillon wore a simple dust mask over his face when he unrolled each bag, but dust masks can’t filter out chemicals. Benedicto Hijara carried a stone and string, which he threw over an overhead cable. He then climbed a ladder, and tied the string to a tree trunk, propping it upright so it wouldn’t fall over under the weight of the banana bunch. To earn 71 pesos daily, he had to tie up 105 trees.

Photos 6-7: Benjamin Libron, fifteen, gathers discarded bananas and then throws them onto a truck for transport to local markets or Manila. Discarded bananas are the ones Filipinos eat. The good ones are exported. Near him children flatten out and recycle the sheets of plastic for two centavos for each sheet, earning as much as 50 pesos a day.

Photos 8-12: A worker pulls bunches of bananas down a cableway, to a shed where other workers wash and sort them in bunches. A child sits on a cableway. In a sari-sari store on the plantation a family sells basic groceries to the workers.

Photo 13: Felix Bacalso, had to pull all but two of his ten children out of public school, since he can no longer afford the small tuition, and the cost of uniforms, food and transportation. “I'm worried I’ll have to send them to work if the price [per box of bananas] does’'t go up,” he said. He spent eight years as a harvester at Diamond Farms, living with his family in a two-room home on the plantation. “If we had a higher price, I could expand my house. As it is, some of my kids have gone to live with relatives.”

Photos 14-16: Workers set up an encampment outside the gate of the Diamond Farms plantation. Inside the gate were Dole Corporation guards keeping them out, with a sign declaring the plantation, which the workers owned, “Private Property.”

Photos 17-19: Workers set up picket lines around the edges of the plantations.

Photos 20-21: At night workers held a meeting under a tent by lantern light, talking about the strike.

Find other installments in this series here.