Sitting at Table

“Perhaps it is dangerous to attempt to embed the brutal events of New World history in any war other than that waged by the rich against the poor.”

--Paul Farmer,

“Uses of Haiti,” 2003

I heard an analogy of heaven that involved sitting at table in a high school speech class. A friend described 2 doors, one marked “Heaven” and one marked “Hell.” Behind each door was a long banquet table piled with steaming gustatory delights. People sat around each table, but those in “Hell” were pathetically gaunt, dour, and silent, while those in “Heaven” were satisfied and jovial. Everyone at each table had one hand secured behind their back and their other hand was fastened to a 5-foot long utensil. The difference between the rooms was that in “Heaven,” people were feeding those across from them while in “Hell” people kept trying to feed themselves.

Paul Farmer is a tireless medical anthropologist who devotes his energy to solving the medical problems of the poor in Haiti and other global destinations. He is at heart a clinician, but affects major health changes around the world through model building, advocacy, and reconstructed notions of health-care financing. Farmer credits Liberation Theology for some of his visions of a different world and describes a table image presented by Guitierez. The rich are “on” the table, consuming whatever they like; the poor are under the table, scrounging for the crumbs. In his book, Uses of Haiti, Farmer states that the most devastating and omnipresent war is that between social classes. We will always have the poor with us, Christ said, and it is so, Farmer says, because the rich create the differences that keep the poor under the table.

Bringing people together at table does not solve all problems. Betrayer and betrayed shared table at “The Last Supper.” However, table represents communion among participants, and we were invited to table at Santos and Tina Sanchez’s house in the small village of Buenos Aires, close to Lake Yojoa in Honduras. Santos used to farm cooperative land in the community, but falling coffee prices, the devastations of Hurricane Mitch, and plague that destroyed the pineapple crops made even cooperative peasant farming untenable. Santos was now a watchman at a retail store in a nearby city. Tina worked to maintain the family’s concrete block home, prepared meals, tended grandchildren, and washed clothes without benefit of machines.

We were late for dinner, but the food was hot and tasty. Tina had prepared fried chicken, scrambled eggs, beans and tortillas. A cloth covered the sweet pineapple and full-flavored bananas that we later shared for dessert. The table was just big enough for our group, though we made space so Santos could visit with us when he arrived home during our dinner. I joked with Santos about how he didn’t need such a big house (4 rooms!) now that his children were gone. He replied that the grandchildren were plentiful, so there were more now than when his children were living in the house.

Santos’s male children live in houses surrounding their parents. The oldest child, Benjamin, had the first adjacent house—one which he shared with my wife and me when we visited in 1998. Benjamin and another of Santos’s daughters-in-law, Sonia, joined 4 other young people from the village after dinner to talk with us about their work in the maquilas—clothing assembly plants that employ thousands in “free trade zones” in Honduras and other places where labor is cheap.

Before traveling, our group viewed a video, titled “Zoned for Slavery,” about maquila workers in Honduras. The video explained the “free trade zones” as islands of independent commerce, the owners free to operate without tariff, tax, or surrounding country bureaucratic interference. The freedom exists for the factory owners, but hardly for the low-wage workers they employ.

I began with the question, “Are you happy that you have jobs in the maquilas?” and all six immediately agreed that they were. Our group then began exploring the nature of their work. Glenda sewed elastic on women’s panties. Benjamin attached one back pocket to pants and handed them to the next person who sewed that pocket in place. Dimas sewed the outside seams of pant legs. From 7 in the morning until 5 or 6 in the evening this monotonous work continued with minimal and regimented breaks for food, bathroom use, and a little rest. When first hired, workers are screened for their production speed. That initial screening provided a baseline for production goals and those

In a Learning Theory class I teach, we study how schedules of reinforcement affect behavior. A classic pattern emerges for any animal forced to work at high rates for extended periods of time. Speed increases dramatically, but the more they are pushed, the more rats, pigeons, dogs, cats, and humans hate their work—evidenced by their selecting paths of escape when they are available. We were hearing stories of just the kinds of work environments that devastate workers. Yet these workers were not complaining. They had jobs that brought cash income. Without these jobs they would have even less.

In “Uses of Haiti,” Paul Farmer describes the common pattern of exploitation of cheap labor in developing countries. High unemployment ensures that laborers cannot effectively organize to pressure their bosses for concessions. If thousands wait in line to replace existing workers who strike, what power remains to the striker? Furthermore, large companies have already made lucrative deals with political leaders that benefit both sides. Factories get concessions from payments to the state, and political leaders line their pockets with under-the-table bargains and/or partial ownership in the companies. Honduran history includes repeated stories of military action against strikers. The reasons are not a mystery.

What do the workers get? They have jobs, though the jobs generate stress and its unhealthy accompaniments. They receive wages, though embarrassingly low. Our panel of workers described differences among the maquilas at which they had worked. In some places, supervisors were harsh and regularly cut short the breaks at lunch and for brief rests. Other places had congenial supervisors, and surprising benefits, including paid maternity leave. But when I asked Benjamin whether he made enough at his job to support his growing family, he replied that the cost of food, utilities, transportation to work, meals at work, all left him short of meeting his family’s living expenses.

These families live on 1/50 th of my family income. They make the clothes that I wear. Their hours are long and their working conditions are miserable. Yet Jose Rodrique thinks in different terms when describing the meaning of his life. To break down walls is his goal. He is a catechist in the Catholic Church, and organizes people for worship and service. His prayer was one of love and brotherhood—grateful for the privilege of sharing with us—when he closed our meeting at Santos’s request.

When I asked Dimas what he wished those of us in the United States knew about his work, he said he wished we knew about the working conditions and his low wages. Dimas is special. Several years ago I had seen his picture as one of the young people our Presbytery had funded for technical training. He is bright—complimented by his instructors and community leaders. He aspires to a job repairing the machines that he now operates. He might make it, increasing his earning potential maybe by 50%. Dimas is a short man. As we said our final farewells, our host pointed out to him that I was from the group that had sponsored his special training. He gave the warm obligatory thanks, looked up at my face, and moved his hand from the top of his head to a height matching mine. He stretched to do so. “See,” he said, with a great smile on his face, “we’re the same.” There is both truth and lie in his ironic statement. We are both human—of equal value when it comes down to basics. Yet contingent circumstances have created a difference—that between oppressor and oppressed. This difference is so ingrained in our existence that we are blind to it. The oppressors do not intend nor do the oppressed choose oppression. Oppressors even maintain their position with token doles to the oppressed. But we continue to invest as if profit was the bottom line of living, and the system rolls through its inevitable differentiating cycle.