CHIQUITA BRANDS TAKE REPRISALS.

More than one-third of the 4,500 workers who participated in a 57-day strike on the banana plantations of the U.S.-based transnational Chiquita Brands in Panama have been dismissed without the due legal procedures having been followed, IPS reported from Panama City on April 23: . The workers decided

to return to work April 17 to avoid a dispute settlement that would have forced the strikers to pay Chiquita Brands millions of dollars in damages if a ruling came down in favor of the company, said the Secretary-General of the company union, Jose Morris. Despite the Government's failure to prevent the dismissal of 270 stevedores in Puerto Armuelles, located at the southwestern tip of Panama in the province of Chiriqui on the Pacific coast, the workers left it up to the Government to settle the dispute; . The strikers were demanding that the stevedores not be laid off, that the 10-minute afternoon break not be docked from their pay and special compensation for workers who handle the agro-chemicals used topreserve the fruit; . Chiquita Brands' head of labor relations Oscar Fonseca says the company's decision to suspend shipments of fruit through Puerto Armuelles was based on economic reasons. The bananas produced in the province of Chiriqui, where the strike took place, and in the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro, have begun to be sold to Europe, which means that shipping them out of a port on the Pacific ocean no longer makes sense, he explained; . Shipping the containers of bananas from the Caribbean port of Rambala in Bocas del Toro, located at the northwestern tip of Panama, will cut the route of the company's boats by some 1,500 kms, and save them the cost of the Panama Canal toll, which averages $30,000 per vessel. The fruit will now be transported by road over the 250 kms separating Puerto Armuelles and the port of Rambala; . Bananas are the main source of jobs in Puerto Armuelles, a town of 15,000. Deputy Carlos Smith of the governing Democratic Revolutionary Party has urged parliament to investigate "the wave of dismissals in Chiquita Brands." The 57-day strike in Chiriqui kept Chiquita Brands from exporting 1.6 million 18.14 kg-boxes of bananas, according to a report by the National Banana Commission, which adds that the drop in exports led to US$7.1 million in losses. Bananas, Panama's chief export, earned US$160 million in 1997.