Côte d’Ivoire: Support the Workers of the “Grands Moulins D’Abidjan” (GMA)

The “Grands Moulins d’Abidjan” or GMA (= “Big Mills of Abidjan”) are flour mills located in the Port area of the Ivorian capital, which occupy a key role in the country’s economy. They produce wheat flour, wheat bran and animal feed marketed across West Africa, including 70% of the flour distributed in Côte d’Ivoire itself. In 2018, they were bought by a US multinational listed in the New York Stock Exchange called Seaboard Corporation, which operates in 45 countries across the world, including 16 on the African continent. The appointment of a new director by the group in June 2020 signaled the start of an offensive against the conditions and rights of the workforce.

In April 2021, following an unsuccessful strike by GMA workers, they decided to create their own independent trade union, the SYT-GMA (Syndicat des Travailleurs des Grands Moulins d’Abidjan). The creation of a genuine and effective trade union representation came about as the logical result of the longstanding inertia of the then union “delegates” affiliated to the Union Générale des Travailleurs de Côte d’Ivoire (UGTCI), who were co-opted by the management and working hand-and-hand with the latter to stifle any genuine demand from the workers, and had led their strike astray for self-interested reasons. “They responded to the orders of the management, not of the workers”, commented Digbé Patrick Raymond Lucien, the general secretary of the SYT-GMA, in an interview with Militant CI.

After its creation, the SYT-GMA fought for and obtained the first plural and transparent union election in the workplace in 58 years, in which it secured an overwhelming majority with 8 out of 10 elected delegates belonging to the new union — and this after only 3 months of existence. 160 out of the 260 workers and employees of GMA are now affiliated to the SYT-GMA.

The SYT-GMA’s combativity and uncompromising stand in fighting against worker’s exploitation and precarious working conditions inside the company, and in challenging the diktats of the bosses, rapidly modified the balance of forces and helped secure important gains for GMA workers. This includes, for example, a health insurance for all workers and employees (which was previously only available for the cadres of the company), family allowances, the rehabilitation of locker rooms, or the access to proper mineral water for all workers instead of the unclean water they were compelled to drink before.

The emergence of the SYT-GMA was immediately responded to by a long series of harassment and intimidation tactics by the management, combined with attempts to lure and compromise the new union leaders and delegates through material favours and privileged treatment, in an attempt to try and neutralize the union. The bosses were indeed used to union reps toeing the line, and who hardly ever contradicted them — not delegates who resist and organise workers on the shop floor to improve their lot.

The culmination of this revengeful campaign by the bosses came this summer with their decision to sack five members of the SYT-GMA executive bureau in May, June and July — just after the union had put forth a strike notice on the basis of a series of demands to which the management had turned a deaf ear. These demands included, ironically, an end to the harassment of the shop stewards, but also the respect of the 40-hour week, night work bonuses, a housing allowance, the presence of a health service at night and the definition of a proper salary grid.

Leading members of SYT-GMA

These layoffs are blatantly illegal as per the Ivorian constitution which in its article 17, guarantees on paper the right to strike, both in the public and private sector. They were done without any compensation, and with the full complicity and formal greenlight of the Labour Inspection. As the workers quickly came to realize, the State has been acting in cahoots with the GMA’s bosses to break their struggle, the special police of the Port having even been mobilized to temporarily arrest several SYT-GMA leaders in May of this year.

As prices continue to rise all over the country and workers are more financially pressurized than ever, the company chooses to attack the workers’ only genuine union by all means possible, rather than making the slightest concession. This has nothing to do with a lack of material capacity for the company to deliver: the GMA have a turnover of at least 300 million CFA a day (about half a million US dollars) while Seaboard Corporation itself registered a profit of 2,4 billion euros in 2016. It has everything to do with an attempt to intimidate workers from supporting the union, keeping them in fear and poverty by crippling their main means of resistance so as to ensure the bosses’ continuation of their one-sided class war, and fill in the pockets of the company’s shareholders.

Militant CI and ISA call for the largest show of international solidarity with the courageous struggle of the GMA workers and their union. A successful outcome to this struggle for trade union rights and workers’ dignity could have a much wider impact in the rebuilding of an organised and fighting labour movement in Côte d’Ivoire. This is especially true considering the special place the GMA occupy in the Ivorian economy, and their location in a concentrated industrial area where tens of thousands of other workers are facing similar conditions of abuse, and of a lack of meaningful trade unions. That is why GMA workers need our solidarity and support, and why the rest of the trade union and socialist movement, in Côte d’Ivoire and internationally, should come behind their struggle.

No to dictatorial and bullying management! Defend trade union rights! Reinstate the sacked leaders of the SYT-GMA, and improve pay and conditions for all workers!

You can help in this struggle for trade union freedom by:

1. Sending letters of protest (see below a template letter that can be used to that effect) to gregs@somc.co.za (Greg Stough, General Director of Seaboard Corporation for Africa) and to seaboard@seaboardcorp.com (Corporate Headquarters of Seaboard Corporation in Kansas City, USA) with copies to odigbahio@gmail.com (Militant CI)

2. Calling +1 913–676–8800 (Corporate Headquarters of Seaboard Corporation in Kansas City), demanding the immediate reinstatement of Digbé Patrick Raymond Lucien, Coulibaly Ibrahima, Dosso Lassina, Ehui Atta Jean Claude and Sieni Désiré

3. Sharing this call for solidarity on social networks.