Trade unions in

Curaçao Curaçao ( ; ; pap, Kòrsou, ), officially the Country of Curaçao ( nl, Land Curaçao; pap, Pais Kòrsou), is a Lesser Antilles island country in the southern Caribbean Sea and the Dutch Caribbean region, about north of the Venezuela coast ...

have a total membership of 5,800 as of 2009. Unions played no role in Curaçao before 1922. There were two possible reasons for this: it can be attributed to workers, as members of a racist colonial society, not yet being ready for this level of organizations and they may have been avoiding repression from the government. In 1913, a large dock strike, the earliest recorded strike by free workers in the history of Curaçao, took place on the island, but it was entirely a

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. Employers brought in workers from St. Thomas and

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...

and broke the strike. It did not give rise to any permanent workers' organizations. In April 1922, another dock strike broke out, again without union involvement. The Royal West Indian Mail Service (KWIM), acting on behalf of a number of shipping companies, lowered dockworkers' wages. It claimed that wages had risen excessively during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. The Roman Catholic People's Union intervened and mediated negotiations between workers and employers. The People's Union was not a labor union, but mostly a middle class organization looking to advance the interests of the people. When negotiations failed, workers decided to form a Dock Workers' Union on July 1. It was able to negotiate a compromise with the local management of the KWIM to end the strike. When the company's general management in New York rejected this compromise, a riot ensued at its offices in the Curaçao capital of

Willemstad Willemstad ( , ; ; en, William I of the Netherlands, William Town, italic=yes) is the capital city of Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean Sea that forms a Countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, constituent country of the Kingdo ...

. The police needed military assistance to put it down, killing four and wounding nineteen in the process. As a result, the KWIM accepted the original compromise. Under the guise of the People's Union, further unions were founded throughout the 1930s, including the Shop and Office Workers' Union in 1934, the Drivers' Union in 1935, and the Roman Catholic Laborers' Union in the course of a strike at a

Royal Dutch Shell Shell plc is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New Yo ...

plant in 1936. These unions were largely driven by their leaders while the rank and file had as yet little interest in unionizing for a number of reasons: Despite the severe global economic crisis, Curaçao's economy was thriving and drawing large numbers of immigrants, mostly from Portuguese

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and the British Caribbean islands. This created a heterogenous workforce. Meanwhile, the government reacted repressively to workers' attempts to organize, as did Shell, the biggest employer. In recent decades, union membership in Curaçao has fallen. It declined from 9,000 in 1957 to 6,000 in 1988 and 5,100 in 2001, but rose to 5,800 in 2009.Docherty/Van der Velden 2012, pg. 81

References

Bibliography

* * {{Curaçao topics