The World’s Largest Rubber Plantation is About to Go on Strike

For sixteen years, Eric Fatoma seldom ventured beyond the boundaries of Firestone’s 185 square mile property in Liberia, where he was employed at the American-founded tire company’s rubber plantation. Around 7,000 employees and their families live on what the company describes as the world’s largest contiguous natural rubber farm, relying on Firestone for food, education, and medical care. Generations of Liberian workers have done so, through a series of violent civil wars and a devastating Ebola epidemic.

Fatoma, 57, first worked as a “tapper,” extracting latex from rubber trees, before learning how to operate heavy machinery. At $8.50 (USD) a day, it was enough for a “comfortable” life, he said. He and his wife, who sometimes worked in maintenance, could support their eight children, and Fatoma had saved enough to buy a motorbike. They lived on the property in a small home, split between two cramped bedrooms.  

In 2019, Fatoma was among eight hundred members of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) who were laid off. Termination letters cited “economic challenges faced by the Company.” 

Fatoma felt he had no choice but to accept a short-term contract through a third-party labor agency and become an office clerk. It came with a pay cut, to five dollars per day, and a newfound uncertainty—each contract lasted only a few months and had to be renewed. But in a country still recovering from war, there were few employment opportunities outside of the farm. Around 30 percent of the Liberian population live on less than $2.15 a day, and a significant portion, particularly women and young people, are employed informally in unreliable and unregulated work that is often paid under the table. 

But FAWUL argues that, for the roughly two thousand people currently employed through third-party contractors on the farm, working conditions have become exploitative. A report published last month by the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW) argues that the precarious employment status of contract workers has made them vulnerable to abuse and that some of the conditions “amount to violations of international labor standards on forced labor.” 

Near the end of last year, when FAWUL’s collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, the union began negotiating new terms with Firestone. In addition to bargaining for wage increases and better benefits for directly employed workers, they hoped that contract workers could join their union. But after a week of government-mediated negotiations in late January, when it seemed unlikely that the parties would come to an agreement, FAWUL’s parent union, the National Timber Wood, Construction & Allied Workers’ Union of Liberia, called for a strike, set to begin tomorrow. On Friday, six thousand employees will not show up to work on Firestone’s Liberia plantation.

In the century that Firestone has been in Liberia, its presence has reshaped the country—for better or worse. As the country’s largest agricultural employer, the company has invested heavily in developing its region of Liberia—building roads, schools, and hospitals. But concerns about working conditions on the plantation have long persisted and drawn international attention. At least since 2006, international unions such as the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers have bolstered FAWUL’s organizing efforts. Some observers see this as yet another chapter in a long history of extraction and exploitation. 

"This is not a new story,” Deborah Greenfield, a co-author of the ILAW report and a former policy director at the International Labour Organization, told me. “Firestone Liberia has been under the microscope for 100 years now. In a sense, their practices haven’t changed that much, and their responses haven’t changed that much.”

Firestone, which is now owned by the multinational Japanese corporation Bridgestone, operates the Liberian plantation through a subsidiary. A Bridgestone Americas spokesperson said that the ILAW report includes “misleading and false statements regarding the company’s labor practices and commitment to workers’ rights.” 

“Firestone Liberia is firmly committed to ethical business practices, transparency, and adherence to the laws of Liberia,” the statement read. “Firestone Liberia and our parent company, Bridgestone Americas, uphold a zero-tolerance policy against child labor, forced labor, and any practices violating human rights.” When reached for comment about the strike, the spokesperson said that Firestone “remains committed to resolving our differences at the negotiating table and requests that the union re-engage in discussions.”

The world’s rubber consumption will only continue to grow—it is used to make things like condoms, shoes, hoses, gloves, and, most of all, tires. But automating the extraction of natural rubber, which is more desirable than its synthetic counterpart for manufacturing, is difficult. This means that human labor is essential in order to make even cheap, disposable products. 

Globalized trade can obscure what it takes to produce the things we buy. (Do you know the people who manufactured your sneakers?) In this way, modern supply chains—how raw materials are extracted, processed, and made into products that arrive at American doorsteps—create distance between the worker and customer. But the Liberian workers behind Firestone’s products are hoping that customers will recognize the human cost of their goods.

In December, the international workers’ rights group Solidarity Center hosted a public webinar about working conditions on the plantation for Firestone investors. During the presentation, Bongorlee, the union’s president, appealed to the international community to turn its scrutiny on Firestone. “We believe that you will be able to mount pressure based on… how the workers are suffering on the plantation, and why it is important for them to be covered by our union, so that they can be given dignity,” Bongorlee said. 

The rubber trade is shrouded in a legacy of colonial exploitation. At the turn of the twentieth century, European settlers exported rubber trees from the Amazon rainforest and established large plantations in British Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. Today, harvesting natural rubber remains grueling, low-wage work done in parts of Southeast Asia and West Africa. The process of extraction is similarly unchanged. Laborers make careful cuts to latex vessels that grow in spirals around the Pará rubber tree, collecting a slow trickle of the milky liquid in buckets. Work in sweltering tropical temperatures begins in the pre-dawn hours, with the threat of snakes underfoot. 

These days, most of the world’s natural rubber comes from small, family-owned farms in Asia, which sell to a network of distributors. Firestone’s sprawling rubber plantation in Liberia, established a century ago, is a relic of a bygone era of the industry.

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