Treading on Liberia

Is Firestone paying for its faulty tires by shortchanging African workers?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Chalk up another casualty of the Firestone fiasco. In February, the company added 98,000 tires to the 6.5 million it recalled last August after 174 people died in accidents related to its faulty tires. But the recalls are also hurting workers at the tiremaker’s rubber plantation in the war-ravaged nation of Liberia, forcing African employees who earn only a few dollars a day out of their homes.

A billboard at the entrance of Firestone’s 35,000-acre facility in Harbel, Liberia, declares it the “World’s Largest Rubber Plantation.” The 5,600 workers at the plantation are supposed to receive free housing. Many of the company houses, however, were destroyed during Liberia’s seven-year-long civil war, which ended in 1997 at a cost of 150,000 lives. Firestone, which has been exporting latex from Liberia for 75 years, had slowly been repairing the homes. But in the wake of the American tire recalls, Liberian union officials charge that the company has stopped nearly all renovation on the plantation.

“Many houses are unlivable, so many people live outside the farm and must pay rent,” says Stanley Nowon, secretary general of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia. “Some of the workers work all year long, and still don’t have the money to build a house.” Firestone dismisses the allegation. “The company has very diligently worked to improve the housing that was damaged by the civil war,” says Joe Quinn, a company spokesman.

A walk around the Firestone plantation last November confirmed the dire living conditions of many workers. Among the densely packed homes were cardboard-and-metal shanties held together by scrap wood and wire. A group of houses faced a stinking trash dump in which children played. Families were living in the charred shells of homes destroyed during the war, some of which lacked roofs. None of the homes had water or electricity. The workers’ housing sits just out of sight of the neatly manicured antebellum estates of company managers.

The housing crisis has only added to the grievances of Liberian workers. With the nation’s unemployment at 85 percent, they note, Firestone can pretty much do as it pleases. According to union officials, the rubber tappers earn $2.53 a day, and work eight hours a day, six days a week. “It is very difficult to live on these wages,” says union president Richard S. Fatorma. In addition, the union says, Firestone has nearly halved its workforce in the last decade — doubling the workload without increasing pay.

Workers also complain that they feel ill from spraying trees with Difolatan, which enhances latex production. In the United States, federal health officials list Difolatan as a “known or suspected carcinogen” that can cause asthma and skin irritation. The company says it no longer uses the chemical.

Firestone says its Liberian workers earn $5 a day. “If you compare rubber workers in Liberia versus rubber workers in Thailand or Brazil, you’d find that Liberian workers’ pay is much more than rubber workers’ elsewhere,” says Quinn, the company spokes-man. By contrast, the average hourly wage for American workers in Firestone plants is about $19. Last year, even after the costly recalls, the company reported profits of $108 million.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate