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. On Thursday, six thousand employees did 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 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.
In July 2024, human rights lawyers and union experts visited Firestone Liberia and conducted interviews with workers, which formed the basis of the ILAW report co-authored by Greenfield and Lance Compa, a lecturer emeritus at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Contract workers interviewed by researchers described poor living conditions, unpaid mandatory overtime, and difficult-to-reach production quotas. According to the report, these workers lived in “constant fear of being disciplined or dismissed” if they spoke out, and some said that they had been retaliated against for even attending union meetings.
There are three types of jobs most commonly held on Firestone Liberia: “tappers” who extract latex, “cup washers” who clean the buckets used to collect latex, and “slashers” who clear underbrush. Contract workers, who are primarily employed as “tappers,” told researchers that they must work 50-60 hours per week to reach production quotas, or risk being fired. According to the report, workers are not paid for overtime, in defiance of Liberian law, which requires overtime pay after 48 hours of work. And because some workers are paid per pound of dried latex extracted, pay can fall below Liberia’s minimum wage of $5.50 a day.
International observers have long been concerned about demanding production quotas on the plantation. In 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund sued Firestone in a US District court on behalf of 23 Liberian child laborers and their guardians. The lawsuit claimed that the company was aware that children often worked alongside their parents “tapping” rubber trees to meet quotas. Firestone said that they do not directly employ children, and the lawsuit was eventually tossed out by an appeals court.
When we think of forced labor, we might imagine work done at the “point of a bayonet,” Greenfield, the report’s co-author, said at the presentation to shareholders. “(But) it’s really important to look at forced labor in the context of contemporary circumstances.”
The precarity of their employment, Greenfield and Compa argue in the report, “plunged” contract workers into “steadily worsening conditions” with no avenues of redress. The report claims that conditions under which contract workers must operate meet international standards of forced labor and violate Bridgestone’s own Global Human Rights Policy.
A Bridgestone spokesperson said that Firestone prohibits retaliation against employees who have grievances and that third-party contractors must comply with “rigorous training, safety, and code of conduct standards.” The spokesperson said that the company “(holds) contracting companies accountable, terminating those who we become aware of failing to meet these standards.”
As Liberia’s first major foreign investor, Firestone has long framed itself as a vital partner in the country’s development.
Liberia was founded in 1822 by formerly enslaved Black people, who had been sent to the coast of West Africa by the American Colonization Society, an organization opposed to racial integration. Despite resistance from local leaders, the settlers established the colony with support from the US government and named its capital Monrovia, for the fifth American president James Monroe. But, for a century, the settlement struggled to be economically self-sufficient. Then came Harvey S. Firestone, founder of the Ohio-based tire company, who had been searching for a place to develop a rubber plantation. In 1926, the company signed a 99-year lease for one million acres of Liberia, at an annual rent of six cents per acre. A subsequent agreement exempted Firestone and its foreign employees from taxes and duties.
In 1929, a US official in Liberia expressed concerns that Liberian elites were using force to recruit workers for plantations and farms, including Firestone’s. After American officials grew concerned, the League of Nations—of which the US was not a member—launched an investigation. It found that, though Liberian political elites may have coerced workers, there was “no evidence” that Firestone “consciously employs any but voluntary labour.”
In 1947, Liberia declared independence and became Africa’s first republic. But Firestone remained a major player in the country, maintaining relationships with Liberian leaders throughout the 20th century—including, as detailed in a ProPublica investigation, the convicted war criminal Charles Taylor. (The company told ProPublica that it had never willingly assisted Taylor’s occupation of Liberia.) Another leader, Samuel Doe, described Liberia’s relationship with Firestone as a “contract of mutual survival.”
“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare.”
“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare,” said Gregg Mitman, an environmental history professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Empire of Rubber. It provided free housing, education, and medical care, and sold rice and palm oil to workers at subsidized rates. But, given its privileged tax status, Firestone’s presence in Liberia did not fundamentally transform the country’s economy. One economist estimated that, from 1926 to 1977, three out of every four dollars earned by Firestone in Liberia were transferred to its American headquarters. “You can ask yourself whether that is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Mitman said.
As the labor movement began gaining momentum in Liberia, Firestone saw its first employee walk-out in 1949, with workers demanding higher wages, improved living conditions, and better treatment by white management. A series of strikes followed throughout the 1950s, which were sometimes quashed by state police.
Between 1989 and 2003, the country was decimated by a series of civil wars, with fatalities estimated between 150,000 and 250,000—during which Firestone continued to operate. As Liberia struggled to rebuild, it once again turned to foreign capital, a strategy that has historically failed to create “sustainable infrastructure and basic social services,” said Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian activist and professor of social policy at the London School of Economics. “The extractive nature of foreign direct investment (doesn’t lift) Liberian citizens out of multi-dimensional poverty.”
In 2007, after a series of wildcat strikes and with international observers present, FAWUL held what has been described as its first independent leadership elections. The new slate of leaders won wage increases and lower quotas in their next contract. At the time, a United Steelworkers official who had helped FAWUL organize wrote, “It is proof that they have a union now that requires management to treat them with dignity and respect.”
When I spoke to Fatoma in early January, over a WhatsApp video call, he told me that he had just been laid off. He thinks his termination is directly related to his recent election as a union representative. “When you advocate at Firestone, you are an enemy,” Fatoma said.
Firestone does not currently recognize FAWUL’s ability to negotiate on behalf of contract workers, despite the strong majority who voted for it in September. Firestone has said that it “recognizes the rights for workers to join a union,” but argues that contract workers cannot be represented by FAWUL because they are employed by third-party agencies.
Fatoma hopes that being represented by FAWUL will give contract workers enough leverage to change their working conditions.
But January’s negotiations, which were overseen by Liberia’s Ministry of Labour, were unsuccessful. Bongorlee, FAWUL’s president, said that Firestone would not allow contract workers to join FAWUL, but said that they could form their own. According to Bongorlee, the negotiations stalled on retirement benefits and sick pay for directly employed workers.
Even if FAWUL and Firestone ultimately reach an agreement, Greenfield says, the fight is far from over. “Companies don’t change their actions overnight,” Greenfield told me. “What you need is a fundamental shift of power, and that doesn’t come about easily, and it doesn’t come about quickly.”
