Unions around the globe will stand with Costa Rica’s dockworkers, says ITF

Moin port
Advocates point to the benefits of $1 billion invested in building the new container port. It sounds good.

But first of all, are thousands of Costa Rican producers presently prevented from exporting additional billions of dollars worth of products because the existing port can’t handle the traffic? No? I didn’t think so. So a new high-capacity terminal will not actually be moving any more production than the existing port.

So why waste a billion dollars building infrastructure that is not needed? To make container handling more efficient, more “competitive”? What does that mean? It means lowering the cost of doing the same thing. But the same money a business pays as its “costs”, is money a worker or supplier earns as his “income”. So lower cost equals lower earned income. The sales job is that lower business costs enable lower prices to consumers. We’ve been lowering costs, getting more “competitive”, for several decades now. What is the real world result, as contrasted with the theoretical outcome promised by the sales job? Consumer costs keep rising. Worker incomes are flat or falling. Corporate profits, and executive compensation, are capturing ALL of the gains of “efficiency”. The rich get richer. Everybody else gets poorer.

And unemployed. And contrary to the sales job, workers who lose their jobs to machines do NOT get “even better jobs in the new knowledge economy”. They get low paid jobs in the service sector; or they simply become unemployable. Do we “believe in” the outcomes predicted by sales jobs, and refuse to see the realities here in the real world? Are the sales jobs really that good, that they can prevent us from seeing reality?

Secondly, and more immediately, who actually receives the money that is invested? Are CR engineering firms hiring CR engineers and draftsmen to design the project? Are CR construction firms hiring the underemployed people of Limon to build the project? Are CR firms supplying all the materials and services to build the project? Are all these Costa Ricans — who are earning the billion invested dollars as their incomes — paying the Caja and CR income taxes, to bolster CR’s fiscal situation? Are all those income earners re-spending their billion dollars of earnings in CR, which employs multitudes of other Costa Ricans who sell stuff and provide services to all the direct recipients of the one billion dollars of invested money? No? I didn’t think so.

How much, if any, of those one billion invested dollars, will be paid to Costa Ricans? And how much will be paid to global engineering and construction corporations who typically design and build these large projects, in which case Costa Ricans will be lucky to earn ANY of the invested dollars. Net benefit to Costa Rica: a high capacity container terminal that we don’t own, don’t need, and probably never will need. But the project will replace lots of Limonese dock workers with giant machines, so at least our unemployment rate will be “up”.

And after the project is built and the new mechanized container terminal is able to rapidly load and unload giant ships, who is going to pay the 1/2 billion dollar cost of moving mountainsides to widen Route 32 to accommodate the (“projected”) increase in truck traffic to and from the port? There’s no point building a rapid handling port when all the trucks that haul containers to and from the port are stuck behind mudslides that close the highway. A transportation system is only as fast as its slowest link, which in this case is Route 32. If the container terminal is built, the road will have to be upgraded, and Costa Ricans will have to pay half a billion dollars to relocate mountainsides and improve the road.

We won’t actually be transporting any increased volume of exports to earn billions of new dollars to justify all this infrastructure investment. But “we will be able to”, if the “projections” ever become reality. Which they never do. Which is where the term “white elephant” enters the discussion. And what if, miracle of miracles, the Nicaragua Canal gets built and Moin becomes obsolete, just when all that (“projected”) increase in CR exports finally becomes a reality but moves along new channels?

So let’s add up the immediately visible costs and benefits of the project:
-earnings of Costa Ricans who engineer and build and sell supplies and services to the project: almost certainly less than $100 million
-costs to Costa Ricans of providing related highway infrastructure: at least $500 million

Net COST to Costa Rica of the $1 billion foreign investment — at least 400 million good ole US dollars, flushed down the container terminal, never to be seen again. All paid for with new government bond debt, so by the time we finish paying interest, the road construction costs us closer to one billion dollars.

Wow, with a windfall like this we’re going to be rich! …as long as we’re employees or shareholders of the global engineering and construction corporations that will build the project and earn the one billion invested dollars; and not Costa Ricans, who are going to be hundreds of millions of dollars poorer.

I’m not anti-development. I’m anti-being ripped off by bad deals that are sold as good deals. Which you should be too, unless you plan to collect some of the invested port billion for yourself, and don’t plan on paying your share of the billion dollars that the debt-financed road will cost Costa Ricans.