Guilds and unions: Alternative histories

Education Minister Alejandro Ventura is publicizing a technical note published by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB, or BID in Spanish) issued last August. IADB technical notes are published with the disclaimer that they are the opinions of the authors, not the IADB.

The study, which is a thorough attack against the education unions in Honduras, is long on opinion and light on credible supporting sources for those opinions. But that's a topic for another time.

Honduran teachers' unions are actually quite different from the image of modern labor unions. And the IADB study illuminates those cultural differences sharply.

Honduran teachers' unions are technically gremios. Gremios, or guilds, arose in the 11th century A.D. as confederations of artisans and merchants that controlled the production, price, and quality of a certain craft. You had to be a member of the guild to make and sell that craft in a particular town, and your education and even the tools you could use were often spelled out. The guild guaranteed your pay. Guilds also provided services like funerals, hospitals, and loans.

In this area of services, guilds served the same function as cofradia memberships did. Cofradias were lay-religious organizations licensed by the Pope that developed at the same time as guilds. Cofradias were concerned with the adoration of a particular saint, but also provided diverse social services such as funerals, hospitals, and loans. We'll return to this shortly.

Honduras has had some form of teacher's union since 1895. The compulsory education law of 1966 established that all teachers must belong to a professional organization recognized by the Honduran government, and those organizations are gremios; guilds. They set the teaching standards, define a code of ethics, and the conditions under which teachers work.

Fast forward to today. What do teachers say are the most important reasons for joining one of the gremios?

According to one study cited in the IADB technical note, they are (in order from most to least important) loans, life and health insurance, and discounts on funerals.

In Honduras teachers are part of the group Hermano Juancito called the "lower middle class." For these people, gremios continue to play a vital role in ensuring economic stability and access to social services.

This is reflected in an otherwise difficult to understand fact: about 20% of the teachers' union members belong to two or more teachers' unions. This matches the practice among cofradia members in medieval Spain, where multiple memberships were common. Each cofradia or guild had a diverse set of social services that could attract members. Some people belonged to as many as five cofradias in sixteenth century Zaragoza, for example.

A World Bank/IADB Public Expenditures Survey (PETS) in 2008-2009 found that having multiple memberships was explicitly a strategy to get more and better health coverage and life insurance, to have greater access to loans, and to have access to a greater suite of diversified services.

(The PETS study found a different set of priorities cited as the main reasons members joined a gremio: salary concerns, academic training, and the formulation of education policy. But that may reflect the contemporary salary negotiations just concluded at the time, and the pattern of multiple memberships is not explained by these interests.)

Medieval institutions still function in our day, still provide benefits to their members. More modern institutions seek to dismantle them in the name of decentralization, not particularly concerned with replacing those services that keep the older institutions popular.

Whatever else is driving the conflicts over teachers' unions that the IADB note seeks to dismantle, one of the effects of their recommendation would be to replace a way to secure social services that has centuries-long roots in the Spanish culture brought to Honduras in the 16th century.

Opiate or Antidepressant

"Religion is the opiate of the masses" may be Karl Marx's well known saying, but the InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB, BID in Spanish), in a study released today, is putting a new spin on it.

According to them, religion is actually an antidepressant.

And Honduras, the authors say, is one of the least depressed countries in their international sample.

This was reported in La Tribuna as "IADB: religiosity reduces the depression of Hondurans", citing the EFE original.

Sound good? well, not so fast: take a closer look at how the study was conducted, and the conclusion seems a little, well, dubious.

The 25 page study, which is part of the IADB's sponsored research on the "Quality of Life", is the work of Uruguayan economists Natalia Melgar and Máximo Rossi. It began with the observation that past studies have indicated some correlation between personal life characteristics and risk factors for depression and sought to extend previous findings by exploring the relationship between specific environmental factors and depression.

To summarize, the study found the depression is

positively related to being a woman, adulthood, divorce, widowhood, unemployment, and low income.

Not surprisingly the study found depression correlated with living situations where there are high levels of inequality, especially in urban areas. But the study didn't actually find as strong a relationship as the authors expected between poverty and depression. And that's where the findings about Honduras that La Tribuna chose to emphasize come in.

The study's authors found that Honduras had one of the economically most uneven distributions of wealth, concluding that "the three least equitable countries are Bolivia, Brazil and Honduras". Yet Honduras had a lower level of depression that would be expected, which they argued "may be explained by the very high percentage of people with religious affiliation".

The wording here is significant: "high percentage of people with religious affiliation". So what did the study actually find?

The study relies on data from a CID Gallup poll in 2007 to assess depression. The question Gallup asked to assess depression was "Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about depression?" The possible answers were "Yes", "No", "Don't know", and "Refuse". Approximately 80,000 people in 93 different countries answered either "Yes" or "No" to the question. Overall, 14.63% of the international sample answered "Yes" to the question, with 85.37% answering "No".

The most depressed country in the sample? Ethiopia, where more than 51% of the respondents reported being depressed.

Religiosity was one of the individual (personal) factors the study's authors tested against depression. Being religious was measured by response to a question asked in the 2007 CID Gallup poll about having attended a place of worship within the last seven days. If a person answered "Yes" to that question, they were considered "religious". They found that attending religious services had no significant effect on depression.

So, in fact, the authors conclude that religiosity-- a personal characteristic-- is not related to depression.

The study's authors, though, went further. They were interested in how what they call macro level factors-- characteristics not of individual people, but of countries-- affected depression.

So they used data on religion: the percentage of the population that was Catholic, Muslim, or Protestant. Each of these had a significant negative correlation with depression: the higher the percentage of the population affiliated with one of these religions, whether or not they attended church services, the less likely the country's populations was to be depressed.

Nine of 14 countries with the highest income inequality that unexpectedly had the lowest probability of depression also had a high proportion of the population that belonged to one of the major religions.

The list includes Honduras, Panama, Niger, Senegal, Jamaica, Uganda, Brazil and Mozambique.

But there is a problem here. For unexplained reasons, the study's authors used a 1980 source for the proportion of the population belonging to the major religions. So somehow, the proportion of the population belonging to a major religion in 1980 is correlated with the degree of depression in 2007.

Never mind that the US State Department 2008 report on Religious Freedom in Honduras states that

there are no reliable statistics on religious affiliation.

The State Department cites the same 2007 CID-Gallup poll used as the source for self-reported levels of depression in the IADB study as the best source for estimating religious affiliation in Honduras.

According to the State Department, the 2007 CID Gallup poll says that 47% of the Honduran population self-report as Catholic, with a further 36% self-reporting as Evangelical Protestant.

Melgar and Rossi do not state where their 1980 data come from, or why they used those data in place of the more recent results from the same poll that provided their data on depression.

From a purely social-science perspective, the IADB study is at best reporting a correlation, which does not say one factor causes the other. Both may be effects of some third factor.

Using data from two completely different surveys separated by 27 years means that the populations sampled were not the same. To see these as cause and effect would require a mechanism through which the religious affiliation of Honduras in 1980 led to a situation in 2007 that caused less depression among a later population. The mechanism involved is, shall we say, hard to imagine.

The fact that actual practice of a religion in 2007 did not correlate with levels of depression in 2007 is a hint that perhaps the 1980/2007 relationship is not real.

According to the 2007 Gallup poll, 11.96% of Hondurans reported being depressed. No comment on what the numbers would be in 2010.

"It Should Be Automatic"

Mario Canahuati, Honduras's Foreign Minister, says Honduras's readmission to the OAS should be automatic when the OAS next convenes in Peru on June. He currently is in the US to meet with Miguel Insulza to lobby for Honduras's reinsertion in the OAS. In a La Tribuna article, he's quoted as saying "the seventh point of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord says Honduras should be reintegrated into the different forums, and nothing remains but for the OAS to fulfill its promise under the document." In Canahuati's vision, it's automatic because they've fulfilled the letter, if not the intention, of the clauses of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord, so they should be allowed back in to play with other countries.

The OAS has a slightly different view. Albert R. Ramdin, the Assistant Secretary General of the OAS, said that the OAS “continues to seek solutions”, and “supports the efforts started by the governments of Central America to create the necessary conditions for the readmission of Honduras to the Organization”.

The OAS determined last July, under Article 21 of the Democratic Charter, that there had been an "unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order of a member state", and that diplomatic initiatives to correct the situation had failed. More than two-thirds of the member countries voted to suspend Honduras. Although suspended, Article 21 still required that Honduras uphold all its OAS obligations, including human rights obligations.

Under Article 22, restoration may be proposed, once the situation is resolved, by the Secretary General of the OAS (Miguel Insulza) or any member state, and will require that two-thirds of the member countries vote in favor of restoration.

You see the problem. While the United States, and several Central American countries are working for Honduras's readmission as a member in good standing in the OAS, there are other countries that have expressed concerns. These countries, including most of South America and Mexico, remain uncertain about whether Honduras should be readmitted at this time.

Honduras hasn't exactly complied with its human rights obligations as required under Article 21. It was added to the OAS Human Rights organization's "black list" in April. It also is not clear that even if the will was there to uphold human rights on the part of the government, that the judicial system has the required independence. Human rights violations aren't grounds for suspension, but they certainly will be taken into account in discussing reincorporation. While the US would like to say the situation is resolved and that Porfirio Lobo Sosa was democratically elected, as Hillary Clinton said in Costa Rica last month, there are other governments that have a different view.

Why is all of this important? What's at stake is the unlocking of aid from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Both have stated in the past that Honduras being reincorporated into the OAS would be required before funding could actually be restored. That funding, along with money from the BCIE and BID is critical to staving off a complete collapse of the Honduran economy.

The OAS discussions in June in Lima, Peru should be interesting.