Stepping onto the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia, the largest contiguous rubber plantation in the world at 185 square miles, is a step into the past — though which past or which historical moment is debatable. The “plantation,” as it’s officially referred to by Firestone, is at once reminiscent of American chattel slavery, nineteenth-century company towns, and the old Western colonies of Africa.

Most of the eight thousand workers and their families live on the plantation in Firestone-provided housing evocative of dilapidated public housing in poor inner-city US neighborhoods. Their children are born in Firestone hospitals and attend Firestone schools on the plantation. The workers are all Liberian while upper management is primarily white Americans. No Firestone tires are produced in the country; Firestone uses the Liberian workers to extract the latex, package it up, and send it off to other countries for production. Traversing the nearly undrivable dirt roads of the plantation, one sees scores of workers cutting tall grass with rusty machetes, workers forced to relieve themselves in open fields due to the lack of public toilets, and rusty facilities so dilapidated they look as though they might have been abandoned and untouched for decades.

Yet this plantation was recently the scene of a momentous union victory. Facing rampant subcontracting — an increasingly favored weapon of employers worldwide seeking to avoid unions — the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) confronted the practice head-on and won a union election among the plantation’s four thousand subcontracted workers; this past December, they secured their first collective bargaining agreement. As workers and unions around the world increasingly struggle with how to deal with subcontracting and short-term contracts, Firestone workers in Liberia overcame huge political, legal, and economic obstacles to provide an example of how unions might tackle the problem.