Cables
released by WikiLeaks to Haiti Liberte reveal that the U.S.
Embassy in Port-Au-Prince worked with major U.S. textile companies to
block a minimum wage increase for Haitian textile workers.
In
2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law that raised the
minimum wage from 24 cents to 61 cents an hour. This measure would
have increased the minimum wage to $5 a day.
However,
even with this 150 percent increase, the minimum wage would still
have been well short of $13.75 a day, which is the minimum necessary
to provide for a working-class family of four according to a recent
study by Workers Rights Consortium.
In
order to block the measure from going into effect, Fruit
of the Loom, Hanes and Levi Strauss threatened to close their
factories and relocate. The cables show that the U.S.-based textile
companies were fully backed by the U.S. Agency for International
Development and the embassy.
David
E. Lindwall, deputy chief of mission, wrote that the minimum wage
increase did not take economic reality into account and was a
populist measure for the unemployed and underpaid masses. Responding
to the threats of the textile companies and the U.S. Embassy, the
Haitian government agreed to limit the increase to only 7 cents, thus
bringing the minimum wage to only 31 cents instead of 61 cents an
hour.
According
to PAPDA (The Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development),
U.S. textile companies threaten relocation every time the Haitian
government tries to increase the minimum wage.
The
revenue and profit figures for Hanes highlights the extent of
super-exploitation of workers on the island. Last year, Hanes had
3,200 workers. It would cost only $1.6 million per year to pay its
workers an extra 2 dollars a day. In 2010, Hanes reported more than
$200 million in profits, with its revenue exceeding $4.3 billion
dollars.
This
recent incident is just one of many examples of hundreds of years of
imperialist exploitation in Haiti.
Haiti
born out of struggle
Haiti
was born out of the struggle of Black slaves who overthrew the French
colonizers and won independence, creating the first Black republic in
the Americas in 1804.
However,
freedom came at a high price. Haiti was forced to make reparations to
the French slaveholders in 1825 for their losses in the amount of
150 million francs, which is equivalent to $21 billion today.
The Haitian government finished repaying the debt over 100 years
later, in 1946.
U.S.
intervention in Haiti, ranging from direct military occupation to
economic intervention for the benefit of the U.S. capitalist class,
has been a constant factor in the island’s history.
U.S.
troops invaded and occupied the island from 1915 to 1934. Throughout
the second half of the 20th century, the U.S.-backed father-son
Duvalier dictatorship plundered the country while holding on to power
through brutal repression.
The
imperialist banks were eager to lend the dictatorship hundreds of
millions of dollars, which disappeared, leaving the Haitian people
with the burden of paying off the debt.
A
mass uprising brought about the end of the Duvalier dictatorship.
Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected president in the first democratic
elections in the country’s history. However, he was overthrown not
once but twice by U.S.-engineered coups in 1991 and 2004.
In
the 1990s, USAID was instrumental in forcing Haitian agriculture to
move away from grain production to pave the way for dependence on
food imports. After Aristide’s overthrow in 1994, under the banner of
“free trade,” the Clinton administration forced Haiti to
drastically reduce its rice import tariffs. In a short period, U.S.
agribusiness was able to dominate the rice market.
As
a result, local agriculture has been completely destroyed and today
the country is in a state of permanent food crisis, fully dependent
on foreign imports. It is hard to believe that Haiti was once
self-sufficient in rice production. During the same period the real
wages dropped over 70 percent.
Behind
Haiti’s extreme poverty and suffering is the imperialist plundering
and exploitation to which the country has been subjected for
centuries. In an article he wrote after the massive earthquake that
hit the island in 2010, Fidel Castro captured this very clearly:
“Haiti is the net product of colonialism and imperialism, of more
than one century of the employment of its human resources in the
toughest forms of work, of military interventions and the extraction
of its natural resources.”
