{"id":49434,"date":"2013-07-11T13:49:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-11T12:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/made-in-haiti-dumped-in-haiti-slave-labor-and-the-garment-industry\/49434\/"},"modified":"2013-07-11T13:49:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-11T12:49:40","slug":"made-in-haiti-dumped-in-haiti-slave-labor-and-the-garment-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/made-in-haiti-dumped-in-haiti-slave-labor-and-the-garment-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Made in Haiti, Dumped in Haiti: Slave Labor and the Garment Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

PORT-AU-PRINCE\u2013In Haiti, people wear T-shirts bearing unlikely English messages: \u201cWe\u2019re the 2% who don\u2019t care,\u201d says one; a respectable-looking grandmother dons a T-shirt emblazoned with \u201cCrack is Whack!\u201d; a little boy without shoes or pants wears a \u201cSave Darfur\u201d T-shirt; while training an illegal militia, a tough former army lieutenant sports a \u201cVarsity Cheerleader\u201d T-shirt.<\/em><\/p>\n

The absurd messages on these garments\u2013by-products of globalization\u2013are often lost in translation for Haitians, but the crueler irony is that decades of neo-liberal measures have pushed Haiti to expand its apparel industry to export T-shirts to US markets. Garments are then branded with various designs, sold, consumed, discarded, and shipped back to Haiti, along with other used clothes, for resale in local markets, undercutting and decimating Haitian tailors and their trade in traditional-style clothing.<\/p>\n

Decades of tariff-free food imports and flooding of food aid sourced from heavily subsidized US farmers has similarly sabotaged the Haitian agriculture sector, forcing people into urban slums, where they compete for jobs in the garment assembly sector. In the 1950s, agriculture made up\u00a090 per cent<\/a>\u00a0of Haiti\u2019s exports; today,\u00a090 per cent\u00a0<\/a>of exports are from the apparel sector, while more than\u00a0half<\/a>\u00a0the country\u2019s food is imported.<\/p>\n

These days, demand for Haitian-style clothing designs has been reduced to uniforms, church clothes\u2013for those practicing Vodou and members of other religious groups\u2013or high-end fashion and tourist boutiques. And the streets throughout the country look like a protracted, open-air\u00a0friperie<\/em>, where clothing made cheaply all over the world\u2013bought, worn, and discarded in Montreal, New York, or Dallas\u2013is shipped to the Caribbean and can be seen billowing in the exhaust fumes of busy Haitian high streets or clogging canals, adding to the Haiti\u2019s water and sewage crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cProfessional tailors who do\u00a0haute couture<\/em>\u00a0are disappearing from the country,\u201d says Daomed Daniel, a tailor who has run his own shop in Cit\u00c3\u00a9 Soleil for 30 years. Daniel says he used to have full-time work, but the expansion of the used-clothing market, locally known as\u00a0pepe\u00a0<\/em>orcontrebande<\/em>\u00a0because it is often smuggled and dumped illegally, has forced him to live mainly on commissions earned by making children\u2019s school uniforms.<\/p>\n

Members of the Association des Tailleurs et Couturiers de Port-au-Prince (ATCP), a network of independent tailors operating out of houses around Carrefour, complain they can\u2019t compete with the excess of garments made in China, Honduras, and Bangladesh that are then dumped, second-hand, in Haiti. But tailors willing to work in the export garment-assembly sector have to do just that.<\/p>\n

In a 2009 report, Oxford economist Paul Collier argued that Haiti\u2019s poverty and deregulated labour market made it \u201cfully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark.\u201d Haiti\u2019s poverty and low minimum wage make it an appealing competitor in the global commodity chain, and it is also conveniently located at the doorstep of North America.<\/p>\n

Preferential free-trade deals signed between Haiti and the United States\u2013named HOPE (Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, 2006), HOPE II (2008) and HELP (Haiti Economic Lift Program, 2008)\u2013have been part of a push to expand Haiti\u2019s apparel industry by branding \u201cMade in Haiti\u201d garments as somehow humanitarian, socially responsible, and good for Haiti\u2019s \u201cdevelopment,\u201d while also giving duty-free access to US markets.<\/p>\n

After the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the international community pledged an unprecedented $5 billion\u2013at the time, the largest pot of post-disaster reconstruction money ever pledged. However, the centrepiece of this post-earthquake reconstruction fund was not the creation of jobs, rebuilding of houses, nor the construction of water and sanitation\u00a0infrastructure to prevent the spread of and death from the worst cholera epidemic in modern history, but rather to build a giant, Korean-run, $300 million industrial park forapparel manufacture in Caracol<\/a>, far away from the earthquake-affected area and at the heart of an environmentally protected region, which is also home to some of the most fertile agricultural land in Haiti.<\/p>\n

A new minimum-wage law was passed in the fall of 2012 to ensure workers in the Haitian garment-outsourcing sector would earn 300 gourdes for an eight-hour day (around CAD$7). But according to an audit released in mid-April 2013 by Better Work, a labour and business development partnership between the International Labour Organization and the International Financial Corporation (ILO-IFC), 100 per cent of apparel manufacturers evaluated in Haiti failed to comply, continuing to pay the previous wage of 200 gourdes (around CAD$4.70).<\/p>\n

In order to earn 300 gourdes, a team of 18 workers must reach a quota of 3,600 T-shirts per day, which often takes well over eight hours, according to Telemark Pierre, the coordinator of Syndicat des Ouvriers du Textile et de l\u2019Habillement (SOTA or Union of Textile and Clothing Workers), formed in September 2011.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state hasn\u2019t done anything to force the minimum-wage law to be respected,\u201d says Pierre. \u201cWorkers do revolt, but timidly, and factories put a lot of pressure on workers to not join the union.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a market driven by the profit-making of multinationals, the garment sector isn\u2019t about creating jobs for Haitians so much as displacing jobs from one poor country to another, poorer one, making Haiti\u2019s poverty its \u201ccomparative advantage.\u201d The Korean clothing giant Sae-A, which produces for Walmart, Target, and Gap, has been accused of anti-union repression, including\u00a0\u201cacts of violence and intimidation\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in Guatemala and, more recently, inNicaragua<\/a>. It closed its operations in Guatemala due to union disputes, before setting up shop in Caracol, Haiti. Richard Lavall\u00c3\u00a9e, Better Work Haiti\u2019s program manager, says Better Work managers in Nicaragua hear from their producers that \u201cHaiti is a real threat\u2026.When we speak to producers in Haiti, it\u2019s El Salvador, it\u2019s Nicaragua that poses a threat. So, there\u2019s no doubt they watch each other and are in competition.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early February 2013, a Haitian workers\u2019 union, Batay Ouvriye, reported that Leo Ved\u00c3\u00a9l, a worker at the Premium Apparel assembly plant in Port-au-Prince, which subcontracts exclusively to Montreal apparel company Gildan, was assaulted and then fired when he demanded he be paid the legal minimum wage.<\/p>\n

Gildan is the leading producer of blank T-shirts for the North American market and has subcontracted to manufacturers in Haiti for a decade. Genevi\u00c3\u00a8ve Gosselin, Gildan\u2019s corporate communications director, told\u00a0The Dominion\u00a0<\/em>she hadn\u2019t heard of the new minimum-wage law, nor of Better Work\u2019s latest findings. \u201cOur company is committed to respecting labour rights and international labour standards,\u201d she said, but \u201cthe way the law is drafted creates confusion locally [and has] never been clarified by the appropriate authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the Haitian labour minister\u2019s assistant director, Marie-France Mondesire, was asked byThe Dominion\u00a0<\/em>why so few companies in the export garment sector respect the new minimum-wage law, she replied, \u201cThat\u2019s your interpretation of the law,\u201d and hung up the phone.<\/p>\n

In contrast, speaking at a press conference on April 29, Haitian Labour Minister Charles Jean Jacques said, \u201cSignificant strides have been made in the implementation of the law on the minimum wage,\u201d citing Better Work\u2019s finding that 16 per cent of workers in the outsourcing sector now earn the minimum wage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe minister has either not understood the report or is not telling the truth,\u201d said Yannick Etienne, Batay Ouvriye\u2019s lead national coordinator, speaking with\u00a0The Dominion\u00a0<\/em>from a May Day march in Ouanaminthe, the free-trade assembly zone in northern Haiti.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a regression,\u201d said Etienne, pointing out that 90 per cent of workers should be earning the new minimum wage. In a country with an unemployment rate estimated between 40 and 80 per cent, Etienne says that workers are so desperate that they tolerate the breach of minimum-wage law.<\/p>\n

According to a 2011 study by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the estimated cost of living in Port-au-Prince is $29 a day. Two hundred gourdes for an eight-hour work shift is one-sixth the AFL-CIO\u2019s estimated living wage. Transport to and from work and a modest lunch could easily cost a worker 120 gourdes. Indeed, Haitians earn less today than they did under the Duvalier dictatorship; wages have barely increased and are worth half their 1984 purchasing power.<\/p>\n

Port-au-Prince\u2019s largest and grimiest meat, vegetable, and clothing market, Croix-des-Bossales, located downtown by the seaport, receives unregulated weekly cargoes of used clothing. Rummaging through the multicolour mounds, one can easily find dozens of T-shirts originally \u201cMade in Haiti\u201d for export, now dumped and being resold in Haiti for around $2.50. On the other hand, new, traditionally Haitian-style linen shirts are scarce, don\u2019t sell for less than CAD$50, and might actually have been made in Miami.<\/p>\n

The absurdity of a Haitian worker spending half of his or her wage on a second-hand T-shirt imported from the US that might say \u201cThank you, Paine Webber\u201d (referring to the now-defunct Wall Street stock brokerage firm) could be lost in translation; the cruel irony of the worker\u2019s poverty\u2013a condition of working for a sub-poverty wage in the global commodity chain\u2013is not. Neither is the fact that Haiti is the only country in modern history to have been founded by a successful slave rebellion.<\/p>\n

Isabeau Doucet<\/strong> is a freelance journalist, TV producer and anthropology MA who spent over a year in Haiti after the earthquake. Her work has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Guardian,\u00a0<\/em>The Nation,\u00a0<\/em>Al Jazeera English, the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times, and\u00a0<\/em>Briarpatch Magazine, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PORT-AU-PRINCE\u2013In Haiti, people wear T-shirts bearing unlikely English messages: \u201cWe\u2019re the 2% who don\u2019t care,\u201d says one; a respectable-looking grandmother dons a T-shirt emblazoned with \u201cCrack is Whack!\u201d; a little boy without shoes or pants wears a \u201cSave Darfur\u201d T-shirt; while training an illegal militia, a tough former army lieutenant sports a \u201cVarsity Cheerleader\u201d T-shirt. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}