Garment assembly workers in Caracol, Haiti's newest free trade zone.
Photo credit: Joris Willems, www.avec-papiers.be
By Beverly Bell and Alexis Erkert
April 25, 2013
As we mourn the deaths of nearly 200 people
in yesterday’s garment factory collapse outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh,
we publish this article about the very issue of garment labor
exploitation on the other side of the world. Economist Paul Collier's
2009 report "Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Security"
recommends for Haiti the same model that in Bangladesh has resulted in a
race towards lower pay, disastrous working conditions, and the deaths
of more than 800 garment workers since 2006. This article begins to explore the implications of sweatshop labor as a model for development.
“Haiti
offers a marvelous opportunity for American investment. The
run-of-the-mill Haitian is handy, easily directed, and gives a hard
day’s labor for 20 cents, while in Panama the same day’s work costs $3,”
wrote Financial America in 1926.[i] That may be the most
honest portrayal of the offshore industry in Haiti to date. Today, the
US, the UN, multilateral lending institutions, corporate investors, and
others are more creative in their characterizations. They spin Haiti’s
high-profit labor as being in the interest of the laborer, and as a
major vehicle for what they call “development.”
In the export assembly sector, the minimum wage is 200 gourdes, or US$4.76, a day. According to the
Associated Press,
the minimum wage in February 2010 was “approximately the same as the
minimum wage in 1984 and worth less than half its previous purchasing
power.” Three years later, the wage has only been raised by 75 gourdes
(US$1.79).
A 2011 study done by the
Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO
put the living wage (what would be required for workers to cover basic
expenses) at US$29 a day, at least, in Port-au-Prince, while a 2008
Worker’s Rights Consortium
report placed it at US$12.50 a day in the border town of Ouanaminthe,
home to a large free-trade zone. Even a study commissioned by a World
Bank-sponsored pro-garment assembly group,
Nathan Associates Inc.,
acknowledged that for factory workers, “the costs of transportation to
and from work and food purchased away from home eat up a substantial
share of that minimum wage.” For the typical worker, who is a single
mother with three to four children, this leaves less than nothing with
which to keep her family healthy, fed, housed, and schooled.[ii]
“They’re always struggling to see how they’re going to make ends meet.
When they get paid each payday, they already owe all of it. Their
problems weigh them down so heavy they don’t know what to do,” said
Ghislene Deloné. Now a health care assistant in a clinic frequented by
many factory workers, Ghislene sewed in a plant herself for 11 years
until, she said, she just gave out. Like many other workers we have met,
she did not want her real name used or her photo published for fear of
retribution from management.
In dozens of interviews we have conducted over 25
years, workers have consistently stated the same outcome of trying to
support an entire family on this wage: they grow poorer over
the course of their employment. For the opportunity to keep stitching at
the plant, survival can involve desperation credit from the
neighborhood loan shark at interest rates as high as 25% per month.
Why would anyone take such a job? People in urgent
need of cash rarely have the luxury of performing cost-benefit analyses.
In interviews, women said they worked in factories simply because they
needed jobs. In a country with about
40% unemployment, any amount of money on payday might stave off starvation, even though the worker loses over the long term.
In 2009, thousands of workers joined students and
others in the streets to demand an increase in the minimum wage from 70
gourdes (US$1.67) a day. During the “200 gourdes movement,” protests
paralyzed Port-au-Prince’s industrial sector for more than a week.
According to one organizer, Nixon Boumba of the Democratic Popular
Movement, factory bosses cracked down, forbidding phone usage and
changing workers’ shifts to keep them away from fellow organizers and
demonstrations. Those they couldn’t stop, they laid off. Police lent
management a hand, arresting dozens of protestors, including a dean at
the State University.
Parliament responded to the popular pressure and
passed an across-the-board wage raise for workers in all sectors, to 200
gourdes (US$4.76) per day. However, when Haitian factory owners
complained to then-president, René Préval, he vetoed the law. According
to US Embassy cables later
released by WikiLeaks,
Washington became actively involved in keeping wages low at export
assembly factories. USAID funded studies to show that the demanded
increase in minimum wage would “make the sector economically unviable
and consequently force factories to shut down.” Subcontractors for Fruit
of the Loom, Hanes, and Levi’s held numerous meetings with Préval and
members of Parliament, using the USAID studies to argue for a lower
wage. Parliament gave in and worked out a compromise with Préval,
creating a special wage category for export assembly workers which would
increase periodically, beginning at 125 gourdes ($3.13 in the exchange
rate of the time) a day.
Subsequent wage jumps that the law demanded never
transpired. Last October, the wage finally increased to 300 gourdes
across all sectors except for factories, where it went up to 200
gourdes. Although factory workers are meant to have the opportunity to
receive up to 300 gourdes, to earn that money they must meet production
quotas (number of bra cups or pajama legs produced) that are set so high
that they sometimes have to put in extra hours—what should be paid as
overtime—and forgo their forty-five minutes of daily break to try to
meet them. Minimum wage laws are so habitually violated that even with
extra hours, a worker is likely to end her or his week well below 300
gourdes.
Women in the assembly plants report
that they are often coerced into sleeping with supervisors in order to
get or keep their jobs. Health and safety protections in the workplace
rarely exist, and those that do are habitually violated, with repetitive
motion injuries and failing eyesight only two of the more common
occupational hazards. Workers have no job security and paltry
opportunities for pay raises or professional advancement.
Though the right to association is
protected in the constitution, company management habitually prohibits
attempts to organize. Continuing a long tradition, in recent months
union members have been fired or harassed in at least three factories,
according to the Haitian labor rights organization Workers’ Struggle. In
one example in February of this year a union organizer in Gildan
Activewear T-shirt factory
was beaten
“in the name of the factory's management” after organizing a protest to
draw attention to minimum wage violations. He was subsequently fired.
The
April 2013 report of
Better Work Haiti,
a joint program of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the
International Finance Cooperation (IFC) which monitors and enforces
factories’ compliance with national and international standards, found
that all 24 of the factories it monitors are “non-compliant” in various
sectors. All violate occupational safety and health standards, with none
providing adequate health and first aid services, and 22 violating
worker protection standards. All violate minimum wage laws, and 11
violate overtime standards.
In telling how they survive on factory jobs, workers use a standard refrain: sou fòs kouray, on the strength of my courage.
Whether in a whispered conversation under a pseudonym
or through unabashed declarations by organizations like Workers’
Struggle and Workers’ Antenna, laborers and their advocates all state
basically the same conditions needed for fair employment. They include:
* a living wage;
* overtime and severance pay;
* the right to organize;
* protection from sexual aggression by supervisors;
* physically safe working conditions;
* coverage of medical costs in the event of work-related injury or illness;
* at least one break a day, plus the time necessary to eat lunch and go to the bathroom;
* provision of drinking water and decent bathrooms; and
* protection from arbitrary or retaliatory firing.
See upcoming articles in the sweatshop series, one each Wednesday for four weeks, for interviews with women workers and an analysis of what an alternative could look like.
Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in
part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly
Bell and Alexis Erkert, Other Worlds.
