UN Peacekeepers Should Stay in Haiti for 20 Years, Envoy Says

[seemslikeadream]

March 30 (Bloomberg) -- The United Nations should keep peacekeeping soldiers in Haiti for at least 20 years to rebuild the violence-plagued Caribbean nation that is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, the UN's special envoy said today.

Reginald Dumas told the Security Council that 10 international missions to Haiti in the past 10 years left the country with no stable governmental organizations, leading to the rebel insurgency that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last month.

``You cannot continue with the stop-start cycle that has characterized relations between the international community and Haiti,'' Dumas said after a closed-door briefing to the Security Council. ``You cannot go in and spend a couple of years and leave. Then the whole thing collapses. This has to stop.''

The envoy's recommendation would put Haiti's 8 million people under international protection for a generation. The Security Council voted on March 1 to send a ``multinational interim force'' for as long as three months, followed by a UN peacekeeping mission. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to recommend the size and mandate of that mission in a report to the council this week.

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=agUvJnNOouPI&refer=top_world_news

[w4rma]

1. What is their game here? The very thugs that they support are the reason

the country is in such turmoil.

What is the corporatist agenda for Haiti? What is their motive?

[saigon68]

2. Motive = United Fruit Co.

More bananas imported for a CHIMPANZEE in the White House

[Tinoire]

4. The largest zone of sweatshops you can imagine

Total globalization (AKA Free trade - never mind the tears) between the border of the DR and Haiti where workers are presently being bludgeoned to death when they stand up for the "revolutionary concept" of wages which will allow their families to slowly starve as opposed to rapidly starve. A few cents an hour... Attention bargain US shoppers....


Garment production
in Haitian export processing zones
Action Alert, Campaign for Labor Rights, 8 August 1998
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. After decades of foreign intervention and political unrest a more democratic system was established in 1994. The primary aim of the government now in office is to build up the Haitian economy and to create employment. One way of achieving this is through attracting foreign investors.

USAID is the US government agency in charge of providing economic support to Haiti. It states, however, that USAID has no position on the violations of the Haitian minimum wage law. ((USAID is up to its neck in this coup- just as it was in getting Aristide defeated in Haiti's past Presidential elections)) This comment came after several years in which USAID has actively pressured President Aristide not to increase the minimum wage. The main interest USAID proves to have is direct assistance to US businesses and thereby to keep it's influence in Haiti. Still, in 1995 the legal minimum wage was raised from 15 gourdes ($1) a day to 36 gourdes ($2.40) a day to make an end to the severest worker abuses. The law requires employers to ensure that piece-rate workers earn at least the minimum wage.

In practice more than half of the approximately 50 assembly plants producing in Haiti for the U.S. market are paying less than the legal minimum wage.

Even if a company does pay the minimum wage, workers earn $14.40 a week, working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. A full-time minimum wage salary provides less than 60% of a family's basic needs. A wage of $1.- a day, common in apparel plants producing for U.S. companies, provides less than 25% of a family's basic needs. In order to satisfy the minimum needs for food, shelter and education a family in Port-au-Prince must spend at the very least 363 gourdes- $24.40 per week. Haitian factory owners claim that they can't afford to pay more than they do, and complain that higher wages will make them lose business to firms in other countries in the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, wages in Haiti are the lowest in the wide region. Other grievances of workers in the apparel industry are threats if they try to organize and claim the right to collective bargaining, illegal firings, verbal abuse, sexual harassment, no access to potable water not enough sanitary facilities, no adequate lighting and ventilation and the constant pressure to work at an enormous speed.

Some examples of companies producing for the U.S. market are:

• Quality Garments S.A.
  SONAPI industrial parc, produces for Kmart in the USA; manager Raymond DuPoux- in April 1996 the average worker earned about $1.67 per day, 73 cents less than the required minimum wage. The company pays straight time on weekends instead of the time-and- a-half as is Haitian law requires.
  
• Seamfast Manufacturing produces for Ventura Ltd., products are sold at Kmart and J.C.Penny, and produces for Universal Manufacturing, subsidiary of Kingley Corp., under Kelly Reed and Kelly Reed Woman label, sold at Kmart. Wages are the lowest in Haiti. One woman with 3 years of experience reported to earn 87 cents for an 8 hour work day. Manager Abraham Felix
  
• Chancerelles S.A., subsidiary from Fine Form, New York produces for Elsie Undergarments of Haileah, Florida. Sold under Shuly's and Elsie labels at J.C. penny and smaller retailers. John whistler is U.S. director of the plant. workers say to earn an average of $1.73 to $1.80 a day. the supervisors, especially chief supervisor Franck Charles verbally abuse the workers on a regular basis.
  
• Excel Apparel Exports, jointly owned and operated with the Kellwood Co. produces women's underwear for Hanes, a division of Sarah Lee corporation, and slips sold at Dillard Department store. nightwear for movie star, sold at sears and Bradlees. workers earn less than $1.33. Since the passage of the new minimum wage law quotas have been increased with more than 100%.
  
• Alpha sewing produces industrial gloves for Ansell Edmont of Coshocto, Ohio, owned by Ansell International of Lilburn, Georgia, in turn owned by Pacific Dunlop Ltd, Melbourne Australia. Workers report skin and respiratory problems because of worker unprotectedly with heavy chemicals. Workers work approximately 78 hours a week, 75 % of the women do not earn the minimum wage. the company is owned by the Apaid family.

<snip>

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/293.html

87 cents for an 8 hour work-day!!!! And some DUers wonder why we REVILE chains like K-MART? :mad: :mad:

Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, earned $203 million in 1993, which amounts to $97,600 per hour!!!!!!!!!!!!! Add the stock and you get $189.7 million= $101,000 an hour!

===


Disney and Cutler want to cut and run
By Ray Laforest, Haiti Progres, This Week in Haiti,
Vol. 15, no. 21, 13-19 August 1997\
((After Aristide dared raise the minimum wage which they were not even pretending to respect))

Washington has long extolled the transformation industry -- i.e. cheap-labor assembly sweatshops -- as the engine which could drive development of the Haitian economy. But the limits of such development became brutally clear last month with the announcement that H.H. Cutler, the largest manufacturer of Disney products in Haiti, plans to close down its Port-au-Prince operations to find cheaper labor in the Far East.

The possible pull-out comes just as the U.S. government and international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are stepping up their pressure on Haiti to accelerate reform of its economy to rely more on companies like H.H. Cutler for investment and jobs.

In recent years, the Walt Disney Company has, by extension, become one of the largest employers in Haiti via its two main sourcing agents: L.V. Myles and H.H. Cutler. These clothing contractors set up in Haiti to draw on the large pool of unemployed and have allowed Disney, Cutler, and retail stores to make super-profits off the misery of Haitian workers.

For example, a study conducted during the summer of 1995 by the National Labor Committee (NLC), an investigative human rights group, revealed that the majority of factories making goods for Disney were not paying the minimum wage, with a significant number paying as little as 11 cents an hour. It took a combination of workers protests and an international pressure-campaign to force Disney's subcontractors to pay the Haitian minimum wage of 28 cents an hour (the lowest in the Americas) and to provide potable drinking water and clean toilets.

Is this not SLAVERY? Oh... Attention K-Mart shoppers!

In the United States, H.H. Cutler used to employ 2,450 workers to manufacture garments for Disney, Nike, Fisher-Price and Warner Bros. at an average wage of more than $7 an hour. But in recent years, H.H. Cutler, a division of VF Corporation -- one of the world's largest apparel companies -- has moved most of its operations overseas to Haiti and other countries including the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, El Salvador and Mexico. Cutler's workforce in the U.S. is now less than 700 workers, but in Haiti, it employs 2,300 workers toiling in 9 factories for about $2.24 a day.

<snip>

Over the past two years, Disney subcontractors have responded aggressively when challenged by Haitian workers demanding respect, a living wage, and better working conditions. For example, when workers formed a union at Classic Apparel last summer, the company threatened them by saying that H.H. Cutler would cut back its orders by 40% bringing layoffs. In December 1996, six workers were dismissed for protesting the firing of a union organizer at B.F. Apparel Manufacturing, a factory subcontracted to produce garments for the Waterbury Garment Corporation, another Disney clothing contractor. More than 30 workers were terminated at the L.V. Myles plant in Port-au-Prince at the beginning of May when flyers were distributed inside the plant to protest unbearable working conditions and substandard wages. In 1995, when the minimum salary was raised from 25 to 36 gourdes a day to offset the devaluation of the local currency and rampant inflation, Disney subcontractors also raised their workers' production quotas by as much as 133%, more than recouping the pay increases.

<snip>

In early July 1997, facing mounting pressure from Haitian workers and international criticism, H.H. Cutler announced its intention to pull out of Haiti in September 1997 to relocate in China and Indonesia where workers are paid as little as 13 cents an hour. The company says the move is forced by a downturn in sales. "The business is very quick and fast-paced, and we are reacting to the pressure of the market", Tom Austin, president of Cutler, told the Grand Rapids Press. "We're trying to grow our business and get it made in the best place."

<snip>

Multinational corporations cannot have it both ways. Factories cannot be allowed to run away whenever workers demand a union or better wages and work conditions. Meanwhile, workers are forced not only to stay in their infernal conditions, but also to tighten their belts as money lenders demand austerity measures from already destitute economies.

Through shame campaigns and a possible consumer boycott, groups like the NLC and the DHJC will continue to push for the rights of hungry Haitian workers and against the flight of corporations hungry only for profit. As the NLC stated in a letter to the Disney Company: The Haitian people desperately need investment and jobs, but they need jobs with dignity, under conditions which respect their basic human rights, and which pay wages that allow them and their families to survive.

<snip>

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED Please credit Haiti Progres.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/281.html


More here: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/index-da.html

==

Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people. Gildan, one of the largest T shirt makers in the world, claimed recently to CBC radio to pay its workers a premium on the minimum Haitian wage. However unionized workers at Gildan’s Montreal factory earn more than 10 times the Haitian wage, and unorganized Haitian workers employed by Gildan recently told the CBC that their wages are not enough to live on. With recent increases in the cost of fuel in Haiti – the IMF demanded it be deregulated and the price has soared – Haitian workers have once again been demanding their minimum wage of 36 Gourdes per day be increased to keep up with inflation.

But what’s bad for Haitian workers - low wages and appalling conditions - are good business for the T shirt trade. At the time of writing, a blank Gildan T sells on Ebay for about $1.25. It’s a volume business, our appetite for T shirts. Gildan’s sales have nearly doubled, from $344 million in 1999 to $630 million in 2003. In the same period Gildan stock soared on the Toronto Stock Exchange from $5 to $44 per share. According to UNITE, Gildan has received over $3 million dollars of federal subsidies while it contemplated moving production offshore.

<snip>

http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=54&ItemID=5091

=====

Haiti: the real story behind the jeans made in Ouanaminthe…

In this issue, we focus on the Ouanaminthe export processing zone, with its poverty wages, exhausting working hours and sexual violence. The interview below features Joseph Salnave (25), a former EPZ garment worker who condemns the conditions in which the jeans, to be sold in the West, are made . There is hope however that progress on trade union rights may now materialize (*).

For two and a half months, you worked on a sewing machine together with 240 Haitian workers. Did you have any idea of what kind of wages were paid in the Ouanaminthe EPZ before you got a job there?

To be honest, when I first found out that the wage was just 432 gourdes (around USD 10) per week, I didn't want to sign the contract (Editor's note: the wage level is now 575 gourdes). But then the EPZ management convinced us when they told us: "After six weeks you'll earn a bit more, and once you're working at full speed – i.e. 900 units a day – you'll earn a 'professional skilled worker's wage' of 800 gourdes. But right now you're still in your apprenticeship."

I believed it. I started working in the EPZ on 19 May 2003 in the 'beltloops' and 'hems' section, two things I had specialized in. Promises of earning higher wages were never kept.

Can you describe a working day in the EPZ? What's it like?

The day would begin at 6.45 a.m. and end at 7 p.m., nearly 11 hours with just one 45-minute break to eat lunch, have a wash and go to the toilet. Then back to work. We could go to the toilet once or twice a day. If we asked to go a third time, then the Dominican 'supervisors' called us 'undisciplined'.

We worked under constant pressure from the 'supervisors', who forced us to keep up a production rate of 900 units per day, in other words we had to sew, say, 900 flies. The Wrangler and Levi’s jeans we made were then sold in the United States. Anyone who did not complete his or her work had to work more the next day to make up for it.

Did you work a lot of overtime?

Of course. The 'supervisors' demanded that we arrive on time, but they didn't give a damn about letting us leave the plant on time. And since we showed our ID when we entered the EPZ – but not when we left it – none of the overtime was ever counted or paid. So, while we were supposed to be working 48 hours per week, in actual fact we worked 55 hours per week. I told them I didn't think that was fair, but they didn't like my attitude. They called my ideas 'revolutionary', and that was one of the reasons I got kicked out.

<snip>

http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?Index=991218987&Language=EN

===


U.S. Is Complicit in Haiti Crisis
By Neil Elliott

The first democratic government of Haiti appears to be in its death throes. To add vicious insult to continuing injury, the American mainstream press continues to present Haitian affairs as the sorry result of the dismal leadership of one man, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose failings have occurred “despite the best efforts” of the United States. The headline that graced the Minneapolis Star Tribune's front page last week – “U.S., France reluctant to intervene in Haiti” (Feb. 18) – would be laughably absurd if the reality it obscured were not so dreadful.

<snip>

One doesn't have to wander far from the AP wires to find abundant information about the United States' enthusiastic long-term “intervention” in Haiti. The so-called “Democratic Convergence” that has dogged Aristide's elected government is, in fact, a tiny group of malcontents who are working with elements of the Bush administration to turn Haiti into one vast sweatshop zone. Having been soundly rejected in every election in which they've run against Aristide's grassroots “Lavalas” party, they've used millions of U.S. tax dollars to organize street demonstrations, buy up radio and television stations, and most recently, field a vicious army of thugs, styling themselves the “Cannibal Army,” who have attacked police stations and set about occupying Haitian cities.

All this has been funded from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the guise of its falsely so-called “Democracy Enhancement” program. USAID has long been notorious for channeling money to the tiny pro-business elite and their armed goons. It was USAID money that helped a CIA agent persuade Emmanuel “Toto” Constant to organizeGRAPHmurderous FRAPH in 1991. That terrorist organization was responsible for some 5,000 murders in the wake of the military coup that removed Aristide from his first term as elected president. Constant now lives a settled life as a real estate agent in Brooklyn, thanks to the protection of the U.S. State and Justice Departments.

In Haiti today, it's déjà vu all over again. In 1993, a CIA-spawned military junta ruled Haiti through even greater terror than the U.S.-sponsored Duvalier dictatorships had achieved. Meanwhile deposed president Aristide, living in exile in New York, had become an international cause célèbre. Under tremendous popular pressure, the Clinton administration at last brokered “negotiations” between the putschists and the democratically elected president, the so-called “Governors Island” accord. In the words of former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Robert White, witness to the negotiations, “all the pressure was brought to bear against Aristide”; the junta “wasn't asked to give up a thing.”

Secretary of Defense Colin Powell was dispatched to “negotiate” the withdrawal of the coup regime ahead of a U.S. military intervention. Powell's team arranged immunity from prosecution for the lead criminals and safe passage to other countries like the bordering Dominican Republic, from which many of the thugs have now returned as elements of the “Cannibal Army.” The U.S. occupation was a tragedy of errors that have now become all too familiar: failures to disarm elements of the coup regime or to safeguard strategic sites, channeling all aid money to U.S. contractors who lined their own pockets, and hog-tying the new government with requirements that the nation's economy be surrendered to U.S. investors. Aristide refused. The U.S. withheld aid and began funding opposition groups, and their contra army, under the guise of “democracy enhancement.”

<snip>

http://thewitness.org/agw/elliott022704.html

Just disgusting. The truth is as dirty as all lies.

“The deed is done. Haiti has been raped. The act was sanctioned by the United States, Canada and France.” -– Editorial, Jamaica Observer


Of the $1,831 the average U.S. family
of four spent on apparel in 1999,2
only about $55 went to apparel
production workers

[RainDog]

5. Now I get it...

okay, so the plutocrats in the west want to outsource jobs to third world countries and pay them slave wages...

AND

THEY WANT TO OUTSOURCE AMERICANS

-- to serve as body guards to make sure the regimes they want in place remain in place to make sure they get their big bucks.

We already have troops in hundreds of places, we plan on remaining in Iraq, we plan on invading other countries in the middle east...

we are losing both labor and middle class jobs...

but, we can be good and patriotic Americans by giving our sons and daughters over to the military-industrial fascists who will pocket the money from all these "nation building" ventures.

How convenient.

[Tinoire]

7. THAT is the BEST summary I've seen yet.

You got it and I love you for it! :loveya:

[Just Me]

6. Tinoire,...I wish someone would finance your form of "reality TV",...

,...because that form of reality would inspire people to engage in those fundamental concepts which create a hopeful and productive world: compassion, equality, justice and liberty (and if you put those together they are evidence of a real love for all life).

Your post is touching and inspiring and emotionally igniting.

You are the best!!!

[Tinoire]

8. OMG. Are you kidding me?

You find enough people to pay for my mortgage and I am OFF! OFF to anywhere you want reporting with a PROGRESSIVE viewpoint!!

I am dead serious. I am ready to go anywhere and get me a** shot off if someone would just help me with the few bills which enslave me to our corporate system.

Huge hug to you- I think that is a fantastic idea ;).

You finance and I am GAME!!!!!!!!! Anywhere in the world. With the training/experience to do it!!

[Just Me]

3. My guess is that, like the rest of the civilized world, they are waiting

to see the outcome of the election in this f*cked up country. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that the UN is engaging in a lot of praying, as are so many of us.

[Darranar]

9. In this case...

UN = US/French colonial interests.

Colonial regime #2 (for this Bush Administration, that is) on the way!

[seemslikeadream]

10. They've already shook hands on it

[seemslikeadream]

11. Back on the Back Burner

Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page A24


REMEMBER HAITI? One month ago, shortly after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was flown out of the country on a U.S. military aircraft, U.S. Marines began landing in the capital of Port-au-Prince as part of a multinational intervention to stop the spread of anarchy. It was a mission the Bush administration did its best to avoid, following years of neglecting Haiti and months of trying to hand off management of its mounting crisis to others. Thirty days later, the Marines are still there -- 1,900 of them -- but the country and its dire problems have once again vanished from the agendas of administration policymakers. And once again, the Haitian situation is starting to deteriorate.



While Washington's back has been turned, Mr. Aristide has returned from Central Africa to nearby Jamaica, while loudly telling the world that his departure was not voluntary but the result of U.S. trickery and force -- an allegation the White House has made no concerted effort to counter. The 15-nation Caribbean Community, whose collaboration is vital to Haiti's stabilization, has responded by calling for an international investigation and postponing recognition of the interim government -- a decision made at a meeting that no U.S. diplomat attended. The interim stabilization force, which was supposed to consist of 5,000 troops, has leveled off at 3,500 and has been unable to establish itself beyond the country's three largest cities. Consequently, much of the rest of the countryside remains in the hands of armed gangs.

The new government was supposed to be one of national reconciliation. But the interim prime minister flown in from exile in Florida, Gerard Latortue, swiftly aligned himself with the opposition to Mr. Aristide. Mr. Latortue's cabinet excluded members of Mr. Aristide's party; last week he flew to the city of Gonaives to celebrate with several of the local gangsters, including a convicted murderer, whom he called "freedom fighters." His government has proclaimed its intention to prosecute Mr. Aristide and some of his key followers, but offered no hint of a plan to prepare the country for democratic elections.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has appealed for a major new effort to rebuild Haiti's government, police and political institutions. Without a nation-building program of at least a decade's duration, he warned, the country will experience continued or worsening chaos. "Our globalized world cannot afford such a political vacuum, whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or on the very doorstep of the sole remaining superpower," Mr. Annan wrote in an article published by the Wall Street Journal.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37604-2004Mar30.html