U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap Read

LurkerBaba

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WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap


A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.

(This article was taken down by The Nation due to an embargo, but it was excerpted at Columbia Journalism Review.)

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti's president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.
 

LurkerBaba

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This is friggin' ridiculous !

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti's president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies

Read more: WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
The next I hear of human rights from US, I'm gonna puke

Also,

2004 Haitian rebellion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 2004 Haitian rebellion was a coup d'etat that happened after conflicts that occurred for several weeks in Haiti during February 2004. It resulted in the removal from office of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide preventing him from finishing his second term, and he left Haiti on a United States (U.S.) plane accompanied by U.S. military/security personnel.

....................

[After] early 1994 . . . Washington's negotiators made one demand that Aristide could not accept: the immediate selloff of Haiti's state-owned enterprises, including phones and electricity. Aristide argued that unregulated privatization would transform state monopolies into private oligarchies, increasing the riches of Haiti's elite and stripping the poor of their national wealth
Colonialism 2.0 ?
 

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