July 18, 2011
HAITI NEWS: The Barack Obama Administration fought to lower the slave wages in Haiti to as low as 31 cents an hour, according to The Nation publishing Wikileaks post recently.
The article in The Nation stated that such things started when Haitian law was passed about two years ago to raise the minimum wage of workers in the country to 61 cents an hour.
The embassy cable reads the following:
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.
A small newspaper in Haiti, Haiti Liberte, with offices in New York City and Port-au-Prince highlighted the issue.
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July 18, 2011 | 1
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