US Left: Split, or Free at Last?

This article appeared in the July-August 1999 issue of The Socialist. I'm posting it here partly because it's no longer on line elsewhere, but also because the issues it deals with have been getting some play recently--as in this Salon piece. 

Many of the article's points are wrong or dated, but some aren't as off-base as they might appear at first. The WTO demonstrations hit Seattle just six months later, and many left-liberal activists did in fact break with the Democratic Party in 2000 to support Ralph Nader. The radicalization process was reversed in response to the September 11 attacks and the lunacy of the George W. Bush administration, but it started up again with the economic crisis in 2008 and the emergence of a new generation of activists. Since then we've seen the rise of the Dreamers, of Occupy, of Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter, all movements that have shown little interest in the Democratic Party. And while the Sanders campaign is taking place within the party, its whole basis is defiance of the Democratic leadership's neoliberal orthodoxy.

I think my piece's biggest mistake was missing the importance of mass incarceration in the Clinton years. And the biggest irony is that in 1999 Bernie Sanders voted to back the Clintons' hawkishness; he seems to have improved a lot since then. --DW

The US Left: Split, or Free at Last?
By David Wilson

In just two months of bombing Yugoslavia Bill Clinton has done what Lyndon Johnson needed three years to do with Vietnam: he has split the majority of US activists from the Democrats in a way that is unlikely to allow any reconciliation in the near future.

It's hard to believe that just six months ago many activists were streaming to the polls to "hold their noses and vote for the Democrats." Now these same activists are forming picket lines outside the offices of the "Progressive Caucus" Congress members, who form the hard core of the war party.

On Apr. 26 some 30 former supporters sat in on the Burlington offices of Rep. Bernie Sanders, self-described "independent socialist" of Vermont, to protest his support for Clinton's war. Sanders' staff called the cops; 15 activists were arrested. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) has had to arrest even more activists--30 of his Santa Cruz constituents since May 13. In one protest, on May 22, the Coalition to Stop the Bombing of Yugoslavia protested as Farr spoke at a Democratic Central Committee Annual Awards dinner. The activists festooned the sidewalk with slogans and pictures, distributed paper "body parts" symbolizing people blown apart by NATO cluster bombs, played a tape of bombs falling in Belgrade, and serenaded Farr with a new song: "Sam Farr, weak in the cranium, bombs the Serbs with depleted uranium!" Police arrested five protesters, including a Free Radio Santa Cruz 96.3 FM reporter who was taping the action.

Getting the Monkey Off Our Backs

Many people have written sadly about the "split in the left." It is indeed a sad, even tragic thing to watch a few once-serious leftists--people with real character and intelligence--turning themselves into cogs in a war machine. But the real split is not in the left but within the ranks of left-liberals, who have finally been forced to decide which they are: left or liberal. And most have chosen the left.

There is in fact nothing tragic about this split, which finally frees activists from an alliance with the Democrats that did nothing but impede effective organizing.

Look at the actual record of the Clinton administration. Take the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention," a bit of war propaganda cooked up in the early 1990s by Establishment think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.* Its first test was the Bush-Clinton invasion of Somalia in 1992-93. The avowed goal was to feed famine victims; the result was the massacre of hundreds of Somali civilians in the streets of Mogadishu.

Next came the comparatively bloodless 1994 invasion of Haiti, ostensibly to end the criminal rule of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and death-squad leader Emmanuel "Toto" Constant. Both turned out to be on the CIA payroll. Cedras now lives comfortably in Panama; Constant lives in Queens, with the Clinton administration shielding him from a Haitian extradition request. The third humanitarian intervention was the NATO's brief 1995 air war in Bosnia Herzegovina, which in effect gave the international community's seal of approval to Tudjman's ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Croatia, legally recognized the fascist "Republika Srpska" in Bosnia, made Milosevic the "guarantor of peace" in the Balkans, and set the stage for the current war.

Understandably, the proponents of humanitarian intervention showed no interest in reviewing the records of their earlier adventures. Instead, they pushed ahead with the next intervention, recycling the rhetoric ("you can't just stand there and do nothing, we must stop the genocide, don't you care about the human tragedy?"). And now they've brought us, once more, a country bombed back to the Stone Age.

Organizing Against the Sweatshop President

Clinton's neoliberal economic agenda--NAFTA in 1993, "welfare reform" and "immigration reform" in 1996, plans to "save" Social Security, countless embargoes against developing nations, efforts to revive the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)--will prove even more destructive in the long run than his military actions.

The president is reportedly concerned about how history will remember him. Many activists are starting to see his accomplishments in terms of how many welfare recipients are forced into slave labor programs, how many undocumented immigrants are working in sweatshops, how many production jobs have moved to low-wage havens in the "Third World." When Clinton took office in 1993, about 400,000 Mexicans worked in northern Mexico's vast maquiladora zone, making $50 or less a week assembling products sold mostly in the US for the benefit of US corporations; last January the number of maquiladora employees officially passed the one million mark. History will probably remember Clinton as the sweatshop president.

Throughout the world left and grassroots organizations have been working together over the last decade to build opposition to these neoliberal economic policies. Just since the Balkan war began, the Americas have been convulsed by strikes and militant protests against IMF austerity programs, against privatization, against union-busting. In Mexico and Argentina, university and high school students organized two of the largest student strikes of the last 30 years. The Argentine strike quickly won a rollback of education cutbacks; the Mexican strike is still continuing after more than a month, with broad support from other sectors.

There are a number of reasons for the failure of activists to build this sort of resistance in the US. The main reason, of course, is that the economic crisis has yet to strike here. Although Clinton's welfare, immigration and trade policies have been a significant drag on wages, so far the effect has been not so much to hurt the majority of workers as to keep them from participating in the boom. But the left's de facto alliance with the Democrats has had an important effect on organizing. How could activists organize effectively against the neoliberal economic program when they still called neoliberal legislators "our friends in Congress," when they were still rallying to defend Sweatshop Bill from "the vast rightwing conspiracy," when they were still supporting the US's ability to intervene everywhere and anywhere it chooses?

The War Room antics in Washington have helped us kick the Democratic Party habit. Just as in 1967 and 1968, activists at last have the scary but liberating ability to act on their own. We may not use our new freedom wisely--to a large extent we failed then--but at least we have it. Now let's get down to work on some long-overdue organizing.

May 29, 1999

* See the Endowment's 1992 report, Changing Our Ways: America in the New
World, pp 50-51.

Textile Workers Mobilize in Haiti for Minimum Wage Adjustment — Press Conference

By PLASIT, via Workers Struggle
April 19, 2016

Press Conference on April 14, 2016

Greetings to all our media friends, print as well as television, that come to provide coverage for the conference that PLASIT, which is Textile Plants Union Platform, to launch the mobilization for the minimum wage adjustment for the year 2015-2016. In PLASIT, we notice that 8 months following the beginning of the fiscal year, the Supreme Salary Council finally made recommendations to the government just as it did for the past 2 years. Thus, the Council has adopted a bad habit of not respecting what is stated in Article 4.1 in the Law of 2009 on the minimum wage.

In the Supreme Salary Council, it’s mainly delaying tactics and plots going on. Management and the two so-called union representatives in the Council are dragging their feet so that management may continue to steal several months of workers’ wages. So, management will have more leeway to continue to pay workers measly wages.[...]

Read full press release:
http://www.workersstruggle.org/textile-workers-mobilize-haiti-minimum-wage-adjustment/
Watch video (in Creole):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oka6qxkqSI

Are Sanders and Fair Trade a Threat to the Global Poor?

By David L. Wilson, MRzine
April 13, 2016

On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets.

For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers -- notably New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof -- had been arguing that assembly plants like those at Rana Plaza were crucial to the development of economies in the Global South and therefore a boon to the world's most impoverished. The media's efforts to promote sweatshops suddenly slowed down after the collapse in Bangladesh, but they seem to be reviving now, just as we approach the third anniversary of the disaster.

The occasion for the new pro-sweatshop campaign is Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' opposition to trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).[...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/wilson130416.html

NYC, June 1: “The Global Minimum Wage Struggle,” at Left Forum

The Global Minimum Wage Struggle

Global capital’s “race to the bottom” in imposing ever-lower—even sub-survival—wages is generating resistance around the world. With a focus on the garment industry in Bangladesh and Haiti, the speakers will discuss the importance of working class internationalism. This includes not only building solidarity, but also coordination of struggles.

Panel at Left Forum

Noon - 1:50 p.m.

Sunday, June 1

Room 1.109

• David L. Wilson, Weekly News Update on the Americas
• Kiki Makandal, Batay Ouvriye Solidarity Network, One Struggle NY
• Stephanie McMillan, political cartonist, Proletarian Alternative, One Struggle FL

Recommended reading:
Stephanie McMillan: “A Garment Worker in Bangladesh Speaks Out”
Kiki Makandal: “Ten Years of UN Military Occupation of Haiti: Background and Current Effects”

Jan Makandal: “Wage Struggles: Reformist or Revolutionary?”

David L. Wilson: “Thinking Big: The Global Minimum Wage”

Thinking Big: The Global Minimum Wage

If the apparel industry can globalize production, the producers need to be able to globalize the minimum wage.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout
April 24, 2014

After years of neglect, the minimum wage has suddenly become a major national issue. President Obama has proposed an increase in the federal minimum to $10.10 an hour, fast food workers are agitating for $15, and candidates who back a higher wage floor, including an avowed socialist in Seattle, are winning local elections. In February, the retailer Gap Inc. announced that it was implementing a nationwide minimum wage for 65,000 of its own 90,000 employees (although only $9 an hour).

The minimum wage is an important issue in other countries as well, although we rarely hear about these cases. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23273-thinking-big-the-global-minimum-wage

Taking On the Fashion Industry

by David L. Wilson, MRZine
April 19, 2014

Tansy E. Hoskins. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. Pluto Press, 2014. 254 pages.

To say that Tansy E. Hoskins' Stitched Up deconstructs the garment industry would be a misrepresentation. What the British activist and journalist does is more like a controlled demolition, using facts and footnotes to strip away the apparel trade's decorative exterior and then to dynamite the foundations.

Hoskins' polemic begins with the title. In British usage "to stitch up" is "to swindle, to overcharge exorbitantly," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Hoskins' goal is to show the many ways that fashion swindles us all. Through its own media outlets and its billions of dollars in advertising, the industry creates a glittery illusion of beauty and sophistication. The reality is a $1.5 trillion industry as grimy and profit-driven as any, and the glossy pages of Vogue conceal a record of human and environmental damage we might expect from coal mining or oil drilling. [...]

Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/wilson190414.html

Wage Hike in Haiti Doesn’t Address Factory Abuses

By Jane Regan, IPS
December 3, 2013

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 3 2013 (IPS) - Haiti’s minimum wage will nudge up 12 percent on Jan. 1, from 4.65 to 5.23 dollars (or 200 to 225 gourdes) per day. Calculated hourly, it will go from 58 to 65 cents, before taxes.

But the raise will not affect Haiti’s 30,000 assembly factory workers, who are supposed to already be receiving about seven dollars for an eight-hour day – about 87 cents per hour. Recent studies have found rampant wage theft at almost two dozen of the factories that stitch clothing for companies like Gap and Walmart.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/12/wage-hike-haiti-doesnt-address-factory-abuses/

The challenges of reforestation

By Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch
November 19, 2013

Doucet (Petit-Goâve), HAITI, 19 November 2013 – Reforestation and soil conservation programs costing many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Petit-Goâve region have resulted in hundreds of small ledges built of straw or sacks of earth. Eight to ten months later, in certain areas the earthworks seem to be lasting. But in many others, these little “shelves” have disintegrated.

The construction and destruction of the anti-erosion ledges – all made with development assistance and humanitarian donations – offer an example of how at least some of Haiti’s reforestations projects turn out. In some cases, at least, they could be considered vicious circles. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/11/19/the-challenges-of-reforestation.html

Stand With Haitian Workers for a Living Wage!

On November 29th, after years of delay and wage theft, a minimum wage increase will be announced in
Haiti. Batay Ouvriye (Workers' Struggle), an autonomous workers' organization, is mobilizing around the country to demand an increase to 500 gourdes (approximately $11.50)--the minimum for a family to survive.

The current minimum wage is only 300 gourdes (85 cents/hour), and even that is not being paid by the factories. Most receive only 200 gourdes (57 cents/hour).

Batay Ouvriye is mobilizing around the country for workers to voice their demands, what they say they actually need for a minimum wage. This takes money to travel, print thousands of flyers, host trainings and protests.

The US-based organization One Struggle has set up an indiegogo campaign to raise $3,200 to help pay for the mobilization in Haiti. To learn more and to contribute, go to:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/stand-with-haitian-workers-for-a-living-wage

For more information on the minimum wage situation, go to:
http://inthesetimes.org/working/entry/14391/7_per_day_haiti_anti-sweatshop_revival/
http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14685/surveillance_beatings_firings_how_apparel_companies_suppress_the_minimum_wa/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/world/americas/group-says-haitian-garment-workers-are-shortchanged-on-pay.html

Behind Haiti’s Hunger

Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch
October 10, 2013

Port-au-Prince, HAITI, 10 October 2013 – During the past year or so in Haiti, as humanitarian actors raised a cry of alarm about hunger, Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) journalists kept hearing complaints and rumors about the misuse, abuse, or negative effects of food aid.

Our journalists and the community radio members who worked with them decided to investigate.

Why – when the country has received at least one billion U.S. dollars worth of food aid between 1995 and the 2010 earthquake – is hunger on the rise?

Who are the actors in the “hunger games” in Haiti and internationally?

What can be done that isn’t currently being done? [...]

Read the articles and watch the videos:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/10/8/behind-haitis-hunger.html

"Now They're All Dead": Threats of Assassination to Human Rights Advocates in Haiti

Mark Snyder, Beverly Bell and Alexis Erkert, Toward Freedom
August 21, 2013

"Those before you were strong. Now they're all dead. Stop what you are doing, or the same will happen to you."

Those were the words delivered to Frena Florvilus, Director of Education and Advocacy of the Haitian human rights organization Defenders of the Oppressed (DOP), early on the morning of August 11 by one of four unidentified men who attempted to enter DOP's office. The threat echoed numerous others that have been leveled against the DOP office and its staff since they took on the case of a young man who died in police custody within hours of his April 15 arrest, his body left covered with bruises and wounds inflicted by a severe beating. DOP has also been targeted for its work to support displaced peoples who face violent eviction from their camps, by the government and private landowners who are determined to rid the country of camps. Never mind that the people, homeless since the January 2010 earthquake, have nowhere else to go. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/3340-qnow-theyre-all-deadq-threats-of-assassination-to-human-rights-advocates-in-haiti

Sweatshops Don't Just Happen - They're a Policy

We see the result of these policies in the more than two million Mexicans who now work in maquiladoras assembling goods for the US market, the more than three million Bangladeshis who sew apparel for European and US retailers, and the millions more across the globe who either work in sweatshops or cross borders "illegally" to find jobs in the richer nations.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout
June 25, 2013

On May 5, The New York Times dedicated its "Sunday Dialogue" feature to letters about the factory collapse in Bangladesh that had killed more than 1,100 garment workers a week and a half earlier. The "dialogue" started with a letter from University of Michigan business school professor Jerry Davis, who apportioned blame for the disaster to "the owners of the building and the factories it contained, to the government of Bangladesh, to the retailers who sold the clothing," and to us. Through "[o]ur willingness to buy garments sewn under dangerous conditions," he wrote, we "create the demand that underwrites these tragedies."

There's a striking omission in Prof. Davis' list - the people whose policies make the sweatshop economy possible.[...]

Read the full article:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/17183-sweatshops-dont-just-happen-theyre-a-policy

An Interview with an Organizer for Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle)

By One Struggle
May 1, 2013

[Batay Ouvriye is the main labor group working in Haiti's assembly sector. They organized the assembly workers union in the northeastern city of Ouanaminthe, the union in the sector with a contract.]

One Struggle: Can you give me a brief description of what Batay Ouvriye* is and a little bit of the history of it?

Batay Ouvriye: Batay Ouvriye is part of a whole current that had roots in Europe and the United States where many of the resistance, many of the leftist people, or many of the progressive militants were exiled from the country. So we organized a kind of line against Duvalier1 which was not the classical front. It was a class line against Duvalier.

They called us sectarian much of the time, but we weren’t sectarian, it’s a line. And we participated with many of those people. But we didn’t enter an organizational front, you see? But if they had a demonstration we were always there.\\

Read the full article:
http://onestruggle.net/2013/05/01/interview-with-batay-ouvriye/

Mrs. Clinton Can Have Her Factories: a Haitian Sweatshop Worker Speaks

By Beverly Bell, Other Worlds
April 30, 2013

Marjorie Valcelat ran an embroidery machine in a factory from 2005 to 2008. She says the experience made her so sick and weak that she’s not felt able to work since then.

I had three children I had to take care of; their father had left. And since I hadn’t had enough schooling, I didn’t have the skills to do much. So I said to myself, “I’m going to work at a factory.” When I got there, they showed me how to run the machines to embroider slips and nightshirts. I spent a month training, but during that time they didn’t pay me; I had to pay them for the training.

If I had met the quota, every two weeks I would have made 1,250 gourdes [US$30.00]. Yep, that’s it. But I couldn’t meet the quota, because embroidery wasn’t my specialty. I did what I could. Sometimes they paid me 500 gourdes [US$12.50], sometimes 400 gourdes [US $9.50], every two weeks. I needed to support my family and I couldn’t survive. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/mrs-clinton-can-have-her-factories-haitian-sweatshop-worker-speaks

A Hard Day’s Labor for $4.76: The Offshore Assembly Industry in Haiti

By Beverly Bell and Alexis Erkert, Other Worlds
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). [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/hard-day-s-labor-476-offshore-assembly-industry-haiti

Haitian Sweatshops: Made in the U.S.A.

By Fran Quigley, Working in These Times
March 21, 2013

When the shift changes in the late afternoon, thousands of Haitians stream out from under an arched entrance labeled “Parc Industriel Metropolitain” toward the traffic-choked streets of Port-au-Prince. Among them is David, a thin 32-year-old man in a short-sleeve dress shirt and slacks, who works at one of the many garment assembly factories here, sewing pants for export to the United States. Through a Creole interpreter, David says the way he and his co-workers are treated is pa bon—not right.

Yet a lot of high-powered people with a stake in Haitian affairs think jobs like David’s represent the answer to Haiti’s problems. The U.S. State Department, the Inter-American Development Bank and the government of Haitian President Michel Martelly recently pulled together more than $300 million in post-earthquake subsidies to create another industrial park just like this one but in northeast Haiti, with Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A as its anchor tenant. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton both spoke at the park’s opening ceremony, hailing it as the centerpiece of U.S. efforts to help Haiti recover from the devastating 2010 quake. Secretary Clinton echoed President Martelly’s mantra that Haiti “is open for business.” [...]

Read the full article:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14763/haitian_sweatshops_made_in_the_u.s.a/

The Caracol Industrial Park: Worth the risk?

Ayiti Kale Je/Haiti Grassroots Watch
Thursday, March 7, 2013

Caracol and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 7 March 2013 – Last October, officials from the Haitian government and from a number the so-called “friends of Haiti” governments and institutions saw their dream turned into reality. Finally, earthquake reconstruction progress worth celebrating. The inauguration of the giant Caracol Industrial Park which, according to its backers, will someday host 20,000 or maybe even 65,000 jobs.

President Michel Martelly was there, as were Haitian and foreign diplomats, the Clinton power couple, millionaires and actors, all present to celebrate the government’s clarion call: “Haiti is open for business.”†

“We supported the Caracol Park because we knew it was going to be an extraordinary thing for the north. The park will allow us to ‘decentralize’ the country and create a northern ‘pole.’ It will also give people jobs in an extraordinary way!” then-Minister of Social Affairs Josépha Raymond Gauthier told Haiti Grassroots Watch.

But a two-month investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) discovered that the number of jobs in the north is not yet “extraordinary,” and that many other promises have not yet been kept.

Read the full article:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/3/7/the-caracol-industrial-park-worth-the-risk.html

For more information on Haiti Grassroots Watch, watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdKe0Ficits&feature=share&list=UU6jTfsGJ_8Oh1QLDOeWwSQQ

To contribute to this valuable resource by PayPal, got to Haiti Grassroots Watch's website:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/

Or if you want your gift to be tax-deductible, send it to the groups fiscal sponsor, Somerville Community Access Television. Please follow the instructions on this page:
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/apui-support-apoyo/

Haiti's Duvalier Needs Company in the Dock

The media, and even human rights groups and many progressives, seemed to miss an important point: Duvalier, like Ríos Montt and the Argentine generals, had accomplices and enablers who are still free to walk the streets of New York and Washington.

By David Wilson, Truthout
March 21, 2013

Human Rights Watch spokesperson Reed Brody called it "historic": on February 28 former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced to appear before a Port-au-Prince appeals court to discuss criminal complaints filed against him by victims of his 1971-1986 regime. The occasion was significant regardless of the outcome of the now ongoing trial of Duvalier. "Whatever happens next," Brody said, "Haitians will remember the image of their former dictator having to answer questions about the repression carried out under his rule."

This was only the latest in a number of encouraging developments involving former dictators forced to confront their crimes from the 1970s and 1980s. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala's military ruler from 1982 to 1983, faces charges in a trial that began on March 19 for the deaths of indigenous campesino civilians, while dozens of former Argentine officials are in jail or on trial for the "disappearances" of as many as 30,000 suspected leftists in the 1976-1983 "dirty war." [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15235-haitis-duvalier-needs-company-in-the-dock

Beaten Haitian Worker Continues Fight for $7-Per-Day Wage

By Dan Schneider, In These Times
March 5, 2013

When Haiti's minimum wage rose to 300 Gourds ($7 US) per day in October 2012, workers across the nation were relieved. The money was certainly not a living wage, but it was far better than the paltry 70 gourdes-per-day standard established in 2003. Despite intense resistance from the U.S. government and apparel companies like Hanes and Fruit of the Loom—who waged a long battle to stave off an increase passed by the Haitian Parliament in 2009 and keep the minimum wage at $3 day for the textile industry—the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere was set to take a step in the right direction for labor rights.

Or so it seemed. Months after the increase took effect, many Haitian factory owners are still refusing to pay their employees the new minimum wage (An actual living wage in Haiti would be much higher still—about $29 per day, according to an estimate by the Workers' Rights Consortium). With a weak national government and an economy largely dependent on U.S. contracts and favorable trade arrangements, workers in the apparel industry—Haiti’s largest exporter—are struggling just to attain their legally-mandated wage. [...]

Read the full article:
http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14685/surveillance_beatings_firings_how_apparel_companies_suppress_the_minimum_wa/

Adidas Sweatshop Workers Speak Out! Worker Tour visits NYC on Feb 4

Hear from garment workers who sew apparel in Honduran and Haitian factories owned and contracted by Gildan Activewear, a Montreal-based apparel company that recently became the largest supplier in the Western hemisphere to sportswear giant Adidas.

Workers will be speaking out across New York to encourage the State to uphold its commitment to not subsidize sweatshops, and in the backdrop of another mounting campaign against Adidas. Six universities have already committed to end their apparel contracts with Adidas over the brand's refusal to pay $1.8 million in legally-owed severance pay to 2,800 former Indonesian workers at a factory called PT Kizone, which shut down unexpectedly over a year and half ago.

Come, listen, and take action!

Monday, February 4th – Three opportunities to hear from the workers!
12- 1 p.m. @ Fashion Institute of Technology, Katie Murphy Amphitheater–enter FIT at the northwest corner of Seventh Ave and 27th Street
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. @ St. Joseph’s College, 245 Clinton Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
8:00 – 9:00 p.m. @ NYU, Kimmel 406 (60 Washington Square South)

Speakers:

Telemarque Pierre is a factory worker and union leader at Premium Apparel, in Port Au Prince, Haiti. The factory produces t-shirts for Gildan, a Canadian company. Gildan clothing is sold in university bookstores, worn by New York state police, and at Walmart. Today at Gildan's four Haitian contract suppliers (Genesis, Premium, Palm and SISA), workers continue to face prohibition of union activities in the factories and arbitrary firings. Moreover, several of Gildan’s Haitian suppliers refuse to pay the new mandatory minimum wage of less than $6/day.

Yannick Etienne is the director of the Haitian workers’ rights organization Batay Ouvriye. Batay Ouvriye brings together independent, democratic unions and worker rights organizations, and educates, empowers and organizes wage-workers, self-employed workers as well as the unemployed for the defense of their rights.

Raquel Navarro is a garment worker and union leader at STAR, an Adidas supplier factory in Honduras owned by Gildan. Gildan is Adidas’ largest supplier in the western hemisphere. After Raquel and her colleagues formed a union in November 2007, a bloody struggle ensued, including the illegal firing of 55 union activists. Still today, mass layoffs continue. Recently, Gildan’s vague plans to close factories provoked a dangerously hostile atmosphere towards union leaders where Gildan management allowed death threats against union leaders to transpire.

In addition, representatives from Labor-Religion Coalition of New York, SweatFree Communities / International Labor Rights Forum, and United Students Against Sweatshops will share information about local actions that people can take in support of Adidas/Gildan workers.

Additional events in New York State:

Tuesday, February 5, 2013
4:00-5:30 p.m.: Presentation at Syracuse University, New York
6:00-8:30 p.m.: Dinner and Presentation at All Saints Church

Wednesday, February 6, 2013
4:00-5:30 p.m.: Presentation at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
7:00-8:30 p.m.: Presentation at First Presbyterian Church, followed by dessert reception hosted by Labor-Religion Coalition of the Finger Lakes (315 North Cayuga Street, Ithaca, NY, by DeWitt

Thursday, February 7, 2013
8:30 a.m.: Breakfast and Presentation at First Unitarian Church (220 South Winton Road, Rochester, NY 14610)
12:15-1:30 p.m. Presentation at St. John Fisher College, Basil 135
6:30-8:00 p.m.: Presentation at University of Buffalo, Natural Sciences Complex 215, NY

Friday, February 8, 2013
11:00 a.m.: Press conference at New York State Capitol, Albany
12:30-1:30 p.m.: Presentation at Siena College, Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202
3:00-4:30 p.m.: Presentation at SUNY Albany, Humanities 354
7:00-8:30 p.m.: Presentation at Pastoral Center, sponsored by Peace and Justice Commission of the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Albany

For more information:
Joy Perkett, Faith Organizer/ Campaign Coordinator
Tele; 518/ 213-6000 ext. 6348
jperkett@labor-religion.org
http://www.labor-religion.org/

For background on Haitian sweatshops:
In $7-Per-Day Fight, Haitian Workers Call for North American Support
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14391/7_per_day_haiti_anti-sweatshop_revival/
What Are 'Peacekeepers' Doing in a Haitian Industrial Park?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/4073-what-are-peacekeepers-doing-in-a-haitian-industrial-park
Some Key Players in Haiti’s Assembly Sector
http://grassrootssolidarity.blogspot.com/2013/01/some-key-players-in-haitis-assembly.html