“Reconstructing Haiti” on starvation wages

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“Reconstructing Haiti” on starvation wages
26 January 2010

Government ministers, international bankers and aid agencies gathered
in Montreal Monday to discuss plans for reconstructing
earthquake-ravaged Haiti. At the heart of their proposals is the
exploitation of Haitian workers at poverty wages.

The conference offered nothing concrete in terms of new assistance,
instead scheduling a donors meeting at the United Nations in March.
Much of the rhetoric coming out of the gathering seemed to bear little
relationship to the situation on the ground in Haiti, where 150,000
people have been confirmed dead, hundreds of thousands more are
wounded and over 1.5 million are homeless.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, representing what remains of the
Haitian government, together with foreign ministers from Europe and
the Americas spoke of respect for Haitian sovereignty, subordination
of foreign military forces to humanitarian efforts, and allowing
Haitians to determine and lead their own reconstruction efforts.

Some leading officials, including International Monetary Fund Director
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have gone so far as to speak in terms of a
“Marshall Plan” for Haiti.

In reality, Haiti is now being run by the US military, which has
deployed over 13,000 troops and unilaterally taken control of the
country’s airport and port facilities. The Pentagon has dominated the
provision of relief, which it has subordinated to the number one
priority of deploying combat-equipped US soldiers and Marines, much to
the detriment of injured and hungry Haitians waiting for life-saving
medical supplies and food.

The US newsweekly Time gave expression to the real situation,
referring to the top US military commander in the country, US Lt. Gen.
Ken Keen, as “the de facto king of Haiti.” Meanwhile, the Haitian
people have seen or heard nothing of Haitian President Réne Préval.

Behind the talk of Haitians determining their own future and the
country’s government leading the way, what is being discussed is a
plan worked out in the months before the earthquake that is dictated
by the profit interests of US banks and corporations, together with
those of Haiti’s wealthy elite.

Speaking to reporters en route from Washington to Montreal, US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to this plan, while
praising the work of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in
seeking to implement it in his position as United Nations envoy to Haiti.

“He had just had a conference with 500 businesspeople,” she said.
“They were signing contracts, they were making investments.”

She continued: “So we have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was
done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United
Nations. And I don’t want to start from scratch, but we have to
recognize the changed challenges we are now confronting.”

The plan, worked up at the behest of the UN last year, is aimed at
expanding the Haitian economy through the development of free trade
zones based on garment sweatshops in which Haitian workers would be
paid near-starvation wages.

The initiative was based on a report prepared for the UN last year by
Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier. The report
perversely cast Haiti’s poverty—the deepest in the Western
Hemisphere—as its number one asset in the global capitalist economy.

“Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has
labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global
benchmark,” Collier wrote.

This “asset” is something that both Washington and Haiti’s parasitical
ruling elite have jealously guarded. Former President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide was overthrown twice—in 1991 and 2004—in bloody coups
orchestrated by the CIA in conjunction with Haitian factory owners, in
large measure for proposing to raise the country’s minimum wage.

After his election for a second term in 2000, Aristide doubled the
minimum wage and banned piece work in the garment factories, provoking
fierce opposition from the owners of these enterprises. Andy Apaid,
the Haitian-American owner of the largest sweatshops in Haiti and one
of the Clintons’ key allies in the new “development” plan, was key
figure in the 2004 coup, which saw Aristide abducted and bundled out
of the country by US troops and thousands of Haitians massacred by
right-wing death squads.

Last year, following mass demonstrations by students and workers in
which several people were killed and wounded, President Préval was
forced to accept an increase in the minimum wage that had been passed
by the Haitian legislature. However, he enacted a sub-minimum wage for
the garment assembly industry of $2.98 a day—approximately
one-twentieth of the minimum wage in the US.

While such a system will make super-profits for garment manufacturers
and further enrich Haiti’s native oligarchy, it will do nothing to
alleviate the country’s grinding poverty and will only deepen its
pervasive social inequality, the worst in the hemisphere. Garment
assembly involves importing pieces of clothing that are put together
in free trade zones and then exported out again, with virtually no
impact on the local economy.

While Secretary Clinton indicated that this slave labor blueprint is
the one Washington is still working off of in the wake of the January
12 earthquake, she allowed that the catastrophe would require making
some modifications.

Clinton praised Bellerive for talking about “decentralizing” the
Haitian economy. “As part of our multilateral efforts to assist Haiti,
we should look at how we decentralize economic opportunity and work
with the Haitian government and people to support resettlement, which
they are doing on their own as people leave Port-au-Prince and return
to the countryside from which most of them came,” she said.

The Haitian authorities, backed by Washington and the UN, have begun
implementing a plan to move hundreds of thousands of predominantly
poor people out of Port-au-Prince and into resettlement camps. Ground
has been cleared for one of these at Croix-des-Bouquets, eight miles
from the capital, which would house 10,000 people. Other sites are
being chosen, with the idea that those evacuated from the capital will
be permanently housed there.

In a society in which social divisions are so stark, the so-called
reconstruction plan for Haiti is inevitably developing along class
lines. It may well emerge that the new resettlement camps will serve
as captive labor for free trade zones erected in close proximity.

Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince will be reconstructed as a smaller city,
geared to the interests of the country’s wealthy. This was hinted at
in a statement by the Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, Raymond
Joseph. Speaking on a C-SPAN television broadcast about the tragedy
that has been inflicted upon the Haitian people, he said, “There is a
silver lining. What was not politically possible was done by the
earthquake. We will rebuild differently.”

Such social re-engineering in the interests of a native ruling class
and foreign capital, and at the expense of the broad masses of Haitian
workers and poor, will inevitably provoke social upheavals and
resistance. This is why Washington has placed getting “boots on the
ground” ahead of saving the lives of the earthquake’s victims.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j26.shtml

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