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Sweatshops Won’t Save Haiti
The United Nations will host a Haiti donors' conference at the end of March.
This conference will be quite different from last year's event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It's already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it's also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti's massive debt burden.
Former President Bill Clinton, currently serving as the UN's envoy to Haiti, and economist Paul Collier have another idea that could prove disastrous. They think Haiti needs to leverage its "cheap labor."
In other words, they think Haiti will solve its problems by opening up more sweatshops.
Of course Clinton and Collier don't call them sweatshops. They talk about "garment factories" or "manufacturing centers" or simply "workshops," but they are sweatshops and nothing more.
For Haiti to join the ranks of developed nations, they argue, Haitians must first work as many hours as possible for paltry wages so that their economy can grow.
Congress seems to agree. It has passed several bills that provide Haitian garment-makers preferential access to American consumers. According to conventional knowledge, Haiti was on the road to economic success--as a result of these legislative reforms--before the earthquake. Now, the logic goes, Haitians must rebuild their collapsed "workshops" and produce as many cheap T-shirts as possible.
All this ignores the most important point: sweatshop labor's inherent inhumanity. Sweatshop labor proponents have never worked in the conditions they so enthusiastically endorse for others. When advocating such solutions, they often offer compelling numbers as proof of their effectiveness. But what about the human costs: the extra hours workers spend away from their families, the risk of injury that accompanies repetitive movements, and the loss of morale as some boss demands that you produce even more?
In Haiti, there are a few plausible alternatives to sweatshop labor. In the lead-up to last year's donors' conference, progressive Haitian civil society organizations suggested a development program that focuses on local production and agriculture. They argued, convincingly, that the benefits from sweatshop labor often end up somewhere else, since the clothes are constructed on-site; the material for the clothes are shipped in, and the clothes are shipped out upon completion.
A focus on locally produced goods, however, would have the opposite effect. Haitian entrepreneurs would produce according to Haitian needs, and every part of the manufacturing process--from the development of materials to the production of goods--would take place in Haiti and benefit Haitians.
In addition, building up the capacity of Haitian farmers is crucial in the coming months and years. Haiti has been dependent on food aid for many years now, and a national program that focused on sustainable agriculture would not only have the effect of providing a livelihood and locally produced food for countless Haitians, it would also allow Haiti to address the environmental degradation that has crippled its economy for generations.
The link between these two suggestions is infrastructure development. Better roads and better transportation generally mean a much more stable and efficient economy.
All three of these proposals would require funding from the international community and expertise from abroad as well. All three proposals, if enacted, would benefit Haitians enormously.
The upcoming donors' conference is an incredibly important forum. We have an opportunity to help Haitians rebuild in a manner that simultaneously respects their humanity and enables them to become more productive.
We have an opportunity to heed the voices of concerned and knowledgeable Haitians. Now isn't the time to subsidize foreign investors' sweatshops.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllWelcome to the New World Economy, Haiti! This is the American pigocracy's answer to all economic problems----lowest possible wages. Why do you think that 15,000,000 Illegal immigrants were allowed to descend on the United States? For truth, justice and the American Way? All sweatshops should be burned to the ground in or out of the United States. Clinton should be ashamed of himself, but didn't he support NAFTA?
Wouldn't it be sweet Karmic justice if Bill "NAFTA" Clinton had to spend the next 10,000 lives sewing in a sweatshop 14 hours a day for a few pennies an hour?
It sounds like a Transnational Corporations "Globalization" spiel. You have to "compete" with labor from cheaper labor countries so you have to work for less to compete.
The more profit, less wage mantra of big business. If we have so much trouble fighting the attack on American workers by business and their shills...how does Haiti fight them off?
If Clinton's NAFTA and the Bush's trade policies and tax gifts to Corporations can't be reversed in our country, then the Haitians don't have a chance. Open borders invite and almost insist on these abuses.
Clinton to Haiti: "the way to a better life is slavery to my shareholder friends."
The world's policeman often defends this kind of faux-philosopher-king economics, making it a force for self-delusion and tyranny.
this all feels so much more 'coincidental' than, say, Iraq, doesn't it? what with us already having troops in the area...
that earthquake was just SO lucky for us! perfect, almost...
Bush, with the support of Canada (think Gildan tee shirts) and France, kidnapped and deported President Aristide because among other things he promoted a rise in the minimum wage. By selecting NAFTA Bill to plan reconstruction in Haiti sadly again Obama demonstrates his corporatist leanings.
Haiti needed american contractors to setup tents and to dig
trenches around the tents to protect the people from the
coming rains. They did not need Bill "Slick Willie" Clinton along with his daughter Chelsea who works for a company that outsourced our industrial base to India. Was Clinton there to help rescue the people suffering from the earthquake or to
find investments for Wall St looking for Slave Workers.
Clinton has done enough damage to this country, we may never
recover with his Nafta deal. The NY Times and the Boston Globe should be asking Clinton what do we do now with some twenty five million unemployed in this country?? The Corporate Press
have done themselves "killing damage", for not looking out for
the good of the country and covering up for the Clinton Circus.
There will not be such slave labor. Haiti is probably about the closest microcosmic case study we can get for the humanitarian action needed by IGO'S, NGO'S, and non-state actors today in all areas of the world. The lessons we could learn there are so great. Security from the looters, development of democratic institutions, even delivery of aid in all forms. It may indeed prove a sobering lesson to the world, a reminder of the human consciousness that is developing with globalization. Globalization is not all sweatshops and submission. It brings technology, jobs, education, health services---a more balanced society. It is not the ultimate solution. Via it however, humanity is becoming more and more aware of places like Haiti. And of the suffering of so many around the world. It gives us the opportunity to act. I predict that country may finally see an end to its decades of suffering. Soon....it could be just like the industrialized world. Not to sound all Pat Robertson on the subject, but we can rebuild this shattered land into such a nation now. Just sayin'....
Wow. You've bought the party line hook line and sinker.
The interesting thing is, from the start, Haiti has been a prime example of how the supposed largesse of the enlightened "democratic' western world reduces every place it outsources its idea of capitalism to the state Haiti was in when the earthquake struck.
Haiti became not the prime example of how neo-capitalism has the shining godly face of a compassionately industrialized and eternally grateful country of little brown people, but the prime example of how the profit geeks of the industrialized world can completely run roughshod over any true democratic spirit and urge and make it into a complete antithetical object lesson of everything that can go wrong when you take the means of improving a society out of the hands of that society and are only interested in production and profit by any means necessary, are willing to enforce it with invasion and acts of war or the threat of war, and not quality of life and hands-off bottom up facilitated self determination.
Mainstream Media, and you apparently, continue to hold to the story that sending in troops to a completely traumatized and already impoverished place is the first compassionate act... that the hungry and traumatically homeless can in fact even be considered looters… and to protect the poor hapless survivors from themselves is matter-of-fact, when, in fact, the lesson is that the first aid, and the first protection offered, was given to those from the foreign embassies who have always been a major cog in the machine that has dispossessed Haiti of its democratic tradition and its people of their resources and their personal power as a collective.
Predict away. "Soon it could be like the industrialized world"????
Maybe you jest. Maybe you haven't looked in Detroit for the ruins of that industrial world, or in the innumerable sweatshops all over the planet that provide you with everything from your shoes to your pots and pans.
The future is now. It will not be different when nothing different is being done and the people who benefit most from keeping it the same insist that what is good for them must be good for everyone else.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/nigeria-is-falling-apart-says-nobel-prizewinning-author-1921835.html
If you were Haitian, would you be more likely to trust the capitalist benevolence of the Clintons/Blankfeins or the self-sufficiency of the Chavez/Castros?
What if you weren't Haitian?
Sweat shops won't save Haiti!!
No sh--, Dick Tracy. Where did you leave your squad car?
But the article misses the point. None of the people involved care about the Haitians and whether or not they are saved is totally and completely irrelevant. All that matters is that someone makes a huge pile of money off of their labor. They can go the way of the women in the Marianas and as long as they are out of sight and hearing, it doesn't matter.