Posted on 06/04/2011 8:00:03 AM PDT by Pinkbell
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Obama’s union lackeys will not be amused.
I think products from Haiti get exempted from import taxes too.
Unions won't say a word.
That Obama, he’s all about helping poor black people.
And we wonder why Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Where is the outrage from the left on human rights violations?
Our government should not be doing the bidding of multinational corporations. This is fascism.
Levi Strauss = hypocrites
These are the jeans they charge $100 a pair for?
Where’s the outrage from the right? Where’s the outrage from the middle? Where’s the outrage from anybody? And then everybody’s shocked when Haiti keeps not getting better.
And then everybody starts getting up in arms when the Haitians want to come here to make a decent wage.
And then everybody starts getting up in arms when the Haitians get turned around in the middle of the ocean, but the Cubans get one foot on land and they’ve got it made.
And then nothing changes. And nothing gets better. The one constant is that it always gets worse for the Haitians.
If this happened under Bush, you can bet this would be the top story on every newscast.
CAFTA
I guess Haiti needs lobbyists.
It did happen under GW Bush, his USTR Robert Zoellick set all this up.
Pay attention, this is “free trade” and the corporations and government officials involved are free traitors.
The only people who don’t need lobbyists are the people who already have the money to afford them.
The only people who don’t need lobbyists are the people who already have the money to afford them.
True, unfortunately.
>>> Our government should not be doing the bidding of multinational corporations
Obama can’t help selling out the poor for the benefit of the Levis Corporation. Blame genetics. It’s in his jeans.
The Goldman Sacks told him to do it.
If Haynes and Levi Strauss made generous campaign contributions to Odumbo and the ‘Rats, they basically own them. It’s just like a few years ago when the minimum wage was increased here but Pelosi managed to carve out an exception for some Pacific island territories where Dole, a major constituent in her district (and generous donor) had significant operations. Dems are for the little guy as long as he’s not employed by a generous benefactor to those same dems.
The media won’t go near this. They are too busy with much more important sturr like charging Palin and her entourage with making turns without using their turn signals.
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