Haiti

By Charles Arthur (NotiCen) 25 March 2010

Following a meeting in mid-March, a large number of Haiti's progressive civil society organizations have issued a statement denouncing the plan for the reconstruction of Haiti that will be presented to the international donors' conference to be held in New York on March 31.

The organizations deplore the fact that the process of drafting the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) took place with almost no consultation with Haitian civil society and with very limited input rom representatives of the Haitian state.

The U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has announced plans to encourage a massive growth in apparel production in Haiti.

It will be for radical trade unions like Batay Ouvriye and their supporters like No Sweat to ensure that the jobs created are jobs with justice.

"In unprecedented campaign, the metal workers of Bundy and Hitachi agreed that 1% of salary their salary go to Haiti"

Workers at General Motors are meeting in the next 11 days to vote donation

SOURCE: WWW.SINDMETALSJC.ORG.BR

Rain pours new misery on quake-struck Haiti
Jim Loney and Joseph Guyler Delva
PORT-AU-PRINCE
Thu Feb 11, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Rain drenched quake survivors in the tent camps of the Haitian capital on Thursday, a warning of fresh misery to come for the 1 million homeless living in the street one month after the devastating earthquake.

Port-au-Prince, 27th January 2010 - Statement by the coordinating committee of progressive organisations (see the list of the participating platforms and individual organizations at the foot of the text)  
  
To all our partners  
   
On January 12th 2010 an earthquake of unprecedented force struck our country with dramatic consequences for the people of many areas in the west and south east, and for the country as a whole. The tremor registered 7.3 on the Richter scale, and the irreparable losses it

The Haitian trade union Batay Ouvriye, active in last year’s struggle for a higher minimum wage, has made an appeal for solidarity in the wake of the devastating January 12th earthquake in Port-au-Prince. The UK anti-sweatshop campaign No Sweat is collecting money for this appeal: You can donate by clicking on the "Donate to No Sweat" button here:
http://www.nosweat.org.uk/product
Please mark your donation "Haiti".

No Sweat will forward all funds received in this way to Batay Ouvriye via the New Jersey account listed below in late February. We have already raised a thousand pounds from ticket sales for our comedy fundraiser. You can help get that figure up and help shape a sweatshop free future for Haiti.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In a city still overwhelmed by rubble and desperate for food and money, a small miracle of commerce took place on Monday: a garment factory reopened.

But no sooner had the first sewing machines begun to clatter at the factory, DKDR Haiti, than the workers cleared the floor. The workers, almost all of them women, mistook the machines’ vibrations for an aftershock and scrambled for safety outside under the locust trees.

Extract from The Nation, 20 January 2010

Just days after the earthquake, the IMF announced Haiti would immediately receive a new loan of US100m.

As the IMF announced its $100 million loan under vague and presumably onerous terms, debt relief activists were already calling for a different kind of global response. They were demanding that aid to Haiti come in the form of grants, not loans. At the same time, Naomi Klein and others warned about the possibility that the earthquake would be used as a pretext to amp up Haiti's exposure to the shock doctrine.

The following is a flyer we distributed last week concerning rising quotas and increased exploitation in the factories in Haiti.

BATAY OUVRIYE

Port-au-Prince, October 16th, 2009

Comrade workers of the clothing and textile industries,

The Haiti Supoort Group reports:
United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, is urging the Haitian government to focus on garment assembly as the way to reduce poverty and spur economic development. During his recent visit to Haiti, and in his latest report on Haiti to the UN Security Council, he declared that Haiti must take advantage of US legislation giving garments assembled in Haiti duty-free and quota-free access to the US market.

Border FTZ workers urge the Senate to vote for the new minimum wage legislation

Port-au-Prince, 17 February, 2009 - (AlterPresse) The CODEVI Free Trade Zone Workers' Union (Sokowa) in Ouanaminthe (on the Dominican border) is urging the Senate to vote for the new minimum wage law in order to help Haiti's disadvantaged sectors cope with the rising cost of living.

From radical workers' union, Batay Ouvriye:

In Parliament as in the Executive (the latter through the Ministry Social Affairs and Labor), the minimum wage debate is on the table.

Jean Paul Faubert started sacking workers in December 2007, and then he closed down the factory, just like that, on 26 March 2008. Around 800 male and female workers were left unemployed. He simply attached a notice on the gate notifying them to go and collect their pay at the Labour department of the Ministry of Social Affairs. To this day, those workers have not been able to get what they are legally owed, in spite of several television and radio reports concerning this case.

THE MOBILIZATION MUST CONTINUE

Widespread MOBILIZATION against the high cost of life has taken place in the cities of Cayes, Petit Goave, Jeremie, Port-au-Prince, everywhere… The people are fed up! We’re hungry, and poverty is finishing us off little by little.

Reports Batay Ouvriye

INTERNATIONAL PRACTICES, DECEMBER 2007
POLITICAL BULLETIN, Vol. 2, No. 3

Statement from Batay Ouvriye, on the violent attack on them and trade union comrades from Brazil, in Haiti on a solidarity tour...

A new film on the conditions faced by Haitian migrant labourers on sugar plantations in the neighbouring Dominician Republic has sparked controversy. Haitians live in poor conditions on plantations and even those born in the Republic are denied citizenship. Film-makers have faced legal threats and intimidation from sugar barons trying to avoid the word getting out about the desperate conditions of workers.

Anti-union dismissals at the brewery in Cap-Haïtien*
- 17 March 2007

Latest on union struggle at Coca Cola plant in Haiti.