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News :: Labor |
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What 'Liberation' Means to Haitian Workers |
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by Ricky Baldwin
Email: baldwinricky (nospam) yahoo.com (verified)
Phone: 217-328-3037 |
11 Jun 2004
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Violence continues in the wake of US-backed coup d'etat.
US-trained and supported "rebel" troops and Dominican guards attack Levi Strauss workers and others. |
When Dominican troops crossed into Haiti’s Codevi Free Trade Zone on June 4 to attack Haitian factory workers, it was not the first time. Management at the Dominican-owned sweatshop Grupo M, where Haitian workers assemble garments for Levi Strauss, has repeatedly sicked Haitian and Dominican troops on union sympathizers in the plant since a US-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Haiti at the end of February.
Jannick Etienne, a union organizers in Haiti, notes that the Codevi Free Trade Zone (FTZ) is at once remote from the center of Haitian political life -- virtually cut off from the capital city of Port-au-Prince by miles of bad roads and difficult terrain -- and at the heart of recent events. Codevi was, Etienne says, where the so-called “rebel” troops crossed into Haiti from the Dominican Republic, where they had been in exile for years following murder charges against their leaders.
Now, after being beaten, kidnapped, threatened and forced to accept mysterious “vaccinations,” all the Grupo M workers are locked out of the plant, jobless with no unemployment benefits, as Haitian death squads roam the area. Management says they may close Grupo M. The workers say management abrogated its agreement with the workers before the ink was dry.
Puppets and thugs
Within two days of the coup, on March 2, Grupo M workers demonstrating at the plant saw “rebel” troops roll into town. The “rebels” beat, threatened and handcuffed the workers before forcing most of them back to work, all except the 34 unionists who had already been fired. The workers had been protesting the illegal firing of these 34 employees for union activity, when management called the “rebels” to town.
“FRAPH is back,” proclaimed the putschist troops, referring to the notorious US-backed death squads, in turn composed largely of army veterans from the bloody years of US-backed Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier and his equally vicious son Jean Claude. The Duvaliers had broken the Haitian union movement, introduced foreign-owned assembly-for-export plants (“maquiladores”), kept wages low, and ruled through terror from 1957 until 1986, when the younger Duvalier was ousted by a grassroots democratic movement led in part by a Catholic priest named Bertrand Aristide.
Four years later Aristide was elected president, and workers began to form unions again. But a US-supported Duvalierist coup overthrew Aristide within the year, and for the next three years, FRAPH was the driving force behind a bloody repression that drove the unions underground and massacred much of the country’s democratic and human rights activists.
Thousands fled Haiti to Florida, where the first Bush Administration, in direct violation of international law, captured the refugees and returned them to face the Duvalierist machete. Candidate Bill Clinton harshly criticized the policy and promised to reverse it, a promise he broke as soon as he took the oath of office. The Clinton Administration also continued the brutal interment of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in open-air cages infested with rats, where US troops beat and tortured prisoners and fed them rotten food containing maggots.
When the Clinton Administration finally returned Aristide to power, it did so reluctantly, after much international pressure, and only on the condition that Aristide give up much of the reformist platform that got him elected. One of the concessions the US demanded was the establishment of “free trade zones,” such as the one at Codevi, where workers would be especially vulnerable to the ravages of corporate investors.
Working conditions in Haiti are desperate at best, but since the coup the violence that workers experienced at Grupo M has all but become a model for worker discipline. Factory owners and big landowners, called “grandons,” all around Haiti have reportedly been calling in the troops to repress their factory workers, sharecroppers and farmworkers. Many other workers are simply terrified by the blatant thuggery of the US-supported troops. When the “rebels” took Port-au-Prince at the end of February, they immediately showed they meant business, locking a group of Aristide supporters in a shipping container and tipping them into the sea.
Vigilance
Meanwhile Grupo M workers are in a unique position to call on international psolidarity. Levi Strauss has a Code of Conduct, which requires its subcontractors to respect workers’ rights, adopted as a result of the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s. The Grupo M factory had been built with a $2 million loan from the World Bank in 2003, conditional on respect for the workers’ right to organize a union. The union rights provision was itself a result of an earlier campaign organized by the most active Haitian union federation Batay Ouvriye (“Workers’ Struggle”), with which the Grupo M unionists are affiliated.
When the troops started beating up workers at Grupo M, the union called on international allies to remind Levi Strauss and the World Bank of their obligations. Thousands did. And management at Grupo M did agree to take back all the fired workers. The celebration was reportedly delirious.
The fire under them removed, however, Grupo M immediately began to play games again. First they announced that the fired workers were to come to a meeting in three weeks instead of returning to work right away. Then management met to receive the union’s demands, which they already had. Then they met again with their employees but refused to allow Batay Ouvriye’s delegate to attend.
Meanwhile, conditions in the plant took a turn for the worst. Supervisors threatened workers, changed work rules and began injecting them with unspecified “vaccinations,” which the workers feared were sterilizations. Nine women had miscarriages in their third trimester of pregnancy following the injections.
Finally on June 2, when management’s representative failed to show up for a planned meeting even though he was seen in the building, the workers voted to strike. The next morning, every Grupo M worker walked off the job. Management was sputtering, demanding to meet with union representatives of its won choosing, a violation of Haitian law, insisting on a list of union members, which is also illegal, and finally threatening to close the plant.
Apparently remembering their modus operandi, management summoned four women inside, where armed Dominican guards stripped them of their work uniform shirts and badges, and questioned them topless.
Outside, the strikers began clamoring for these workers’ release. The women were allowed to clothe themselves, but soon a truckload of Dominican soldiers pulled up and forced the workers back. Workers say these guards also beat a woman who was four months pregnant and threw her into a mud puddle.
By June 8, management had agreed to negotiate with the union and the workers agreed to return to work. However, when the workers arrived at the plant the next morning at 5:30 a.m., they discovered that management had betrayed them again. They were locked out.
Yet the workers have not given up, hopeless as the situation may appear. They are, after all, in a better position than most Haitian workers. In fact, since there are only about 100,000 full-time permanent jobs for Haiti’s 8 million citizens, the Grupo M workers are in a better position to fight than almost all Haitians. In part this is why they must fight, and why Batay Ouvriye calls on “all workers and progressives” to unite against the “international multicorporate world of today.”
“We would like to encourage the people in the United States to remain concerned about what is happening in Haiti,” says Jannick Etienne, “not to be taken in neither by mainstream media, nor by other medias placing specific political interest above what is happening to the popular masses on a daily basis. We hope they will continue to follow the events, take contact with us and fight with us as they can for our common interests.” |
See also:
http://www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org
http://www.laborstart.org
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
