Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Feb. 27—For more than three weeks, thousands of workers and subcontractors in the SONAPI (National Industrial Park Company) “free trade zone,” accompanied by workers from other sectors and students, have taken to the streets here to say that they can no longer live on the poverty wages paid by the bosses. The workers are demanding an increase to the minimum wage and better working conditions, including an end to the special exploitation of women workers. U.S. and local bosses—Dominican and Haitian alike—profit exponentially off of the national barriers that separate workers from uniting together against their unsustainable working conditions. Our Party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP), continues to support the workers in their immediate demands, marching alongside them in the streets and engaging in discussions about the need to build a revolutionary communist party that will lead workers around the world to throw off the chains of racist capitalist exploitation.
Women in the garment industry help lead the fight
The protesting workers are undeterred by the generalized wave of terror in Haiti unleashed by gangs and kidnappers paid by the bosses (far better than workers are paid). They are also undeterred by the police, armed agents of the State, with their tear gas, beatings, and bullets (a journalist was killed and three workers savagely beaten, including a pregnant woman on 2/23). Recently they disrupted traffic on the “airport road” (leading to the capital’s busy international airport) where the majority of subcontracting factories are concentrated—the center of exploitation of modern capitalism. More than 10,000 workers, mainly women, toil here in garment and small parts sweatshops owned by foreign capital and sustained by the Haitian bourgeoisie. Throughout Haiti, there are 50,000 – 80,000 workers in these sweatshops.
The workers are demanding an increase from 500 HTG (Haitian gourdes, US$4.17) per day to 1,500HTG (US$12.50) per day. Yet even this is insufficient. According to the U.S.-based Solidarity Center in 2019, a family of four (2 parents, 2 children) would need 1,750HTG (US$17.50) per day for the bare minimum. In 2021 money, that family would need 2,500HTG (US$21) per day (AyitiKonpeFache, chronicle #2). The government did offer a pittance this week; garment workers, for example, would receive 685HTG/day, (US$6.65) (Le Moniteur, 2/21). The workers won’t accept that and a sharper struggle is anticipated in the coming days.
According to Section 137 of the Labor Code, each time inflation increases by more than 10 percent, the minimum wage must also increase. The current inflation rate is over 20 percent, yet the law remains unenforced because, as everyone knows, the capitalists own the State. The gang-up by State inaction and CSS slowness (Superior Council of Salaries, which publishes the guide to wages for different job categories) to decide on an increase in the minimum wage, and violent police repression makes it clear to workers that these forces work for the capitalist class, the enemy of all workers.
In a glaring contradiction, however, Réginald Boulos, a major player in the Haitian bourgeoisie, is for an increase in the minimum wage because he sells commodities locally (groceries, cars, etc) and he wants people to have money to spend that will go directly into his pocket. In addition, the imperialists play a big role in keeping the workers’ wages low: a coup d’état against the Lavalas government in 1991 when it proposed adjusting the minimum wage; USAID spent a reported $26 million to block another increase in 1996, just to mention a few instances.
H.O.P.E. law starves Dominican and Haitian workers alike
Garment and assembly shops here function under the U.S. government’s HOPE (Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement) law, which benefits U.S. bosses by reducing or eliminating import and export taxes (raw materials and parts imported, finished goods exported). HOPE provides quotas for commodities produced, so when the bosses of Grupo M in neighboring Dominican Republic, for example, use up their quotas, they open factories in Haiti. Thus, low-wage Dominican workers (US$17/day) and even lower-wage Haitian workers (US$4.17/day) are exploited by the very same bosses—what better cause to build international solidarity!
This fight of the workers to improve their standard of living, essentially to take back from the bosses some of the value that they create through their labor, is unending. As soon as the bosses are forced by class struggle to give workers more, workers find that inflation has eaten up their increases. We have to raise workers’ class consciousness, to see themselves as part of an international class with the same interests as workers everywhere, from the Dominican Republic and beyond. Only when we get off this merry-go-round of intense fightback for paltry reforms can we really be liberated from capitalist misery. Workers of the world, unite: we have nothing to lose but our chains. Join us.