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David: Hey, a new Wikileaks document says that the U.S. fought to lower the minimum
wage in Haiti. Hanes and Levi's both do a lot of production in Haiti, and this week,
Wikileaks posted, it was published on "The Nation", then the article was taken down due
to an embargo, but it was still excerpted in other places, including the "Columbia Journalism
Review". It shows that the Obama administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an
hour.
OK, seems a little low. Let's look into it. This all started when Haiti passed a law two
years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. And according to this embassy cable
that has been released by Wikileaks, this infuriated American corprations like Hanes
and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians literally slave wages to sew their clothes. They said
they would work... they would only fork over a 7-cent-an-hour increase, then they got the
State Department involved. U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti's president, which carved
out a $3-a-day minimum wage for textile companies.
Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers, if you pay each of them two bucks a day more,
it would cost about $50,000 a day, or $12.5 million a year. To give you some comparison
numbers, Louis, as of last year, Hanes had 3200 Haitians making T-shirts for them, you
pay them each an extra two bucks a day, it's about $1.6 million a year. Hanes made about
$211 million in profit on $4.3 billion in sales last year, so we're talking about pennies,
we're talking about, as usual, a drop in the bucket here. So thanks to U.S. intervention,
the minimum was raised only to 31 cents. Any surprise on this?
Louis: Not at all.
David: I'm just not surprised. For all of the positive things that I've seen Barack
Obama and his administration do, and there are many, there at least several...
Louis: Yeah. But here is just another example of the corporate domination.
David: That's right. And this even shows much more directly that while there are differences
on many social political issues that we can find between Republicans and Democrats, on
the whole, American White Houses are basically controlled and subject to the whims of large
corporations, you can buy and sell just about anything in this country, I would probably
say anything, except I'm just hedging slightly in case there's something you can't yet buy
and sell. I don't know what it would be.
Louis: Honesty?
[Laughter]
David: That's a good... that's a good oxymoron. So that's what's going on there. I'm just
not surprised at all. What can people do about this? I don't know, especially in the U.S.,
like I said, $4.3 billion in sales, it's hard for the few that would be willing to boycott
a company like Hanes to really effect change.
Louis: It's Haiti that has to do something about it.
David: That... exactly. You're probably right, except...
Louis: But they're in a situation, I mean, we... the U.S. makes it so that it's almost
impossible for them to change anything about it.
David: They need... what, are they going to lose the business altogether?
Louis: Are they going to boycott? Right, are these people who need this money desperately
going to take even one day off? No, they're not. They cant.
David: No, absolutely. The other thing is, we can kind of... I don't want to go overboard
and say this really depends on Haiti, because Haiti actually did want to raise the minimum
wage, but it was the U.S. State Department that got involved to prevent it. So we could
say well, Haiti should've done more, but I think that really, on this one, it's an American
company, it's the U.S. State Department getting involved.
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