22351: Simidor Re: 22340: Durban: on the Grupo M plant Closing (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>

Durban is unfair to both Arthur and the Batay Ouvriye labor organization.  To organize for better conditions in the Grupo M sweatshops in the free trade zone alongside the border is not to be “against factory work in Haiti.”  Unless Durban is making the case that only sweatshop work is profitable factory work in Haiti, without the faintest hope of a living wage ever, anywhere on the horizon.

I’ve read several Batay Ouvriye reports on their struggles against Grupo M lawlessness in the free trade zone.  The latest details how factory managers treat the workers as if they were in a prison camp, and  how they have even called on the Dominican army to repress the workers in the plants, even though the latter are on Haitian soil.

Instead of playing games and threatening to quit, Grupo M should clean up their act.  The letter by Neil Kearney, General Secretary of the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation, to Grupo M’s CEO (post #22339), makes a good case as to why the company should “deal urgently with the very serious problems that have arisen.”  Some of the problems listed are rather shocking: workers receiving unspecified injections; women workers suffering miscarriages; workers held in “dark rooms;” workers threatened at gun point by Dominican guards; women workers stripped of their work shirts, and one pregnant woman knocked to the ground.

I’m sorry that workers may be losing their jobs, but I wouldn’t be sorry to see Grupo M get the hell out of Haiti.  It was a lousy deal that let them in, in the first place – Aristide’s selling out of the Haitian quota on the US market to the Dominicans, and the ruin of the Maribahoux plain, cemented over for what?  And now the arrogant bosses are throwing a tantrum because the workers want to be treated like human beings?

Daniel Simidor