23207: Esser: Slave Labour Along The Massacre River (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser <torx@joimail.com>

Slave Labour Along The Massacre River
by Maurice Lemoine

Le Monde Diplomatique
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/

September 20, 2004

The Massacre river in northern Hispaniola divides the Dominican
Republic and Haiti. It is crossed by a crumbling bridge, with
Ouanaminthe, Haiti, on one side and Dajabón, Dominican Republic, on
the other. In 2002 Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government announced the
creation of a free trade zone in Ouanaminthe. The proposal was
fiercely resisted by local landowners, tenant farmers and
agricultural labourers, who were promised compensation but have
received none. But resistance was impossible: the tractors that tore
up the crops were accompanied by armed guards, leaving the farmers
helpless, homeless victims.

The Dominican investor was clothing subcontractor Grupo M, the
largest employer in the Dominican Republic, with 12,000 workers in
its factories and a reputation for treating them brutally and
ignoring union rights and regulations. The World Bank’s International
Finance Corporation, possibly unaware of the malpractice, provided a
loan of $20m for Grupo M to set up in Ouanaminthe. We may presume
that Aristide was better informed about Grupo M’s nature: on 8 April
2003, when he came to lay the foundation stone with the Dominican
president, Hippólito Mejía, he did so in secret. Haitians only heard
about it the day after, in the Dominican press.

In August 2003 Grupo M opened two facilities in the new free trade
zone, employing around 1,000 workers. The Codevi factory produces
Levis 505s and 555s jeans while the MD factory makes T-shirts, all
exported via the Dominican Republic.

Grupo M’s Haitian employees were made to work at high speed for long
hours in terrible conditions and paid a pittance. They soon
protested: on 13 October 2003 the Codevi Workers Union (Sokowa in
Creole) was created in Ouanaminthe and affiliated to Batay Ouvriyé,
Haiti’s worker support organisation. On 2 March 2004, with the
country in a power vacuum following Aristide’s departure, Grupo M
fired 34 union members, with militiamen from northern Haiti’s "rebel
army" on hand to crush resistance.

On 13 April, after tough negotiations attended by representatives
from the World Bank, Levi-Strauss & Co, and a tripartite commission
from the new Haitian government, Grupo M agreed to reinstate the 34
workers. But, as Yannick Etienne of Batay Ouvriyé explains: "They
forgot that there was also an agreement to let the union negotiate a
new factory-wide contract."

A new contract was urgently needed. Codevi employees were being made
to work from Monday to Saturday, often doing 55 hours instead of the
official 48, with no overtime money. "You can’t ask questions,"says
Etienne. "If you do, they put your name down so they can fire you."
Recalcitrants were called into the back room: "You’re locked in there
for hours, guarded by armed thugs. They put the air conditioning on
full blast to make it uncomfortable." Female workers are given a
mysterious injected "vaccination" every two months and many have
complained of irregular and unnaturally long periods; there has been
an abnormally high rate of unexplained miscarriages among Codevi
workers.

Sokowa continued to campaign for a new contract and on 7 June staged
a half-hour work stoppage. On 8 June 40 heavily armed soldiers from
the Dominican Republic arrived (on Haitian territory) to beat the
workers. A 24-hour strike followed and Grupo M bosses closed the
factory, illegally locking out its employees; 370 were laid off 48
hours later when the plant reopened.

Since then the workload has increased further. Workers were expected
to produce 1,000 pairs of jeans a day. They are now required to turn
out 1,300 for 1,300 gourdes ($37) a week. "No one can meet these
targets," says Etienne, "and you only get 432 gourdes ($12) if you
don’t manage it."

While Dominican soldiers, now in plain clothes, continue to enforce
order, Grupo M’s chief executive officer, Fernando Capellán, has
threatened to relocate. "We don’t believe the factories will close,"
says Etienne, "but the threat is a clear signal that this is war."
Batay Ouvriyé has fought tough battles before - it rose up in 1995
against the Walt Disney Corporation’s Haitian subcontractors and the
Association of Haitian Industrialists (ADHI). Capellán, a Dominican,
is a member of the ADHI. Etienne is suspicious: "I think the
Dominican and Haitian bosses want to work together to get rid of our
young union and remove all workers’ rights to ensure maximum
exploitation."
.