23227: radtimes: Slave Labour Along the Massacre River (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Slave Labour Along the Massacre River

By Maurice Lemoine

Le Monde diplomatique, September 2004

http://mondediplo.com/2004/09/10ouanaminthe

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."

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