Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

During a recent visit to Haiti, I met a woman who's been on the assembly line for four years. Her name is Paulette Dorval, and she works 10 hours a day, six days a week. She has four children, but she's had to send three of them away to live with her mother. Every two weeks, she gets a pay envelope with 840 Haitian gourdes—that’s 22 dollars and 63 cents Canadian. That's 18 cents an hour. On the day I met her, Paulette said she wasn't having any dinner. She'd spent the last few pennies on the bus ride home from work.

Koreans own the factory she works in, but nationality has nothing to do with the exploitation of garment workers in Haiti. The French owner of a t-shirt factory in Port au Prince threatened to shut his factory down, and lay off hundreds of workers, if the minimum wage was raised to $5 a day. He meant it. And an executive of a Montreal company, Gildan Activewear, that buys a lot of its leisure wear in Haiti justified the country’s pay rates by saying you have to look at the question of Haiti's minimum wage in an "holistic" way. That’s the word she used. Holistic.

Gildan says everything costs more in Haiti: electricity, transportation, fuel, building expenses. There's also the cost of insecurity and rampant corruption. The argument is that if manufacturers had to pay their workers a better wage, a living wage, say $5 a day, they simply couldn't compete. In other words, it comes down to a choice between profitability, and Paulette Dorval eating dinner every day. There is no middle ground.

— "Minimum Wage, Maximum Outrage"