Avi Lewis writes:
"I got back from Haiti a week ago, with my team from Al Jazeera English TV. We looked at the grand schemes being advanced for rebuilding the country, and found a familiar model of exploiting cheap labour for export industries. Traveling to the countryside, we also found longstanding alternatives on a more bottom-up model, like those pioneered by Paul Farmer and Partners in Health. As my partner Naomi Klein just wrote in The Nation [2], the Haitians in this piece are full of ideas on how to rebuild their country. They are not the passive victims we see on so many other networks. Here's our documentary, Haiti: The Politics of Rebuilding, produced by Andrea Schmidt."
Links:
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuUt12usDVs&feature=player_embedded#
[2] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/klein
[3] http://rabble.ca/print/rabbletv/program-guide/2010/02/best-net/avi-lewis-documentary-haiti-politics-rebuilding-haiti#comment-1116409
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29collier.html
[5] http://rabble.ca/user
[6] http://rabble.ca/user/register
Here's what imperialism has in mind for the "rebuilding" of Haiti's economy:
Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca leans forward and guides a piece of suit-jacket wool and its silky lining into a sewing machine, where - bat! bat! bat! - they're bound together to be hemmed.
If she does this for eight hours, she will earn $3.09. Her boss will ship the pinstriped suit she helped make to the United States, tariff-free. There a shopper will buy it from JoS. A. Bank Clothiers for $550.
In the quest to rebuild Haiti, the international community and business leaders are dusting off a pre-quake plan to expand its low-wage garment assembly industry as a linchpin of recovery. President Barack Obama's administration is on board, encouraging U.S. retailers to obtain from Haiti at least 1 per cent of the clothes they sell....
Few Haitians have steady incomes, and unemployment is unmeasurable; before the quake it was estimated at between 60 and 80 per cent. In cities, most scrape by selling in the streets, doing odd jobs or relying on remittances from abroad that make up a quarter of Haiti's $7 billion gross domestic product.
Garments are central to the economic growth plan commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last year, a 19-page report written by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier and promoted by former President Bill Clinton as special envoy to the impoverished nation.
They say the sector could quickly produce hundreds of thousands of jobs thanks chiefly to two things: an existing preferential trade deal with the nearby United States, and cheap Haitian labour.
The deal is the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, or "HOPE II." Passed by the U.S. Congress in 2008, it lets Haiti export textiles duty-free to the U.S. for a decade. Last year, $513 million worth of Haitian-made apparel, the bulk of exports, was shipped with labels including Hanes and New Balance. Factory profit margins average about 22 per cent, according to Washington-based Nathan Associates Inc....
It was HOPE II that persuaded the bosses to move their Dominican plant and rename it DKDR Haiti SA. Nearly all the 1,200 people still working there after the quake make the new "outsourcing" minimum wage of 125 gourdes a day, about $3.09 - approximately the same as the minimum wage in 1984 and worth less than half its previous purchasing power.
Pay was even lower last year when lawmakers raised the country's minimum from $1.72 a day to almost $5 in response to protests. But owners complained, and President Rene Preval refused to enact the law. A compromise allowed non-garment workers to receive the higher minimum, but stuck factory workers with the "outsourcing" wage.
DKDR complied but cut production-based incentives, according to general manager Chun Ho Lee. Producing 600 pieces in a day used to yield a worker a bonus of $2.47. Now it's worth $1.23....
All sides agree that garment-industry wages are too low to feed, clothe and house workers and their families. Even factory owners acknowledge that reality - though they deny running sweatshops...
In a recent opinion piece [4] published in The New York Times, Collier likened the moment to the opening of the American West: "The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti."