Despite the efforts of the Parliament of Haiti to increase the minimum wage for workers to $6.00 per day, Haiti’s President Rene Preval has refused to permit the wage increase on the basis that garment workers should not receive more than $3.00 per day maximum.
Preval says that this will ensure garment factories operate profitably regardless of the workers inability to survive on such wages. Even though the United States permits the duty-free import of Haitian garments to support the industry, Preval wants to maintain local profitability for the factories, which employ about 200,000 Haitians in total.
Thousands of workers have formed massive protests outside the Parliament building and local police have staged defensive lines to maintain crowd control. Workers complain that they cannot survive on the $2.00 per day salary allowed garment workers and that their families are suffering as a result.
“We cannot feed our children for $2.00 per day, we cannot buy them school supplies, we cannot even pay the school fees. This prevents us from sending our children to school. What are we to do, allow our children to be ignorant and oppressed?”
The standard of education for those children that are able to attend school is very high by any measure. In fact, Haitian children are better educated than American children despite Haiti’s unrelenting poverty. To Haitian parents the thought that their children will be denied an education because President Preval prefers profits is abhorrent. While the protests are without violence thus far it is likely that will change soon.
The problem for President Preval is the probability that the garment manufacturers will organize political opposition against him if he allows the wage increase; a similar event caused the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.
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