Interview with Batay Ouvriye —Sweatshop organizers in Haiti

The interview below, by Socialist Action reporter Marty Goodman, is with a long-time supporter of Haiti's Batay Ouvriye, living in New York City. Batay Ouvriye has played a prominent role in organizing sweatshop workers in Haiti. It also organizes around peasant and women's issues. Batay Ouvriye opposes all forms of foreign intervention in Haiti. The interview was conducted via e-mail. For more information on Batay Ouvriye, you can visit its website at www.BatayOuvriye.org. Please note that the important fight to reinstate fired sweatshop workers in the city of Oanaminthe referred to in this interview was won. Visit the Batay Ouvriye website for details.

Socialist Action: Batay Ouvriye has gained much respect in Haiti as a fighting workers’ organization. Can you describe the organization's goals and purpose?

Answer: Batay Ouvriye means the fight of workers. One could just say "worker's struggle" but the Creole meaning puts a greater emphasis on the actual battle, the active struggle.

Batay Ouvriye is a grassroots workers’ movement which arose out of years of underground organizing against sweatshops in the assembly factories in Haiti, and took on its name in 1994 with the opening of a workers’ organizing center in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.

But the organizing spread fairly quickly into all the areas of popular struggle, popular resistance, so that Batay Ouvriye became and is today a movement which is an instrument of organized struggle of all the popular classes in Haiti, the oppressed, the dispossessed, and the exploited. Batay Ouvriye aims to foster the people's struggles as a means of popular empowerment, and through the organization of these struggles, to promote the unity of the popular masses around their concrete demands.

The main organizing principles around which these struggles are built are that people come together around their concrete demands, organize themselves democratically, determine themselves how to push for their demands, and what tactics and strategies to adopt.

Batay Ouvriye also promotes the active leadership of the working class through the actual participation of workers in all areas of popular struggles.

Batay Ouvriye is unaffiliated with any electoral party and recognizes the need for a radical change in the state, the traditional state being a tool of the exploiting classes in their domination of the popular masses.

Batay Ouvriye, as a movement of broad autonomous mass struggle, relies fundamentally on the will of the masses to pursue their struggles without compromise, without collaboration.

In May of 2002, the Batay Ouvriye Federation was founded, uniting a number of autonomous trade unions and workers organizations.

SA: What are conditions like for workers in Haiti today?

Answer: The minimum wage for workers is 72 gourdes a day for a 48-hour week, or about $1.50 a day. Under the Duvalier dictatorship workers were paid $2.40 a day in 1980 dollars. That means that under the dictatorship workers were paid more than twice what they were paid under Aristide.

Aristide's last presidential minimum wage adjustment for inflation was to raise it up from 36 to 72 gourdes. That nominal increase did not even come close to half of the increase in the cost of living due to inflation since 1995, the year of Aristide's previous increase.

Increases in the minimum wage, which was never a living wage to begin with, is required by Haitian law. Both of Aristide's increases were well below the legally required rate. Even dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier implemented the minimum wage law.

People in the U.S. may think the cost of living is less in Haiti, but it's not. For example, a lot of basic foodstuffs are imported from the U.S. In "normal" times there are about 40,000 workers in the assembly sector, mostly in Port-au-Prince. But there are also "Free Trade Zones," the majority of which are along the Haiti-Dominican border. Dominican businesses use Haitian sweatshop labor to meet the quota of the U.S.-brokered Caribbean Basin Initiative accord and expand their assembly plants.

Working conditions in Haiti are deplorable. In the sweatshop assembly sector workers are forced to work in tremendous heat and lack sanitary facilities.

They are harassed constantly and treated with no respect and fired at the whim of management with complete impunity.

The Department of Social Services, Haiti's equivalent of the U.S. Department of Labor, turns a blind eye to these injustices and often colludes with factory owners. This is particularly true where you organize uniform unions. Union officers have to file their names with the labor department. The list is immediately turned over to management and they are fired.

Conditions within the Free Trade Zone have been denounced as virtual slave labor by labor activists. Abuse is rampant. The sweatshops run by Dominican owners have a history of racial oppression, and in the Free Trade Zones its like hell getting worse.

Right now in the Free Trade Zone, rebel forces are being paid to crush workers in a factory in Oanaminthe. Levi-Strauss management at a factory that makes 509 jeans in Oanaminthe decided to cut orders because production was low, they said.

One morning they had a meeting with workers whom they told they were going to suspend. In the afternoon, when workers were going to leave, they called them by name and asked them to go to a meeting. Once they got there they found Dominican guards and Haitian military guards with arms, asking workers to give them their badges. Without badges you cannot get into the Free Trade Zones.

Some of the workers refused and were beaten. Then they took their badges.

That day they fired about 34 people.

The next morning the fired workers tried to start an action and asked fellow workers to join them. Thugs were paid $2000 to fight the workers that fought back. The workers there are still fighting against the firings and demand that all 34 workers be rehired.

The attempt to break organizing drives like this one could only have happened with the Lavalas government's criminal negligence and impunity towards violations of the labor code. As a result management has been able to break a lot of unions in the assembly sector. Overall, the percentage of organized workers in the assembly industries is low.

SA: How does BO see the current occupation?

Answer: Since the early ’80s, throughout the decline of the murderous Duvalier dictatorship, there has been a complex of intertwined crises developing in Haiti. Underlying these crises has been the continuing and deepening economic degradation of practically all the productive sectors of the Haitian economy and the evident inability of the ruling classes and/or the imperialists to forestall this degradation.

The struggle between factions of the ruling classes, spurred by the onslaught of corporate globalization and New World Order imperialist policies, has led to a continuing crisis of the state, a continuing struggle between these various factions to maintain or establish their hegemony, and a continuing failure to maintain the "legitimacy" of the state.

It is in that context that one can best understand the current occupation as part of a continuing process of imperialist penetration and domination, coupled with the continuing and deepening subservience of the Haitian ruling classes to imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism.

Haitians often say that Haiti has been under occupation all along, since U.S. marines first invaded on July 28, 1915. It's only sometimes more apparent than others. But military occupation is particularly vile, particularly repressive, and singularly objectionable.

Nonetheless, the policies pursued by all the ruling classes, all the Haitian governments, have contributed to the gradual erosion of the sovereignty of Haiti.

The Duvaliers and/or the juntas which followed their fall signed accords granting the Dominican Republic the right to intervene to quell uprisings in Haiti and to provide a Haitian immigrant labor force for the virtual slave-labor camps in the Dominican sugar-cane fields. They also granted the U.S. the right to patrol Haitian waters, Haitian airspace, and to turn back Haitian vessels.

Haitian territory has been ceded to the U.S. (the Navase Islands), foreign companies have taken over some areas and made them off limits to Haitian citizens (Labadi, in the north of Haiti), and there has been an ongoing plot to turn the Mol Saint Nicolas into a U.S. military base.

The Lavalas government, after having been ousted by a U.S.-sponsored coup (1991), is singularly responsible and historically accountable for setting the precedent of justifying foreign intervention, particularly U.S. intervention. The return of Aristide under U.S./UN occupation was a furtherance of this process of placing Haiti gradually under U.S. imperialist tutelage.

The policies pursued by various Lavalas administrations have greatly contributed to this—from their complete dependence on "foreign aid," facilitating the penetration of by non-Haitian sponsored NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), to their capitulation to the demands of the structural-adjustment policies of the IMF, to the Free Trade Zones established to grant foreign corporations unequaled and unimpeded access to the super-exploitation of the Haitian labor force, to the accords signed with the OAS granting international institutions oversight into the resolution of political conflicts in Haiti.

The current U.S.-led intervention in Haiti was first called for by the Lavalas government, desperately seeking a way to stay in power by any concession necessary. But the U.S. had more servile lackeys in mind and thus ousted Aristide's regime, while taking advantage of the invitation to intervene.

It has always been up to the people to stand up against the selling out of the Haitian ruling classes, and to this day the struggle of the Haitian popular masses remains the only way to reclaim Haiti's sovereignty.

Certainly, the road ahead is more dangerous, and the struggles are harder, but the "paper tiger" surely will not prevail against the united will of the people.

The article above first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.