Les employés de Gildan en Haïti et au Honduras se plaignent des bas salaires

Publié par siel sur 29 Novembre 2014, 09:03am

Gildan workers in Haiti, Honduras complain of harassment, pay too meagre to live on

To survive in the rag trade, Montreal's Gildan Activewear scoured the Caribbean for cheap labour. Now, as a not-really-Canadian company, it pays no corporate income tax and enjoys a soaring stock ...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/do-you-know-where-your-t-shirt-came-from/article21818609/

The quest for lower costs eventually brought Gildan to Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti has a GDP per capita of $1,300 (U.S.) a year, and by some estimates nearly 80% of its 10.3 million citizens live on $2 (U.S.) or less per day. The country has been devastated by colonization, environmental degradation, resource depletion, dictatorships, foreign invasions, hurricanes, coups d’état, an unscrupulous oligarchy, and finally an earthquake that killed 220,000 people in 2010.

In Port-au-Prince, the signs of a society teetering on the brink are glaring: Sidewalks are packed with people out of work, selling anything they can find. Shantytowns teem with people living in tin-roofed shacks. The high unemployment benefits employers, say activists. “It’s worse than slavery,” maintains Jean Bonald Golinsky Fatal, a union leader. “The slave owners had obligations to feed and clothe the slaves. Here you don’t have to do that.…The employer uses the extreme poverty and unemployment in Haiti because they know other workers will take the wage.”

Gildan opened three factories in Haiti starting in 2004. By 2009, it had sold them and begun contracting production to suppliers to have sewing assembly done in local factories. A key supplier is the Apaid family, led by André Apaid Jr. The Apaids’ factories also contract with Gildan’s competitor, Hanes, while the clothing of another rival, Fruit of the Loom, is also produced in Port-au-Prince. At least two Apaid factories—named Premium and Genesis—assemble clothes for Gildan. The family’s GMC factory has also done Gildan work.

The Apaid family is controversial due to its support for dictator Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, its opposition to the governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and for lobbying against increases in the minimum wage (the Apaids backed the 2004 coup that removed Aristide from power, at a time when the minimum wage was a pivotal national issue). “They’re tough,” declares Yannik Etienne, spokesperson for the Haitian workers’ federation, ESPM-BO. “They have their own rules and are very authoritarian.”

In 2009, the Better Work program, run by the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corp. and the International Labour Organization (ILO), began producing surveys on wages and working conditions in Haiti’s apparel factories, including those supplying Gildan. In Haiti, the minimum wage has been, until this year, 200 gourdes a day (or $4.92), and 300 gourdes for piecework ($7.48). (The basic rate rose to 225 gourdes, or $5.61, this year.) In contrast, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center estimates a living wage in Port-au-Prince is about $28 a day. Two Better Work surveys conducted in 2013 revealed that none of the Haitian apparel factories were paying their entire workforces as much as 300 gourdes, even though most employees are doing piecework. “Gildan has been aware of these violations for years,” says Scott Nova of the WRC.

The Clobe and Mail

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Les employés de Gildan en Haïti et au Honduras se plaignent des bas salaires

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