Haitian Textile Workers and Malnutrition--How they are Related--June 2021

Photo by John Carroll

The slender mother sat right in front of me in the pediatric clinic holding her little one-year-old girl who appeared malnourished.

I examined the baby and told mom that the baby could enter our malnutrition clinic run by the Daughters of Charity. Her baby would receive two hot meals per day, a bath, and be allowed to take a nap before returning to their shack in the slum.  

The only catch was that mother--and no one else besides mother--would need to bring the child each day Monday through Friday to the clinic.  

Mother thought about this briefly and then looked at me and said that this could not happen because she worked in one of the businesses on Airport Road and she could not give up her salary for her malnourished child because so many others in her shack were dependent on her income. 

Mother was making 3 dollars for her eight-hour workday. And she was "triaging" the best she knew. 

I felt very bad about this scenario where this mother had to choose between the two bad decisions I had offered. But this was life in Haiti. 

In 2010, Wikileaks exposed secret US State Department cables from the American Embassy in Port au Prince. Factory owners in Port au Prince had told Haitian Parliament that they were willing to increase their workers' hourly rate by 9 cents so the workers would make 31 cents per hour to make t-shirts, bras, and underwear for multinational businesses like Hanes, Dockers, and Nautica. They were ok with paying their workers about 3 dollars per day but refused the 62 cents per hour (about 5 dollars per day) that the Haitian Parliament requested in June 2009. 

The US State Department worked with President Preval to keep the minimum wage at 3 dollars per day for the textile workers of Haiti "to keep the political environment from spinning out of control." And President Preval, while revealing some nervous body language, said he did not want to lose textile jobs in Haiti if the companies moved away due to wage increases for their employees.

From Haiti-Now.org:

But was the State Department right in opposing the increase?

“I have no idea what would happen if Haiti did have a $5-a-day minimum wage,” Adam Davidson of NPR’s Planet Money said in 2011. “But I do think it’s reasonable to assume that some factories would close and far fewer new ones would be built. Far fewer Haitians would be allowed to take that first tentative step on to the ladder of industrial development.”

As the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives put it in a press release in June 2009, “Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs. In every case, it was a lie.” (ADIH is the Association of Haitian Industry which has textile industry representatives.)

From The Nation-- June 1, 2011:

In an emailed statement, the State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on documents that purport to contain classified information and stating that it “strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information.” However, the State Department spokesperson added in the email: “In Haiti, approximately 80 percent of the population is unemployed and 78 percent earns less than $1 per day”— actually, according to the UN Development Program, 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day—and “the US government is working with the government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry and invest in agriculture and beyond.”

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With these Haitian wages, companies with factories in other Central American countries had the "competitive advantage." For example, if their workers in Mexico wanted a pay raise, the companies could always threaten to move to Haiti where Haitian workers worked for less while doing the same work. 

Policies made on top, whether good or bad, dramatically affect the lives of people on the bottom. And with my little family from the slum, they help determine who gets enough to eat and who does not. 

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org