Monday, June 6, 2011

A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down

Click here to access article by Ryan Chittum from Columbia Journalism Review.

This article illustrates why WikiLeaks is such a problem for the US ruling class. The leaks reveal to US citizens the dirty details of the ongoing class war against all working people everywhere. The targeted group in this example are Haitian workers.
Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved.