Five years after the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, workers are still struggling to pay for transportation, food and housing, as the cost of living rises exponentially while wages fail to keep pace, writes the Solidarity Center’s Tula Connell.
In a major victory for Cambodian garment workers and their allies last year European brands, including H&M and Zara, pledged a pay increase for garment workers at supplier factories. David Welsh, director of Solidarity Center programs in Cambodia, together with Cambodian factory workers are calling for American brands to follow suit.
Earl Brown, labor lawyer and China program director at the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, argued that “social auditing is like staging Shakespeare’s Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.”
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 Solidarity Center estimates a living wage in Port-au-Prince is about $28 a day.
Labor ministers from Gulf and Asian countries meeting on November 26 and 27, 2014, should improve labor law protection, reform abusive immigration policies and increase dialogue with trade unions and nongovernmental groups, 90 human rights organizations and unions (among them, the Solidarity Center) said in a written statement.
“It’s not just increasing the monetary amount of the minimum wage, but looking at subsidizing where most of those expenses go to, and, currently, most of those expenses go to sub-standard housing and food for sub-standard nutrition that’s provided to workers,” said David Welsh, Solidarity Center Cambodia program director.