by Beverly Bell, Alexis Erkert, and Deepa Panchang

May 23, 2013

Over the past few weeks in this article series, we’ve heard firsthand from Haitian garment workers about low wages, sexual abuse, labor rights violations, and work-related injuries they suffered in sweatshops.

Meanwhile, the world has watched the death toll in last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh creep to above 1,100. Global activists have joined the calls of protesting workers, ramping up pressure on clothing retailers against the regular mistreatment and deaths of workers. Slowly, the public is realizing that exploitation within the garment assembly industry is not the exception, it’s the rule. Today, we take a deep dive into the economics of this sector in Haiti to look at how it has come to be, and at what alternative pathways might look like.

Haiti Presidential Palace

In discussions among foreigners about working conditions and wages in the assembly industry, we often hear, “But Haitians need jobs. Wouldn’t things be worse without them?”

The question creates a false choice between no job and a grinding, exploitative job. Looking at the factors that led to low factory wages in the first place helps expose the myth. Western governments and their international financial institution (IFI) partners have played an active role in creating the dearth of options that exists for Haitian workers. For example, trade policies from the 1980s onward caused the decimation of the Haitian agricultural sector. Out-of-work farmers fled on masse to cities, and many had no better option but a factory job. Foreign policies imposed on the Haitian government have also contributed to a near-complete lack of public services and a weak, dependent domestic economy, which ramp up desperation; desperation, in turn, forced workers to accept the low wages.

The offshore assembly model creates a race to the bottom. In it, businesses circle the globe seeking the lowest cost of production – which involves the lowest health and safety standards and suppressed union organizing. As factories move to the next country, they create dirt-poor workers.

Despite this, governments, the UN, and the IFIs tout the garment assembly industry as a path to development in global South countries. The UN places the expansion of free trade zones (groupings of export-producing factories that enjoy tax exemptions and fewer safety, health, and environment regulations) toward the center of its development road map for Haiti. A 2009 report it commissioned argued that Haiti’s duty-free, quota-free preferential access to the American market, combined with low labor costs and a lack of protectionist policies, makes the country “the world’s safest production location for garments.” Weeks after the earthquake, that paper’s author, Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier, likened the catastrophic moment to 19^th Century development of the US West, with its “investment booms, financed by enthusiastic outsiders. The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti.”

Apparently sharing this view, four months after the earthquake the US Congress extended US trade preferences for assembled garments to Haiti in a law that was portrayed as a relief measure. Also since the earthquake, the US and other global players came up with $224 million to subsidize the development of a new free trade zone in northern Haiti, Caracol. Developers, who displaced 366 farmers from arable farmland for the project, promised more than 20,000 jobs. In actuality, fewer than 1,500 people are employed in the park; and after paying for transportation and meals, workers reportedly end each day with an average of US $1.36. More free-trade zones are in the offing.

For all the funding and attention the sector has received, the 24 factories currently making garments for export to the US employ very few people: 25,924, or approximately 0.5% of the working-age population. No matter the numbers, the industry’s contribution to the national economy is false development, said economist Camille Chalmers with the Platform to Advocate Alternative Development in Haiti. “Almost all of the primary materials used in manufacturing come from outside. When they say that Haiti exports hundreds of millions of dollars in products, a lot of that goes to [foreign companies to] pay for the inputs like cloth and equipment. Once assembled, the goods aren’t consumed in Haiti but are shipped abroad. The government doesn’t even benefit from taxes or tariffs. Haiti’s only role is as a stopover in the production process, where cheap labor keeps profit margins high.”

Haiti does need work opportunities, as any cash-desperate person there will tell you. But not at any price or under any conditions. Former factory worker Ghislene Deloné said, “It can’t be based on the exploitation of people. We need to be treated like human beings.” And Camille Chalmers said, “When we speak of employment, we have to talk about the quality of employment. [This sector] doesn’t create work that can develop our human resources or reduce poverty. These comparative advantages just reproduce misery.”

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Terracide and the Terrarists 
Destroying the Planet for Record Profits 
By Tom Engelhardt

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide.  And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide.  But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically speaking, late last night.  A possibility might be “terracide” from the Latin word for earth.  It has the right ring, given its similarity to the commonplace danger word of our era: terrorist.

The truth is, whatever we call them, it’s time to talk bluntly about the terrarists of our world.  Yes, I know, 9/11 was horrific.  Almost 3,000 dead, massive towers down, apocalyptic scenes.  And yes, when it comes to terror attacks, the Boston Marathon bombings weren’t pretty either.  But in both cases, those who committed the acts paid for or will pay for their crimes.

Global Warming

In the case of the terrarists — and here I’m referring in particular to the men who run what may be the most profitable corporations on the planet, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell – you’re the one who’s going to pay, especially your children and grandchildren. You can take one thing for granted: not a single terrarist will ever go to jail, and yet they certainly knew what they were doing.

It wasn’t that complicated. In recent years, the companies they run have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more frenetic and ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on.

How to Make Staggering Amounts of Money and Do In the Planet

None of this was exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. NASA scientist James Hansen first publicized the reality of global warming to Congress in 1988. It took a while — thanks in part to the terrarists — but the news of what was happening increasingly made it into the mainstream. Anybody could learn about it.

Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing “doubts” about the science (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes “dirtier” energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.

The peak oil people hadn’t been wrong when they suggested years ago that we would soon hit a limit in oil production from which decline would follow.  The problem was that they were focused on traditional or “conventional” liquid oil reserves obtained from large reservoirs in easy-to-reach locations on land or near to shore.  Since then, the big energy companies have invested a remarkable amount of time, money, and (if I can use that word) energy in the development of techniques that would allow them to recover previously unrecoverable reserves (sometimes by processes that themselves burn striking amounts of fossil fuels): fracking, deep-water drilling, and tar-sands production, among others.

They also began to go after huge deposits of what energy expert Michael Klare calls “extreme” or “tough” energy — oil and natural gas that can only be acquired through the application of extreme force or that requires extensive chemical treatment to be usable as a fuel.  In many cases, moreover, the supplies being acquired like heavy oil and tar sands are more carbon-rich than other fuels and emit more greenhouse gases when consumed.  These companies have even begun using climate change itself — in the form of a melting Arctic — to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies.  With the imprimatur of the Obama administration, Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been preparing to test out possible drilling techniques in the treacherous waters off Alaska.

David Koch

Amid concerns that Koch Industries could buy several major U.S. newspapers from Tribune Company, industrial billionaire David Koch was forced to step down as trustee of WNET, New York City’s largest public TV station, after the New Yorker revealed how WNET gave Koch inappropriate influence over its programming. Mr. Koch was floating a seven-figure donation over WNET’s leadership as the station aired a movie that portrayed him as a particularly greedy Manhattan resident.

Sure enough, WNET didn’t get David Koch’s hefty donation.

Last Thursday, David Koch submitted his resignation at a WNET Board of Trustees meeting, and Brad Johnson at Forecast the Facts* reports that Koch’s name was scrubbed from WNET’s website several days prior to the resignation. Koch Industries’ public relations website, KochFacts, released a preemptive response to the New Yorker article (which it has now urgently elaborated on), attempting to stifle New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer and the details of her newest piece. David Koch’s resignation as a WNET Trustee, coupled with telling quotes from WNET president Neal Shapiro and other sources, makes it clear that Koch had too much influence at the decreasingly-public TV station in New York.

The article is a fascinating culmination of two portions of the ongoing legacy of the Koch brothers: their desire to influence media, which is playing out with their company’s bid for the Tribune Company’s eight national daily newspapers, and their attempts to intimidate journalists and silence reporting they consider unfavorable.

Collapsed I-5 Skagit River Bridge, Washington State

Just after 7pm PT, a central portion of the I-5 Skagit River bridge in Washington State collapsed dumping several cars in the water. People were seen sitting on top of the cars, on top of the bridge wreckage waiting for rescue.

Live stream reporting from KIRO 7.

Live stream reporting from KOMO 4.

Continuing updates here.

Technical Details of the ‘riveted steel truss bridge’ from uglybridges.com. “Evaluation: Structurally deficient” “This website highlights the “ugly” condition of our nation’s bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.”

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

From Peterr:

That “all of our bridges” quote ought to shame the Austerians. Right now,
money can be borrowed for pennies if governments want to do capital
projects, making repairs/replacements of bridges like these so much cheaper
than they would be when the economy is perking along. But that makes too
much sense . . .

8:51 pm PT: Fingers crossed, but no reported fatalities.

Pic

Pic

Various reports that a wide load truck hit it.

Sour apple for the teacher?

Some employers, both large and small, have announced plans to limit their part-time workers to 29 hours a week specifically so they can avoid paying for health care for employees working 30+ hours a week, as required by the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Under the law, most of which takes effect in 2014, large employers are exempted from contributing anything towards healthcare costs of employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week. For full-time workers, companies must offer affordable insurance or face steep fines. Employers seeking to avoid this responsibility could impose a 29-hour ceiling on workers, and many are doing just that.

Obamacare prompts fears for low-wage workers as employers exploit the rules

Three years after the passage of Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, labor advocates are warning that it could have the unforeseen consequence of harming some of the very low-wage employees it seeks to aid. The legislation’s incentive scheme, they say, could cause a shift toward part-time work that extends beyond companies like Papa John’s and Darden Restaurants, which last year publicized their plans to cut employee hours to avoid costs under the new law.

Other large businesses have announced plans to raise the prices of their burgers or widgets to recover the health care costs. There has been blowback, but probably not nearly enough, since the likes of Wendy’s, Darden (Olive Garden, Red Lobster), Taco Bell, etc. already make huge profits and pay minimum (or less for waitstaff) wages. Darden Restaurants tried reducing full-time staffing at some of its restaurants last fall, but after a lot of negative publicity, the chain said it would not change its staffing in 2014. At Whole Foods, workers who put in 30 hours a week already get full health benefits, but the company may consider reducing the number of those employees because the proposed rules include more expensive benefit requirements. So workers just scraping by in minimum-wage jobs will see their pay reduced even more. In a very real way, these workers are taking another pay hit so that more well paid full-time employees can get company-provided health insurance benefits.

Many of you will remember that my daughter is a teacher whose writings I’ve posted here occasionally. But she is not a contracted teacher with her own classroom, she is a full-time “instructional assistant” who teaches technology to every student in her elementary school. Each child in the school attends several “specials” in the course of a week, and my daughter teaches one of the specials. This scheme is supposed to help make up for the elimination of valuable enrichment programs such as art, music and gym in cash-strapped school systems all over the country. As an instructional assistant, my daughter is paid a smaller, hourly wage, and has very limited personal and sick days compared to a contract teacher, and no health benefits, even though she has the same workload as a regular classroom teacher, and instructs every student in the school each week. She also works with children who need extra help to keep up with their assignments, as part of an intervention program. She is a full-time teacher in every sense of the word.

But my daughter and her colleagues were just informed that her school system may reduce the hours of certain classes of employees to 29 hours per week to avoid providing health care benefits. They also propose to limit substitute classroom teachers to four days per week, as another way to avoid incurring the health care costs. The letter from the superintendent spells out the problem, and it is very real:

We currently pay approximately 1,700 employees–1,000 of which are benefit eligible, 700 of which are not benefit eligible. If hours are not reduced, [the school system] could incur an annual expenditure of $4,952/Single Plan, and $13,278/Family Plan for each employee working over thirty (30) hours per week, which could result in increased insurance costs and PPACA fines to the School Corporation in the amount of $1,000,000 – $2,600,000 annually.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for Wendy’s or Taco Bell and their desire to wiggle out of providing health insurance benefits to their underpaid workers, but what is an already cash-strapped public school system to do? They’re too large to get any exclusions offered to small businesses, and too large to qualify for subsidies. It’s not just MY family; this situation will be replicated all over the country, in schools that already are eliminating programs just to be able to continue to provide the basics. A lot of school systems use part time workers not only as support staff, but for instruction of children.

This is one way that the Affordable Care Act, whatever its good points — and there ARE some — will disadvantage not only low-paid workers in retail companies who will see their pay even further reduced, but also our public school children, as the schools are forced to make even more cuts. It is unlikely that in a 29-hour week, the “specials” teachers will be able to instruct all of the students every week.

I don’t have an answer. It is a problem I hadn’t even considered until it touched my own family. I wonder how many more surprises are in store for us as the ACA rolls out? This is a provision that could be tweaked, and some states have begun to draft legislation to address the problem. The Republican legislators who want nothing more than to see the ACA fail, are unlikely to cooperate in a fix. So we are between the proverbial rock and hard place, I fear.

President Obama is expected to announce that the eternal war on the world will have an end.

When?

He won’t say.

I too have an announcement.  I promise my drinking problem will end some day.

When?

I’m not saying.  But the celebrations of the armistice in 1918 began when plans for it were announced, and the partying continued until it actually happened.  Perhaps that is the best approach here.  As an aid to your festivities, let me present the…

Afternoon Obama Murder Rap Drinking Game
(which I promise to stop playing soon)

1. The President is going to admit that he has a murder problem and propose to correct it by murdering less in certain countries.  If examples occur to you of crimes you might commit that you could not continue committing by promising to limit your criminal activities in some countries but not in others, DRINK!

2. The President is going to claim to have targeted, or to have allowed an unnamed John Brennan to have targeted, only one U.S. citizen for murder but to have killed three by mistake, on top of three killed by President Bush by mistake.  If you can think of outrages you might commit that you could not go on committing by claiming that 86% of them were accidental side effects, DRINK!

3. The President is going to claim that the one U.S. citizen he or his subordinate chose to murder was an imminent (meaning eventual theoretical) threat to violently attack the United States, that capture was infeasible (meaning the target was hiding following lots of death threats, but his location was known anyway), and that said citizen was a senior operational leader of al Qaeda (or an associated group or was an adherent or a backstage groupie who had once met a guy whose cousin knew where an al Qaeda meeting was held one time).  If you understand what that means, DRINK!

4. The President is going to hope that nobody notices that laws against war and murder don’t include exceptions for people who invent lists of arcane criteria that they require themselves to meet before murdering.  If you think you could invent and meet at least three qualifications before engaging in some immoral behavior, DRINK!

5. The President is going to hope nobody notices that he did not actually meet his own criteria before murdering Awlaki.  Attorney General Eric Holder now says Awlaki was killed for actions, not words.  Prior to the deed, Holder said it was the “hatred spewed” on Awlaki’s blog that put him “on the same list with bin Laden.”  Asked if he wanted Awlaki captured or killed, Holder did not say “captured if feasible,” but evaded the question.  Awlaki, as far as we know, was never a member of al Qaeda.  Obama’s and Holder’s claims about Awlaki’s role in terrorist attacks are undocumented claims.  No evidence has been presented and no charges were ever brought in court.  If you think shouting “Whoever he is, and whatever he’s charged with, he did it!” would be a nifty way to get out of jury duty, DRINK!

6. The President is going to speed past the fact that over 99% of the people he’s murdered have not been U.S. citizens, and that the pretense of justification so lazily applied to U.S. citizens has not been bothered with at all in these cases.  He’s not going to discuss “signature strikes” targeting unknown people and whoever’s near them, or the targeting of the rescuers of victims.  He’s not going to discuss children, women, seniors.  He’s not going to discuss the posthumous identification of males as “enemy combatants” — a non-legal term that adds insult to murder.  He’s not going to discuss the many known cases in which the victims could quite feasibly have been captured, were clearly not involved with al Qaeda in any way, and lacked any capacity whatsoever to threaten the United States.  He’s going to propose applying the fraudulent, meaningless, and illegal standards he applies to murdering U.S. citizens to murdering non-U.S. citizens in the future … in some countries.  If you can think of some people who might not be satisfied with this reform, DRINK!

7. The President is going to claim to be moving some but not all drone kill operations from a secret agency technically lacking in Congressional oversight to a department Congress simply chooses not to oversee.  If this falls short of what you can imagine when you hear “most transparent administration ever,” DRINK!

8. The President will not be speaking about how some 75 other nations with drones should begin applying his standards to their own behavior.  If you think such matters are worth discussing, DRINK!

9. The President is going to brush over the question of where and how he will be ordering the murder of people by means other than missiles.  If you can think of ways this might become seen as a problem down the road, DRINK!

10. The President is going to speed past the existence of a massive ongoing U.S. war on Afghanistan, larger now than when Obama moved into the White House, and expected to continue for many years after it “ends” in another year and a half.  If his ability to get away with this strikes you as perhaps what he must love most about drones and how they change the conversation, DRINK!

11. If you have concerns that go unanswered about the global expansion of U.S. bases, threats to Syria, weapons provided to Israel, threats to Iran, or the gargantuan military budget, DRINK!

12. The President will leak a great deal of information about his kill list program in this speech, as he has done on some previous “I killed bin Laden!” occasions, and yet will fail to prosecute himself for espionage at the end of the speech.  If you believe laws should be applied equally to all, DRINK!