By Regan Boychuk

The collapse of one of Palm Apparel’s factories in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince was likely the site of the single largest loss of life from the January 12 earthquake.

Workers had ended their shift one-half-hour before the earthquake struck, but almost all stayed late to work overtime. As many as 1,000 were killed. None were saved from the rubble because rescue teams were kept at bay for four days by fears that the neighbourhood’s population was “too dangerous”.

A stark illustration of largely imaginary security concerns thwarting desperately needed rescue efforts, this tragedy also touches on issues about how Canada can best help Haiti recover.

Previous attempts to lift Haiti out of poverty have often focused on assembling garments.

Palm Apparel’s factory produced 180,000 T-shirts a day for Montreal-based Gildan Activewear, which expanded operations in Haiti when the regime installed after the February 2004 coup offered tax breaks and Canada eliminated most tariffs and quotas on Haitian textiles and apparel.

In the absence of concrete initiatives—the only thing of substance to come of January 25’s donors’ conference in Montreal was the International Monetary Fund backing away from an earlier statement supporting further debt relief—earlier proposals to expand Haiti’s garment manufacturing are enjoying renewed attention.

But are sweatshops really the best way we can help Haitians? The track record of such “development” suggests not.

The Duvalier dictatorships (1957-86) killed tens of thousands of Haitians, but they also opened Haiti up to do assembly work for foreign corporations in the late 1960s.

Haitian workers were “closely supervised and controlled by the government”, which kept “wage rates at very low levels”—“undoubtedly...the single most important factor influencing the location of assembly industries in Haiti”, according to economist Monique Garrity.

By the late 1980s, even the World Bank admitted the assembly industry was “largely outside the Haitian economy” and made “no fiscal contribution”.

During this first experiment in sweatshop development, absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated to have increased 60 percent—from 50 to 80 percent of the population.

And poverty isn’t all that this model of development produced in Haiti.

It also contributed to creating what USAID described in 1990 as a “rapacious” new Haitian elite that had “arisen to seize hold of the economy”: “These entrepreneurs have a 19th century approach to making money and have moved in to take advantage of the country’s massive and cheap labor pool. They run sweatshops, pay starvation wages and oppose any effort to improve the lot of the average impoverished Haitian.”

Similarly, in a memo to the first president Bush, the chair of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Haiti described this elite “as being in the forefront of those financing thuggery and terror to intimidate the Haitian people and the democratic sector.

“They fear that a freely elected government accountable to the Haitian people would...threaten their short-term interests and for this they have and continue to finance an apparatus of terror to block change.”

Indeed, this cast of characters was among the main players behind both the 1991 and 2004 coups that overthrew democratic governments and killed thousands among Haiti’s pro-democracy movement.

But aren’t jobs sewing T-shirts a better option than what’s now available to young Haitians?

That is the argument in favour of sweatshop development, but starvation wages are not the best we can do to help Haitians.

In the mid 1990s, when Haiti’s government proposed a new minimum wage of 75 gourdes per day, pressure from international donors forced a compromise of 36 gourdes (about US$2.40 a day or 30 cents an hour).

According to a National Labor Committee investigation, that meant workers had less buying power than they did before they elected their first democratic government in 1990 and almost 50 percent less in real terms than when the Duvalier dictatorship first set a minimum wage in 1980.

Recent attempts to raise the minimum wage to a mere $5 per day having been vetoed, it remains a measly $3 today.

Now, more than ever, we owe Haitians more than that.

Haiti needs to chart its own course for development. To help, the most important first step would be for Canada to begin to respect the  democratic choices of the Haitian people and put an end to the kind of policies that saw Canada support the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in February 2004 and that have seen Fanmi Lavalas—Haiti’s most popular political party—barred from the ballot since.

Regan Boychuk is part of the  Canada Haiti Action Network and is currently editing a book on Canada’s role in Haiti for Athabasca University Press.