Failed Solidarity: The ICFTU,
AFL-CIO, ILO, and ORIT in Haiti
by Jeb Sprague
LaborNotes, June 2006
http://labornotes.org/
On February 16, 2004 a group of foreign
trade union officials arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, amongst
them ORIT General Secretary Victor Baez, ICFTU Assistant General
Secretary Mamounata Cissé and union leaders from France,
Canada, Guyana and the Global Union Federation. The purpose of
the delegation was to assist eleven trade unionists of the Coordination
Syndicale Haïtienne (CSH), accused by Haitian authorities
as working to bring down the government. The labor delegation
drew international coverage as Katia Gil, General Coordinator
of Programs with ORIT explains, "We went to visit them in
jail. We went with many newspapers and press, local and international
agencies." Just thirteen days after their arrival on February
29, 2004, Haiti's popularly elected Lavalas government was overthrown
and its President Jean-Bertrand Aristide after being sent on a
plane to Africa, declared he had been kidnapped by U.S. Marines.
An interim government made up of elites drawn from the political
opposition to the Aristide government was quickly put into place,
supported by the United States, France, and Canada.
"Following the coup, more than 12,000
public sector employees, who had been hired under the Aristide
government, were immediately fired without compensation",
writes Isabel Macdonald, a Canadian journalist conducting interviews
with laid off workers in Haiti. The Associated Press on May 12,
2004 reported that Telecommunications D'Haiti (TELECO), the 90%
government owned public telephone company, had announced plans
to lay off 2,000 workers, half of its workforce.
In May of 2004 an investigative report
from a labor-religious delegation sent to Haiti, initiated by
the San Francisco Labor Council, spoke of a witch-hunt against
supporters of the former government and of receiving reports from
the "FTPH (Federation of Public Transport Workers of Haiti),
of criminal attacks on over 100 of the buses that they had purchased
for use in the bus cooperative operated by the union." Sasha
Kramer, a PhD student from California traveling in Haiti took
photos of the demolished public buses. With death threats and
arbitrary placements on police "wanted" lists, public
sector employees and trade unionists, such as teachers, port workers,
and bus drivers across Haiti were targeted. With an untold number
of dead victims and political prisoners from the coup and the
consequent twenty-six months of an unelected interim government,
numerous human rights organizations decried state sponsored violence
and persecution (March 2004- May 2006).
During the weeks prior to the 2004 coup
a "general strike" was called by businesses and organizations
associated with the opposition to the government, in which banks,
gas stations, supermarkets, and specialty shops kept their doors
closed, while the marketplaces of the poor remained open. In
a recent interview Duclos Benissoit, a founder of the Haiti Transportation
Federation currently living in exile in New York, discussed his
experience during the 2004 coup. "The people who stick their
necks out, vocal resisters were targeted first. I was one of
those people. I was opposed to any kind of "strike"
called by the bosses. Unless called by labor, I told consumers
to ignore the other 'strikes.' (Big business and national forces)
didn't like this."
The ICFTU delegation in February 2004,
just prior to Aristide's ouster, as Katia Gil explains, "visited
many people but only those involved with the opposition to the
government of course." The International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), claiming a membership of 157 million
workers in 148 countries and territories, plays a leading role
in investigating and drawing attention to labor abuse around the
globe; but for the two years following the coup d'etat, the ICFTU
did not make a single public statement or condemnation in regards
to the massive labor persecution. The Organización Regional
Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT) as the Latin American regional
affiliate of the ICFTU , currently headquartered in Brazil, also
remained silent.
CSH, the "ICFTU/ORIT's fraternal
organization in Haiti" according to Victor Baez, was a member
of the Group of 184, supporting the installation of the interim
government. CSH Secretary-general Fritz Charles, whose organization
was made up primarily of anti-Lavalas unions and labor organizations,
such as the Duvalier sanctioned and formerly U.S. government funded
Fédération des Ouvriers Syndiqués (FOS),
explained, "We adhere to the Group of 184 because it is a
broad organization of the civil society which preaches a social
pact where we want to play our part, where we want to also support
the claims present in our trade-union agenda, ratified by our
general assembly." The Group of 184 a Haitian organization
of NGOs, business elites, and foreign financed human rights groups
was the principal civil society organization that agitated for
the downfall of the elected government and was headed up by one
of Haiti's most notorious sweatshop owners, Andre Apaid, Jr.
"Democracy Promotion" program
monies through United States, Canadian, and European Union aid
agencies were channeled nearly exclusively to groups and organizations
that were critical of the elected government of Haiti. In some
cases, this took the form of actively building the political opposition,
such as many of those within the Group of 184 - in others, it
was simply supporting and funding sectors and leaders who were
sharp critics of the Haitian government. Fabiola Cordove, a program
officer at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington
D.C., which funds numerous opposition affiliated groups, pointed
out, "Aristide really had 70% of the popular support and
then the 120 other parties had the thirty per cent split in one
hundred and twenty different ways, which is basically impossible
to compete [with]."
While foreign governments and financial
institutions heavily favored the elite opposition, the local and
foreign media did as well. Similar to the media manipulation
during the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, the Haitian media,
owned overwhelming by opposition-affiliated elites, refused to
air pro-government demonstrations. Instead they devoted large
blocks of air time to coverage of the much smaller opposition
marches, which one observer noted were led down the streets by
"fancy BMW motorcycles and huge, square Mercedes Benz SUV's."
Haiti's government by early 2004 had been
weakened and it's impoverished masses of supporters, as well as
its opposition, felt increasingly under attack. In the months
and weeks before the large ICFTU led labor delegation arrived,
chaos reigned as rebels, from the disbanded military, based in
the Dominican Republic had begun an invasion of Haiti, equipped
with new SUVs and, reportedly, airplanes. For years the same
rebels had been running violent raids, into Haiti killing police,
government officials, and civilians alike - sparking violence
and reprisals. Even months before the inauguration of Aristide
in February 2001, Port-au-Prince had been shaken by mysterious
bombings. OAS officials admit they never worked to investigate
the rebels or pressure the Dominican Republic to root them out.
With the economic strangulation of a Bush Administration backed
government aid embargo taking effect in 2000 and a small poorly
armed police force, the difficulties of the Haitian government
intensified. The CSH, like many other opposition groups affiliated
with the Group of 184, had something the Haitian government did
not have - foreign aid.
Fritz Charles explains that the CSH received
assistance, support, and computers from ORIT and the International
Labor Organization (ILO), which, though viewed as a labor organization,
is in fact a tri-partite body of the UN which groups together
trade union bodies, employer organizations, and governments. Katia
Gil of ORIT clarifies that "Since 2000, we have had support
from International Solidarity funds from the ICFTU to help in
a trade union education program, organizing workers in Haitiwe
helped to build the CSH, and we provided part of the support for
the CSH infrastructure, in order to create a place where the Haitian
workers [the CSH] could plan and manage their own process."
The ICFTU continues to provide an undisclosed amount of funding
for CSH programs.
Charles also refers to the ILO's financing
of six seminars for the CSH conducted by André Lafontant
Joseph (Secretary-general of the private school teachers Union,
the CNEH). André Lafontant Joseph, was the author of a
major research report funded by the ILO on the Haitian labor movement
and his union the Confédération Nationale des Educateurs
d'Haiti (CNEH) took a leading role, following the coup, in working
to undermine the public school teacher's in the north of Haiti.
According to André Lafontant Jospeh's ILO funded study,
"ORIT" amongst others "encourage[d] more than about
fifteen organizations to constitute the Trade-union Coordination
Syndicale Haïtienne (CSH)."
According to Ana Jiménez, of the
ILO's San Jose office, the ILO has provided "technical cooperation.a
program that has the objective of fortifying the Haitian union
movement, in particular the Coordination Syndicale Haïtienne
(CSH). This program is assumed within the ordinary budget of the
Officewhich does not surpass US $70.000." The ILO currently
has two other projects in Haiti, a project in Gonaives worth US
$413,00 (partially financed by the United Nations Development
Program) and a Canadian government financed project working in
the field of child labor with US$ 382,374. The AFL-CIO works closely
with the ILO, as Harry G Kamberis, Senior advisor of the AFL-CIO's
Solidarity Center explains, "Through our representatives
at the ILO we supported what the ILO tried to do as well."
Kevin Skerrett, a researcher at the Canadian
Union of Public Employees (CUPE) who previously visited Haiti
as a Canadian labor delegate argues, "There is not much evidence
to suggest that the CSH actually operates as a trade union at
all. I have not seen any reports that they have engaged in any
collective bargaining, or even have democratic meetings of affiliated
unions during which policy positions are democratically decided.
A number of the trade unionists that I spoke with in Haiti and
in the post-coup exile-diaspora have suggested that the CSH was
only formed in the late 90s, and with significant involvement
of US and foreign agencies. While it continued to operate as
a sort of "advocacy" group for Haitian workers, it is
not clear that they became anything more than a small number of
people that were part of the political opposition to the Preval
and then Aristide governments." Suffice to say; led by Fritz
Charles, the CSH became the main platform for organizing labor
leaders towards the platform of the Group of 184.
Meanwhile, in Canada, while the Canadian
Labor Congress (CLC) denounced Canada's role in legitimizing the
2004 coup d'etat of the democratically elected government, it
failed to investigate the massive layoffs and persecution of public
sector workers in Haiti. An April 2004 statement from the CLC
committed itself to "monitoring" the human rights and
workers rights situation in the coming months in Haiti, something
which never occurred.
From Brussels the ICFTU played a leading
role in the year's leading up to the coup, circulating reports,
heavily influenced by Haitian opposition elites, within the European
labor movement - and to some extent the North American labor movement,
that while informing the public of some real ongoing labor disputes,
also forwarded unfounded allegations. For example, attributing
to the Aristide government the killings of two labor advocates
that took place in the rural area of Guacimal in 2002, near the
northeastern town of St. Raphael, which were in fact (according
to a newspaper whose reporter lost an eye in the assault) murders
carried out by employees of a local landowner, not "government
partisans" as one Aristide critic recently claimed. Showing
the echo effect of such allegations, an employee of the AFL-CIO's
Solidarity Center recently made the unsubstantiated claim that
"Aristide flew over Guacimal in a helicopter, shooting at
workers."
While labor conditions remained extremely
poor and corruption persisted, as foreign backed destabilization
plunged Haiti's economy, the Aristide government took steps towards
aiding labor. The minimum wage was increased from 36 Gourdes
to 70 Gourdes a day in early 2003, the right to organize in the
free trade zone was successfully negotiated, a provision of the
labor code that sanctioned child domestic service was repealed,
and legislation prohibiting human trafficking was passed. A 20-person
police unit was set up to monitor cases of suspected human trafficking
along the border, while steps were taken to promote access to
education, offering a 70% subsidy to cover education supplies
and calling on families who employ children to release them during
school hours. The second Aristide administration (2000-2004)
also refused to privatize public sector industries, requested
by the IMF. Following the coup d'etat many of the labor reforms
were suspended, with numerous employers reverting to the old minimum
wage.
The ILO, ICFTU and ORIT were not the only
labor organizations to support the opposition to the Aristide
government and ignore the persecution of public sector workers
following it's overthrow. On March 1, 2004 the AFL-CIO released
its sole statement in regards to the overthrow of democracy in
Haiti, stating that the "current crisis in Haiti represents
a failure of U.S. foreign policy." Only weeks later, the
AFL-CIO and its offshoot the Solidarity Center (American Center
for International Labor Solidarity) began talks with the Batay
Ouvriye (BO), an anti-Lavalas worker's organization that had agitated
for the Aristide government to "leave the country."
By mid-2005 the Solidarity Center had
won two grants for its program with the BO.
The first grant for US $350,000 was awarded
to the Solidarity Center in May of 2005 through the U.S. State
Department's "Democracy Rights and Labor Department",
while the second grant for US $99,965 came in September of 2005
from the NED, also receiving its funding from the U.S. State Department.
Teresa Casertano, regional director of the Americas for the Solidarity
Center, managed the grants. She explains, "We provide a
service that is an educational service, to train them, to share
with them our knowledge and skills on trade union organizingOrganizing
members, doing new member orientation, collective bargaining,
contract enforcement, shop stewards."
As part of the grant requirements, the
Solidarity Center must submit quarterly evaluation reports to
its funding sources, the NED and U.S. State Department. Casertano
explains, "We wrote a proposal that was submitted. A very
standard format with objectives, activities and evaluation proceduresSo
there was a grant agreement based on that, the State Department
dispersed funds for those activities describedThe specific grant
has a quarterly reporting requirementWe then write that up and
we submit it as a quarterly report." In this particular
program with the Batay Ouvriye (BO), the U.S. State Department
asked to extend the program, as Casertano explains, "They
did ask us to extend it from a year long to 18 months with the
same amount of funding and we agreed."
Kamberis explains further the cooperation
between the U.S. State Department and the AFL-CIO's Solidarity
Center. "The State Department has annually a labor officer
conference that we are invited to come and speak at and also when
they have labor officer training programs they send the officers
over to speak with us. We design our own programs and run them.
But we do talk with the State Department. We exchange information
and we help them with information on their annual labor and human
rights reports."
Kamberis argues that there is a difference
today between the activities of the Solidarity Center and its
Cold War predecessors. "Since the end of the cold war the
global trade union movement has become less ideological. What
you see in Haiti [the support for opposition labor organizations]
is just a coincidence...We are supporting the efforts of workers
to organize. For example with the World-Bank, we worked to build
labor rights conditionalities and that's what we have achieved
in Haiti to help workersI would say that working with the Batay
Ouvriye does advance U.S. Strategic interests, because it helps
to advance freedom of association in Haiti and that is a U.S.
government objective, to allow workers to freely associate."
In regards to the Solidarity Center's predecessor, AIFLD (American
Institute for Free Labor Development), and it's support for unions
run through Duvalier's secret police in the 1980's Kamberis states,
"We had programs under the Duvalier government that addressed
the same thing: worker exploitation whether they were or were
not Anti or Pro-Duvalier. That was not for us the issue."
As the United States, Canada, and France
played integral roles in overthrowing the Aristide government;
those with close ties to Haiti - CARICOM and the African Union
- refused to recognize the interim government put in its place.
Unions such as the Oilfield Workers' Trade Union (OWTU) of Trinidad
and Tobago and the Caribbean spoke out against the coup. On March
1, 2004, the day following the coup, Errol McLeod, President of
OWTU condemned the foreign role in occupying Haiti, stating "It
was totally wrong for the US, France and Canada to determine that
President Aristide was 'unfit to govern'."
There are numerous trade unions and labor
organizations that did not join the political opposition movement,
while none have received support from any of these four bodies.
These organizations continue to support political interventions
through groups that espouse the undemocratic removal of governments
in selected countries (i.e. Haiti, Venezuela), at the expense
of workers and in collaboration with the foreign policy of the
Bush Administration.
The blind eye turned towards the major
transgressions of the interim government can be partially explained
by the vested interests that international labor organizations
had in the participants of the coup and pre-coup destabilization
campaign. Political parties of Western Europe that have strong
ties to their countries large and influential trade unions such
as Germany's SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) have consistently
supported Haitian political parties opposed to Lavalas such as
the OPL (L'Organistation de Peuple en Lutte), a backer of austerity
measures forwarded by the IMF. While the majority of Haitians
speak kreyòl and live at abysmal subsistence levels; the
French-speaking opposition aligned elite, many with European educations,
were apt to form long term relations with foreign institutions
already predisposed against popular democracy - so called "radical
populism". The ICFTU released a statement on November 23,
2000, over two months prior to Aristide's inauguration, titled
"Return To Dictatorship?" heavily reliant on OPL sources,
labeling Haiti's largest political party Lavalas as "much
feared." Another deeply partisan ICFTU Bulletin in May of
2001 cited OPL leaders Sauveur Pierre Etienne, Gérard Pierre,
and Paul Dennis, as well as a Convergence leader Evans Paul, with
no mention of their heavy reliance on foreign government aid agencies.
In comparison to its overtly critical stance during the second
Aristide Administration (2001-2004), not a single ICFTU bulletin
decried coup and post-coup labor rights violations against public
sector workers and trade unionist supporters of the ousted government.
Dominique Esser, a New York based human rights advocate, argues
that labor "persecution is a non-topic if it happens to elements
of society that are not supported by those wealthy parties that
are strongly intertwined with international union heavyweights."
The most prominent international labor
organizations active in Haiti, the ICFTU, AFL-CIO, ILO, and ORIT,
working to support and strengthen labor unions that agitated for
the ousting of Haiti's democratically elected government, have
simultaneously refused to condemn the massive layoffs and persecution
of public sector workers and trade unionists committed by its
illegally-imposed successor. In response to questions over the
Solidarity Center's aloofness in regards to labor persecution
resulting from the coup, Casertano states, "We make public
statements. We make plenty of statements." In reference
to post-coup labor persecution Katia Gil of ORIT explains, "We
have not looked into that."
Jeb Sprague is a graduate student, freelance
journalist, and a correspondent for Pacifica Radio's Flashpoints.
This article is in part based off a talk he gave at the 32nd Annual
Conference of the South-West Labor Studies Association. Visit
his blog.
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