Labor & Employment Law

Help Match $100,000 Donation to Haiti from Union Plus

By James Parks

The union movement is working to bring relief to workers in Haiti affected by the Jan. 12 earthquake and to build a long-term strategy to move the country away from a sweatshop economy to one that provides good jobs.

The first priority has been to respond to urgent needs for food, water, medical attention and dry shelter. If you haven’t yet had a chance to help, or wish to donate again to relief efforts, Union Plus has pledged to match up to $100,000 in individual donations to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Earthquake Relief Fund. Already, Union Plus has matched $80,000 and needs just $20,000 more to reach that goal. Click here to donate online now. Donations also can be made by sending a check with Earthquake Relief Fund for Haitian Workers in the memo line to:

Solidarity Center Education Fund
Attention: Joan Welsh
888 16th St., N.W., Suite 400
Washington, D.C. 20006

Goods are currently being delivered to the Association of University Graduates Motivated for a Haiti with Rights (AUMOHD), which is serving as the labor movement’s central distribution point and organizing center. Through donations, the Solidarity Center has helped AUMOHD obtain energy-generating solar panels for their building, allowing union members to charge cell phones, use computers and set up communications?a vital first step in the relief and recovery process.

Even as they distribute needed supplies, unions also are sending a message to those donors who want to invest in Haiti for the long term. Cathy Feingold, Solidarity Center representative for the Dominican Republic and Haiti, told In These Times magazine that an investment strategy “has to be for good jobs, not just jobs at the current minimum wage of $5 a day.”

Now aid organizations are providing cash for work, cleaning up after the earthquake at that minimum wage. That can’t be the model, hiring people at $5 a day without health care, pension, or a right to organize. If it’s just creating more sweatshops, Haiti does not need more of that.

Apparel sweatshops have expanded in Haiti. Before the earthquake, some 18 factories employed 25,000 workers with only one union factory.

Unions and our international allies also are fighting for workers’ right to form a union. Before the earthquake, most workers were employed in the public sector, and private-sector workers trying to form unions were typically fired or threatened with death, Feingold told In These Times. The government rarely enforced laws protecting workers, and the nation’s few factory owners insisted they could not flourish if workers organized unions, she said.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 23, 2010 (boomark / email).