28626: Durban (comment): On Grupo M's Announced Closing (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

Holmstead writes:
     The silence is deafening. I would have thought I would
     have heard folks jumping to Batay's defense and
     explaining how these 700 jobs weren't worth anything
     anyways. Semidor? Durban? Dailey? Lyall? Kathleen?

Well, I'll have a crack at it in predicting that there won't be much
response from the Corbett Group, since most on it seem to be passively
supportive of the Bataye folks... and how can you defend the group when
they have apparently just succeeded in closing one of the few
manufacturing plants in Haiti?

As for the Bataye folks themselves, their prime motivation has nothing
to do with helping poor workers and everything to do with class
warfare.  Grupo M's closing a plant on the Dominican/Haiti border is a
victory in their eyes because heck, those rich, exploiting-class
owners must have lost millions on their ill-fated investment.  Take
that, you filthy capitalist roaders, etc. etc.   Needless to say, these
sentiments won't be expressed quite so publicly, but neither will they
be doing anything to help the 700 now-jobless workers find alternative
employment.  Job creation?  That's not their business.

Thoughtful people might ask themselves a simple question.  If it is so
easy to make a fortune exploiting poor factory workers earning the
Haitian minimum wage, why are there so few export-oriented factories in
Haiti?  In fact, the very few factories that do exist are almost all
manufacturing for the local (Haitian) market... cosmetics, plastic
buckets, very limited food processing, etc.

Could it be that in Haiti manufacturing export doesn't offer the big
return on investment that many assume?  That certainly is my
impression, inadvertently reinforced last night when I took a wrong
turn in an IMMENSE traffic jam on Route Frere going into Petionville.
I ended up totally lost in Vivey Michelle, a good-sized enclave of
multi-million dollar homes that I had been only vaguely aware of.
Where does this money come from?  It certainly is not the folks
manufacturing for export.

These days, Haitian exporters are playing in a no-holds-barred global
economy, and being 90 minutes from Miami doesn't count for much when
shipping a 40' container from China to the U.S. West Coast costs less
than shipping the same container from Port-au-Prince to Miami.  No
doubt $3/day labor had initially looked attractive to Grupo M.  My
guess is that they underestimated the many other quite substantial
costs which anyone manufacturing in Haiti has to cover.  In reality,
Bataye's labor activities, while no doubt a factor, were probably only
the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Lance Durban