WikiLeaks Cable: Obama Admin. Pressured Haiti Not to Raise Minimum Wage

Eco.Soul.Intellectual

What can you buy for 61 cents? In the case of the Obama Administration, that was simply too much for the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Wikileaks cables expose that the Obama Administration put pressure on the disaster-stricken country, Haiti, to not raise its hourly minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, or $5 a day.

Perplexing being that everything in Haiti has skyrocketed since the January 2009 earthquake. A large can of peaches is reported to be roughly $40 American dollars by Haitian activist Mawiyah Duperval of Haitian American Ministries and Ujaama International based in Haiti.

According to the report by the Columbia Journalism Review, American corporations who hire Haiti's 25,000 garment workers, like Hanes and Levi Strauss, were pissed off because that meant they had to pay their workers an increase. So let's put this together, a pair of Hanes' underwear costs more than a worker making about 200 of them in a day.

Since the earthquake there has been much criticism of the lack of aid that actually went directly to the Haitian government, less than 7 cents, the question remains "Where is the money?" According to a Huffington Post article back in 2010, here was the breakdown.