Edward Lovoquintanilla
The Silhouette

Following Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, many outside observers - whose purview extends only as far and wide as their television screens - waited expectantly for social breakdown and looting. Instead, most communities had rapidly mobilized to deliver mutual aid before the arrival of foreigners. Throughout Haiti, foreign aid did not arrive for days, weeks in other places, yet Haitians reached for whatever was in grasp and dug themselves out of the rubble, often with their bare hands. With a barely functional government, the people of Haiti themselves tended to the injured, set up camps, fed one another, sang, prayed, and mourned together.

This self-mobilization has a long history that stretches back into the postrevolutionary period when Haitians transformed traditions of farming inherited from Africa into innovative ways of the management of the land, despite an almost indifferent leadership. Century upon century of foreign intervention and manipulation layers the history of Haiti, never quite able to extinguish the fires of self-determination beneath its sands.

Nation after nation, corporation after corporation have sought to suckle the milk from Haiti’s soil by the sweat of its people. In the presence of French warships, the Baron de Mackau coerced the President of Haiti, without further consultation, into buying the freedom of Haiti for 150 million francs; which is no freedom at all, but the bonds of economic dependence.

The bonds forged by economic dependence have become Haiti’s garment industry, owned by the white and lighter-skinned elite, some of whose production belongs to Wal-Mart and Gildan Active Wear. The workers are paid nearly a third less than the minimum wage, coerced into working more than the legally allowed work-week, rendering food unaffordable; eating, a practical question the worker faces every mealtime.

Not only is Haitian law broken in the treatment of workers, but it also violates the code of conduct of the corporations whose production is in Haiti’s garment industry. In fact, it also violates the ethical purchasing policy of the McMaster Students Union, who purchases clothing from Gildan Active Wear.

Can we conscionably stand idly by while our student government contributes to the current chapter of this centuries-long story of dependence, extortion and exploitation? Ethical purchasing is a question that is being raised by McMaster students, and we are waiting for the answer.