Sometimes it really does just hit you. The Internet really does change the way we look at things. I was struck by this as I look back upon the recent tumultuous events in Haiti.
\nWatching television news here in Britain – which is how most of us get our news, especially foreign news – the story we saw played out was of a once-democratic leader (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) who had somehow gone bad and was tossed out of office by a popular rebellion. But only hours after the departure of Haiti’s elected president, we heard of dramatic developments taking place at a textile factory in the north east of the country. The news came via email.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it really does just hit you. The Internet really does change the way we look at things. I was struck by this as I look back upon the recent tumultuous events in Haiti. Watching…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labour-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe factory was owned by a Dominican company called Grupo M, and produced materials for, among others, Levi Strauss. Its workers had formed a union, but came to work one morning to find that all the union members had been sacked. The following day, a demonstration of the workers in solidarity with their sacked comrades was set to take place.
\nNow this was happening in the context of a rebellion against what appeared to be a hated and corrupt regime, so one would have expected that the rebel forces would either let the workers carry on, or even come to their aid. Instead, rebel troops came to the factory at the invitation of management to beat and arrest demonstrators, and terrorize the others into returning to work.
\nNot one of the three 24-hour news channels I receive was reporting that story, despite extensive coverage on the Internet. The story was reported on Haitian web sites, and then on anti-sweatshop websites and mailing lists, and eventually got picked up by such sites as the Workers Independent News Service (WINS) and LabourStart, which launched an online campaign in support of the workers.
\nNow you could argue that the happenings at a single textile factory in north-east Haiti may not deserve to be reported on the BBC, Sky and ITN. Fair enough. But because stories like this don’t get reported, we don’t see the whole picture. Suddenly the rebels no longer appear to be cigar-chomping Fidel Castros emerging from the jungles, kalashnikovs in hand, singing revolutionary anthems. They start to look more like Pinkertons, union-busting private cops.
\nIn a statement released by one Haitian union, the “rebels” were also called just that – in double quotation marks. The real rebels in Haiti seem to be workers at Grupo M, daring to fight for their rights to have a union even as their country imploded.
\nFor more information, see http:\/\/www.labourstart.org\/haiti\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"