Haiti: Fight for Minimum Wage Continues Workers Expose Bosses’ State

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 12—Workers have kept their word: The fight against the capitalist bosses for an increase in the minimum wage continues into its third day. Class struggle is intensifying, with several thousand workers and students demonstrating in the streets of the capital. After marching for miles, they arrived at the Parliament and called on legislators to reject the report of the High Council on Salaries, which recommends a measly 35-gourde increase in the daily minimum wage of 300 gourdes (US$4.60).
Reinforced by two loudspeakers, the militant protestors marched through downtown streets and residential neighborhoods, singing and chanting slogans against the bosses. In particular, they targeted Jovenel Moise as a “puppet of the bourgeoisie,” the famously corrupt capitalist ruling class that bleeds workers for profit. Moise is a protégé of former President Michel Martelly, the brutal thug who ran a plundering police state and collaborated with MINUSTAH, the hated United Nations occupation army that caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti. In 2015, Martelly’s ruling-party machine propelled Moise into a runoff despite exit polls showing he’d received only six percent of the vote in a low-turnout, massively fraudulent election (Haiti Sentinel, 11/19/15). So much for capitalist “democracy!”
Minimal Wages, Maximum Profits
The rulers’ justification for the unlivable minimum wage is that it will create more jobs. While the bosses’ media admit to an unemployment rate of 40 percent (indexmundi), 80 percent of the working class lives in wretched poverty. Another seven percent are employed in the private sector, which rarely pays the legal minimum. If 300 gourdes per day doesn’t create jobs, 335 won’t, either!
The protesters, mainly young women between 21 and 35, were demanding a minimum daily salary of 800 gourdes (US$12), which might meet at least some basic needs, including health care. One young woman said, “At 23, I should be at university instead of wasting my strength for the bosses and a few pennies.”
Another worker said, “If we continue to work for this tubercular wage, we will never be able to feed our children, house ourselves, or have decent health care.”
The protesters didn’t mince words, openly calling out the state for protecting the capitalists’ interests. In one chant, they said, “We don’t have a government, it’s in the service of the bosses; we don’t have a president, he’s in the service of Apaid, Becker, Alain (local big business owners)…”
‘Burn and Crush the Bosses’
All along the march, the workers raised the miserable situations they are forced to endure by the profit system: “Some supervisors whip us workers…Many of us work 12 hours a day…If we want to earn 500 gourdes (US$8) a day, we have to produce 300 dozen T-shirts.”
One, marching with four companions, said passionately, “I have been working for one boss in outsourcing since 2003, before there was a union. When I protested about working conditions, I was booted out. But I continue to fight. Now we have more organizations, we can do as in other workers’ revolutions, burn and crush the bosses.” He clearly has a desire to end the bosses’ murderous reign.
Another worker who accompanied him added, “I believe that if workers organize and are not afraid, they can do anything.” Showing a keen understanding of capitalist exploitation and surplus value, the chorus of five concluded, “Without us the bosses are nothing, it is our work that makes them wealthy!”
These workers suffer under inhuman conditions. How can a parent or a young person live on a salary that is scarcely enough to pay the cost of transportation to get to work in the first place? That is why they chanted unequivocally: “We’ve had enough, time to revolt!”  
One comrade called on students to unite with striking clerical workers at the State University of Haiti (UEH) and street vendors demanding permanent marketplaces, and to build a single force against the bosses and the state. Workers see that the struggle must be organized apart from mass union organizations that are tools of the bosses who try to entice workers with crumbs. Enough of crumbs! The working class creates all wealth! We have the right to share it among ourselves!
From the Masses, to the Masses
Some phony leaders carry the red flag and say they are for revolution. But they have shown time and again that they are merely opportunists, spouting meaningless slogans as they try to mislead workers into reformist politics. More and more workers are seeing through these political hacks. Engaged in struggle and discussion with comrades in Progressive Labor Party (PLP), they are developing confidence in our comrades and in our ideas. They are beginning to see the difference between PLP and other groups. As our ties in the working class deepen and we struggle ideologically and in class battle side by side, we are developing more and more confidence in the working class as well.
Workers’ struggles in Haiti, according to one young worker, are sharpening: “They have become more mature than before. But we have to be on guard against the opportunist politicians and mass leaders.” It is in this context, despite our modest numbers, that our PLP comrades are giving leadership in mass mobilizations and in leading class-conscious chants and songs.
University students are also developing more confidence in our Party. They believe our line is correct and are reassured when our comrades are present in many different battles. Their banners signal the unity of students with workers’ struggles, especially since many of the workers are their fathers and mothers.
Communism is the future of our world. As one worker said at today’s demonstration, the world cannot be transformed without the struggle of workers against the bosses and their agents. PLP is fighting to organize the international working class as a single fist, to put an end to the misery of capitalism once and for all and build an anti-racist, anti-sexist, egalitarian communist world.
As PLP maintains, “Together we are unbeatable! Join us!”