Unions Resist Privatization in Haiti

by David Morris

A coalition of Haitian unions has announced a series of activities to mobilize the people to resist the privatization of government operations in Haiti. Roger Annis reports on HaitiAnalysis.com that a transport union, the Association des Propriétaires et Chauffeurs d’Haïti, called for unions and popular organizations to launch a two-day general strike on August 27 and 28.

Currently in contention are the fates of the government-owned electrical power system, its seaport and airport facilities and, most importantly, Téléco, the Compagnie Nationale de Téléphone, which was practically shut down during a three-week strike in June by workers protesting the massive layoffs privatization would entail. The workers had demanded the resignation of director Michel Présumé, whom they accuse of refusing to negotiate with the union and of sabotaging telephone operations to stimulate public sentiment in favor of privatization.

Ongoing Struggle

Groups supporting and opposing privatization have struggled in Haiti since soon after popular rage forced Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” out of power in 1986.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide cites privatization as the main reason the U.S. government and other interests overthrew the democratically elected leader in 2004. “Privatization, privatization, privatization,” Jean-Bertrand Aristide said to Naomi Klein when she asked him what had led the United States, France and Canada to sponsor the coup and kidnapping that forced the Haitian president into exile in Pretoria, South Africa, where she interviewed him for The Nation in 2005.

Forces For and Against Privatization

The aim of privatization is not to improve the lives of the people of Haiti, Gassandy Brave of the telephone worker’s union told Agence Haïtienne de Presse, and no country where privatization has taken place has profited from it, including countries more advanced economically than Haiti.

If Aristide paid dearly for his resistance to privatization, current President René Préval, Aristide’s successor for a second time, is likely to face the outrage of the people who elected him but not that of the U.S. government. Préval has never resisted privatization. “The government of René Préval is aligning itself more and more with the interests of the foreign powers in Haiti, to the detriment of the Haitian people,” Fortuné Patrice of the transport union told Roger Annis.

During his first term as president, from 1995 to 2000, Préval oversaw the selling off of a government-owned company manufacturing cement and other building material and of its flour mill. Haitian economist Camille Chalmers was quoted in Haïti Progrès in 2002 as saying those privatizations, as predicted by critics, had resulted in higher prices for food and housing, with no improvement in distribution. Shortly after Préval’s inauguration, Haïti Progrès reported, members of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy, at a conference Aristide himself did not attend, passed a resolution declaring, “This neo-liberal plan was hatched in Washington and is not in the interests of the nation. It is the United States, the World Bank and the IMF which control this diabolic plan."

Aristide himself had been criticized by supporters after the Clinton administration reinstated him by military force following the first coup against him in 1990. As a condition for his return to the presidency, the U.S. had forced him to implement much of the IMF structural adjustment scheme. But he balked at the demands to privatize state enterprises. René Préval was more cooperative.