Authored by Alana Coulum
This is the front of the VHS Tape. The front cover features two people from the Institute interviewing a woman wearing a mask to protect her identity
For my academic service-learning project, I chose to volunteer at the Center for Migration Studies, which is an institute devoted to the advocacy of migrants around the world. It is an organization backed by an international group of Catholic ordained and lay people, and the institution holds an impressive amount of immigration information in their archives. I was tasked with cataloguing their audio/visual collection, which was small but disorganized. In the collection, there were many documentaries telling the stories of immigrant groups who came to the United States. The Center for Migration Studies in general has an enormous amount of resources about Italian-Americans and their experience. One VHS tape in particular caught my eye because of its title: “Mickey Mouse in Haiti”. This is a video exploiting the terrible working conditions of laborers in Haiti making apparel for The Walt Disney Company. This was part of a campaign sponsored by the Institute for Global Labour and Rights, to convince Disney to raise the minimum wage for factory workers in Haiti. The entire documentary is available here on the Institute’s official YouTube page.
Haiti as a nation has a long history of oppression and misfortune. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with more then half of the population living under the poverty line. (Langley, 1999) Because of the country’s extreme poverty, it is a target for large corporations to outsource their labor to cut costs. The documentary talks to some factory workers about the wages and conditions of working for Disney. Most of them do not even know what company they are working for! This is a deliberate strategy from the Haitian state, because changing the names of the companies makes it difficult to trace where exactly the apparel is made. (Jackson & Déralciné, 2010) The documentary makes it clear that the Haitian people do not want Disney to close the factory and run, but to convince the government to raise the wage. In 1996, the average wage for a day’s work in the factory is 28 cents, which is not nearly enough for families to support themselves. Essentially, they are working for credit at the factory. Parents do not have enough money to buy medicine for their sick children, and most go to bed hungry. Laborers are also afraid to start organizing unions, since they know the factory owner will fire them immediately. (National Labor Committee, 1996)
The solution to this problem is for Disney to raise the minimum raise, not to drop the factory and run. The video makes this abundantly clear as disgusted factory workers plead to Disney to come visit the conditions they have to work in. (National Labor Committee, 1996) Even though these laborers are mistreated, they know having a job is better than no job. I chose to represent this object because a social justice issue from the past that is still relevant today, especially after the 2010 earthquake. A report from the Solidarity Center marks that the minimum wage has been raised to about 4.81 USD in 2014, but half of that wage is used for transportation and food. This does not include rent, and due to the immense destruction from the earthquake, Haitians have taken up living in shacks to put a roof over their head. (Connell, 2014)
The people of Haiti are underprivileged and deserve to be helped by the Vincentian community. Through Catholic faith and service to the underrepresented, the Vincentian community can help spread awareness about that the terrible conditions of factory laborers, and raise the minimum wage.
References
Connell, T., “Five years after Haiti earthquake, Workers Still Struggle With Low Wages,” 2014. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/
Jackson, P., & Déralciné, V. J., “Unraveling Apparel in Haiti. Canadian Dimension,” Vol. 44, No. 3, 2010, 38-41.
Langley, W., Encyclopedia of Human Rights Issues Since 1945, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999.
National Labor Committee, An Appeal to Walt Disney Company, New York, NY: Charles Kernaghan, 1996.
National Labor Committee, Mickey Mouse goes to Haiti, 1996. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/lt5quy6