Paying Workers: Bad For Buisness in Honduras

A year after minimum wage hikes in Honduras, owners of maquiladoras are making their case for "more incentives" to bring back the nearly 16,000 jobs they say they have lost to El Salvador and Nicaragua where wages are lower. Says La Prensa, business leaders are appealing to the state for various mechanisms to help them weather salary adjustments. Minister of Labor, Felicito Avila, said the most important thing Honduras has to offer business is a nation of law and order (unless you are a democratically elected president). I would point out that back in December the maquila organizations were trumpeting their ability to create 20,000 new jobs for 2011 in Honduras. Looks like the only folks that have been able to tell the future here are the activists that started saying back in the late 1980s that maquilas / Free Trade Zones would create a dog-eat-dog situation in Central America where wages spiraled into a downward trend.

Check out the National Labour Committee's look at "slavery" in Central America. The twenty-four cent per hour DROP in wages in Honduras is telling (from .57 to .33).

Netherlands to Honduras: Here's Your Teeth Back

La Tribuna reports that Holland has repatriated a set of teeth that originate in Copan, and were inlaid with jade and pyrite. Two things struck me about this piece. First, I recently posted on the fake Tlaloc given as a "gift" to the people of San Miguel Coatlinchan in exchange for the real one taken 40 years ago. Second, I was intrigued about the place the story ran - the society pages.

Yep, the tiny and little picture of the teeth was passed up by four pictures of members of Tegucigalpa society present at the embassy party. Little to no information was provided about the teeth, but we do get a close up of Yeymi Avila. As lovely as she is, I was thinking the repatriation of Myan artifacts might come under arts or heritage - not the society pages above the wedding announcement of Armando and Ada.

Oh, and FYI, a quick look at Latin America Herald Tribune states that the teeth were returned anonymously to the Honduran embassy in Holland. No concrete info on how the teeth got to Holland, though I suspect Fritz on Spring Break '78 or some such.