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).

Free Trade Zone Chemical and Waste Storage

KCRW has a Sunday radio show by Harry Shearer called Le Show. In it Shearer "reads the trades" and tells you what corporations are up to as discussed in their own publications. It is horrifying.

I started doing the same back in Montana (before I had heard of Le Show, thank you very much) and I occasionally do this for Free Trade Zone companies. That is how I ran onto ZOLIC today.

While many NGOs dealing with Free Trade Zone issues deal with labor or byproducts of industrial production, a visit to the ZOLIC site shows that some trade zones are storage facilities for industrial waste produced elsewhere. In short, all the waste without even the overture of the insultingly low wage and bad conditions. Check out ZOLIC here and here.