Building capacities of the MAST to ensure labour law compliance in the Haitian apparel sector

The garment manufacturing sector plays a key role in Haiti’s overall economy, and the United States has implemented several trade preference programmes to facilitate trade with Haiti over the last decade. In particular, the US Congress adopted the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II) allowing for certain textile products from Haiti to benefit from duty-free access to the US market. In order to benefit from HOPE II, Haiti was required to work with the ILO to develop a programme to assess and promote compliance with core labour standards and national labour law in those factories eligible for tariff advantages. This was referred to in the legislation as the Technical Assistance Improvement and Compliance Needs Assessment and Remediation Program (TAICNAR). Both the United States and the Haitian governments turned to Better Work in order to implement the TAICNAR programme, also referred to as “Better Work Haiti”. The programme was launched in July 2009, and significant improvements have been made in the factories covered by BWH, resulting in better compliance in several areas. However, non-compliance on freedom of association and collective bargaining, minimum wages, and forced overtime is still rife. There are also high non-compliance rates in relation with OSH issues. These issues need to be further addressed by State institutions, particularly labour inspection in use of the authority powers rec-ognized by ILO’s Convention 1947 (N0. 81), ratified by Haiti. However, Haitian institutions suffer from extremely weak administrative and implementation capacities. The MAST is no exception and has very limited capacity to adequately enforce the law and address non-compliance issues in the garment sec-tor. A needs assessment of the MAST conducted by the ILO in 2009, and follow up consultations with the Haitian constituents, identified the main challenges and the needs to be addressed by the government of Haiti with respect to its capacity to effectively enforce labour laws and protect workers’ rights in the apparel industry and other sectors. Among those, the labour inspectorate, the conciliators and the Labour Ombudsperson lack adequate resources and training to effectively prevent and resolve labour disputes and enforce fundamental labour standards, labour laws directly related to and consistent with those standards, and decent working conditions Labour inspection and conciliation services rely on poorly qualified staff, using obsolete tools and without regular practices of cooperation with other institutions or collaboration with employers and workers’ organizations. The information provided to producers and workers by labour inspectors is incoherent and insufficient in many occasions. The law is not appropriately enforced, given that labour inspectors rarely visit the fac-tories and when they visit, the supervision carried out does not follow a defined protocol, methods or use of adequate tools. All these limitations seriously affect not only the implementation of the BWH in the sense that as the Programme cannot rely on even minimally functioning labour administration services, but also signifi-cantly hamper its impact and the sustainability of its results. The overall project objective is therefore to build capacities of the MAST to better promote compli-ance with fundamental labour standards and related legislation in the textile sector .To do so, the strategy will be three-fold. First, special attention will be paid to the functions of labour inspection, improving the quality and efficiency of services provided to employers and to workers and setting in place a reinforced role of labour administration on the implementation of labour policies and enforcement of labour law. Synergies with the BWH programme will be looked for so that both the BWH assessment mechanisms and labour inspection may benefit from the exchange of expertise. The project will assist the MAST to better follow up on

Project symbol

HAI/12/52/USA

Admin unit

DWT/CO-San Jose

Start date

01/11/2012

End date

31/12/2016

Total allocation

1400000

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

1362529

Development Partners

USA, United States Department of Labor, Bureau for International Labor Affairs, Office of Trade and Labor Affairs

Country/Countries

Haiti

Outcomes

Promoting workplace compliance through labour inspection