Over on the Columbia Journalism Review website is an article about a scoop that The Nation website posted, then pulled back (nothing nefarious - they have a partner site that won't be posting it until Wednesday, and agreed that they wouldn't post it until then either).
What's was the article about Well, I haven't personally read the original, but according to the CJR, it was about the U.S. efforts to roll back or carve out exceptions to Haiti's new (as of 2009) $0.61 cent per hour minimum wage.
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
Two years ago, Haiti unanimously passed a law sharply raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. That doesn’t sound like much (and it isn’t), but it was two and a half times the then-minimum of 24 cents an hour.
This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).
From The Nation:
Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”
Pardon me while I scream.....
The CJR is not the only news site that caught this before it went away. There are articles on CBS.com ("Wikileaks Haiti: U.S. pushed to lower minimum wage"), and the Business Insider website ("WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap"). This is only going to grow.....