Better Work Haiti: 21st Compliance Synthesis Report
- Garment sector employment grew from about 20,000 direct jobs in 2009 to over 51,000 in 2019, with exports passing US$1 billion.
- Full-time equivalent workers fell by an estimated 25 percent from April to September 2020.
- Nine in ten respondents to a mid-2020 Better Work survey of female workers reported trouble securing their household's usual food.
- In a May 2020 survey, 53 percent of factories had suspended some workers and 40 percent had laid off or planned to lay off more than 500.
- The highest non-compliance rates among the 31 factories were in occupational safety and health, and two companies were cited for freedom of association violations.
- The US Congress renewed the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act, due to expire at the end of September 2020, for ten years.
The HOPE II law requires Haitian apparel factories exporting to the United States under its preferences to take part in Better Work, which assesses their compliance with core labor standards and Haitian labor law and must publish compliance results twice a year. This report covers October 2019 to September 2020. Garment employment grew from about 20,000 workers when the program began in 2009 to over 51,000 in 2019. The report traces the government's COVID-19 measures, including the April 13, 2020 communiqué allowing factories to reopen with 30 percent of workers in rotation, and the results of two industry surveys from May and June 2020. It reports investigations of union dismissals at five factories, gives aggregated non-compliance charts for the 31 participating factories, lists the factories assessed between September 2019 and March 2020, and provides factory-by-factory tables with remediation status.
How to cite
2020, Better Work Haiti: 21st Compliance Synthesis Report, accessed via HaitiDocs, https://www.haitidocs.org/doc/betterwork-haiti-2020-better-work-21st-compliance