Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
establish a union. It calls for automatic recognition of a union
if the government has not acted on its application within a specific
time. In practice, the government has readily facilitated
recognition of labor organizations. Unions can and do freely
affiliate regionally and internationally, and they are independent
of the government and political parties.
Collective bargaining is provided for by law and may be exercised
in firms in which a union has gained the support of an
absolute majority of the workers, but only a minority of companies
have collective bargaining pacts. The Labor Code stipulates
that workers cannot be dismissed because of their trade
union membership or activities. In 1997 there were some seventy
unions in the thirty-six established FTZs, which included
288 United States-owned or affiliated companies and employed
approximately 172,000 workers, mostly women. The majority of
these unions are affiliated with the National Federation of Free
Trade Zone Workers, but many of them exist only on paper.
And some FTZ companies, whose working conditions are generally
better than others in the country, have a history of discharging
workers who attempt to organize unions. The State
Sugar Council (CEA), on the other hand, employs workers
from more than 100 unions while it discourages additional
organizing efforts. Dominican workers predominate in most of
the unions, but two unions are Haitian-dominated.
The matter of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic
has been a contentious one. Since the early twentieth century,
the Dominican Republic has received both temporary and permanent
Haitian migrants. Several hundred thousand Haitians
were believed to reside in the Dominican Republic in the late
1990s, representing workers in the country both legally and
illegally. As the result of several agreements between the
Dominican and Haitian governments, numerous cane cutters
were brought in legally. However, most were paid miserably low
wages and experienced very poor living conditions. Many of
the legal and illegal Haitian workers lived in camps on the sugarcane
plantations. Because of disturbances that arose at a
sugar plantation in 1985 in which several Haitians were killed,
the government discontinued the official contracting of Haitian
cane cutters. Reportedly, however, numerous Haitians in
the Dominican Republic illegally (primarily because Dominican
salaries and living conditions generally were better than
those in Haiti) were picked up by the government and obliged
to work in the cane fields or be forcibly repatriated. Haitians
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