2016 ITUC Global Rights Index - Haiti

Creation of a union close to the government, works councils in export processing zone, unions discriminated against and crushed: In 2016, the Confédération des Travailleurs des Secteurs Public et Privé (CTSP) sent a report to the ITUC denouncing the collusion between the government and the Front Syndical Haïtien (FSH). According to Jean Bonald Golinsky, head of the CTSP, the authorities orchestrated the formation of the so-called Front, in a bid to prevent other unions from making their voice heard. During the transport strike in February 2015, Joseph Montes, the coordinator of the FSH, strongly criticised the action being led by a platform of trade unions from the transport sector, maintaining that the strike was politically motivated. Joseph Montes is also a director of the state transport company Service Plus, from which he reportedly dismissed a large number of workers in the past, including all the trade union representatives. The head of the CTSP also reported that the nine members of the Post Office trade union committee dismissed in 2012 had not yet been reinstated despite the demand of the Citizen Protection Office (OPC), an independent institution, although set up by the state. He points out that anti-union discrimination is the rule in Haiti, particularly in private sector companies, such as the BRANA brewery, in the banking sector and in the export processing zones, where works councils have been set up – often by the employers – despite the presence of trade unions.

Continued repression at BRANA brewery: Leaders of the Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses de BRANA (SYTBRANA) were threatened and two members were dismissed in August 2015. On 1 September, another employee, Wilson Celiné, suffered the same fate. At the beginning of 2015, he had been given permission to take part in a trade union workshop organised by the Canadian union Teamsters, but also received barely-disguised threats from a manager that his safety was at risk. Not long after, he narrowly escaped serious injury when one of his superiors restarted a bottle washing machine while he was conducting maintenance work on it. On 1 September, Wilson Celiné was dismissed. Two managers deigned to justify the decision by telling him that his profile no longer met the company's needs (although he had been working there for ten years) and that, no doubt, the complaint he had filed against his superior following the accident at the plant had not helped. At international level, the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) sent a mission to investigate the situation at the brewery. The Canadian union Teamsters and a number of other unions put pressure on the brewing giant Heineken to ensure respect for trade union rights at its Haitian subsidiary BRANA.