While many Ukrainians look gleefully at the possibility of American companies setting up shop in their land with the promise of spreading their milk and honey to the Ukrainian people, the reality will be a little different. U.S. companies might come, but little will change for the average Ukrainian worker and some things may even get worse.
For instance, let us look at a 2011 example that occurred in Haiti, (according to Wikileaks published U.S. Diplomatic cables and also stories that ran in/or are on the following websites: Business Insider, the Columbia Journalism Review and Haiti Liberte).
(Note: Due to U.S. copyright restrictions, you the reader must visit and search these sites yourself.)
According to the aforementioned sources, when the Haitian government tried to raise the minimum wage from .24 cents (5.35 UAH) an hour to a mere .61 cents an hour (13.59 UAH), American companies such as Hanes & Levi Strauss, which are operating in Haiti became enraged and got the U.S. State Department involved. The U.S. Ambassador to Haiti then put pressure on the Haitian President which resulted in a minimum wage of only .31 cents (6.91 UAH) an hour.
The minimum wage in the U.S. varies between $7.50 (167.08 UAH) to $11.50 (256.20 UAH) per hour, as of April of 2015. But, due to worker protests across America, with the latest occurring on April 15th of this year and throughout at least 200 American cities, most states in the U.S. are feeling pressure from their own citizens to increase their minimum wage to $15.00 (336.14 UAH) per hour. At the same time, some American companies and corporations which operate abroad intentionally and actively collude to keep their foreign workers’ wages low, in order to keep their profits high; It is the main reason that they outsource labor to other countries.
The case in Haiti presented above is just one clearly documented example, which illustrates that American companies & corporations do not come to share their wealth in the countries in which they operate and the U.S. Military is also present in, but that they also try to take advantage of the unsuspecting population, exploiting them, with the full support from the highest levels of the U.S. Government. Welcome to modern day serfdom…
