Try this Disney math problem:

Michael Eisner is the head of Disney. He earned more than $185,000,000 in 1996

Remi makes Disney T-shirts in Haiti. He earns 30 cents per hour.

Question:

How many years will it take for Remi to earn the same money as Michael Eisner makes in one hour?

Answer:

156 years

Disney is a multi-billion dollar company, and one of the largest corporations in the world. In 1996, its CEO, Michael Eisner, received more than $185,000,000 in pay and stock options. And yet the people who make Disney clothes in Haiti are not paid enough to live on.

STOCK OPTIONS: the chance to buy a stock for a special price, often given to company managers

Remi lives in a one-room house in one of the worst slums in Port-au-Prince (Haiti's capital). He walks 45 minutes to work in order to save money. He works for a company that is subcontracted by Disney to make children's clothes.

SLUM: a poor area of a city, crowded with homes and apartments in bad condition

SUBCONTRACTED: have a contract to do work for

More about HAITI

The workers are paid by a piece rate system: the company sets each worker a quota - a certain number of T-shirts that they must finish each day. Workers are only paid the highest rate (around 42 cents per hour) if they complete their quota of T-shirts. If they do not finish their quota, they are paid less.

QUOTA: a fixed amount that must be finished in a day

The workers complain that the quotas are much too high. Even the best workers can only finish their quota on two or three days in a week. Remi has been making clothes for five years, but he earns only 30 cents per hour. That is the official minimum wage in Haiti. In total, Remi is paid about $2.40 per day. He said:

"I like my job, but it's not enough to live on. It's not enough to buy food, or to send all my children to school."

One simple family meal of rice, beans, tomato paste and bread costs $2.85. The rent for his house is $5.13 per week.

OFFICIAL MINIMUM WAGE: the least amount by law that a worker can be paid

Protests against Disney

News of the very low wages paid to Disney contract workers has reached countries in the North. The National Labor Committee (NLC), a human rights group based in New York, has started a campaign to help the workers in Haiti. It wants Disney to pay the Haitian workers at least enough to live on.

Among other things, the NLC produced a video called 'Mickey Mouse Goes To Haiti', which shows the poverty and bad living conditions of the Haitian workers and their families. Some of the workers speak on the video. One worker wore a mask because he was afraid of what his company might do to him.

"They don't treat us like human beings," he said. "The quota [of clothes we must finish] is too much. When I go home I collapse. I ask God and the international community to speak up for the Haitian people."

COLLAPSE: fall down from being so tired

Other workers say that they have to borrow money to live, and that they will not get out of debt for the rest of their lives.

"Even on the day I get paid, my children go to bed hungry," said another worker.

Disney wants people to think it supports 'family values'; the cruel treatment of these Haitian workers and their families makes that a lie.

Why do Haitian people work in these conditions?

High unemployment
Haiti is the poorest country in the Caribbean, and one of the poorest countries in the Americas. Unemployment is around 70%. That means employers have a lot of power and it is easy for them to control wages and working conditions.

UNEMPLOYMENT: not having jobs

And it means that it is very difficult for workers to improve their situation. If workers try to form unions, they are demoted or lose their jobs and they are blacklisted.

BLACKLISTED: put on a list of 'bad' workers. Other companies share this list, so these workers cannot get new jobs

When workers at one Disney contract factory, LV Myles, tried to start a union, 150 of them were sacked by the company.

A Disney CONTRACT FACTORY is a factory that has a contract with Disney to make products.

SACKED: fired; to lose your job

In 1997, another Disney contract company, H H Cutler, threatened to move from Haiti to a new factory in Mexico, near the border with the USA. The National Labor Committee (based in New York) sent people to check out the Mexican factory. They found that:

people were forced to work overtime;
workers did not have enough clean drinking water;
access to the toilets was controlled.

ACCESS: letting somebody get to something

Disney won't listen

Anger and protest is growing in the North as people understand how Disney treats its workers. Thousands of American schoolchildren have written letters of protest to the company.

PROTEST: (v&n) to protest is to complain formally or publically about soemthing in order to change it.

But it is difficult to make Disney listen. At first, the company said it did not directly employ anyone in Haiti: Disney contracts out the work to other companies and therefore Disney said that it is not responsible for the wages or working conditions of the people who make its clothes.

CONTRACTS OUT THE WORK: has other companies do the work for them

Later, Disney said that the contractors paid their workers between 60 and 90 cents per hour, although there was proof that some workers were being paid as little as 12 cents per hour.

Finally, Disney agreed to send its own representatives to Haiti, to look at working conditions and wages at the companies it had contracts with. However, Disney refused to allow independent people to check these companies for them. And Disney refused to raise wages, although it could easily afford to do so. A pair of 'Pocahontas' pyjamas, for example, costs $11.97 in the USA: the worker who made it was paid only 7 cents.

A worldwide problem

The case of Disney highlights a worldwide problem. The global economy makes it easy for large corporations to find the cheapest labour. They look for the countries where the workers will accept the lowest wages and the worst working conditions. Then they subcontract the work to companies in those countries.

The contractors, themselves, can make a lot of money and still produce things much more cheaply than companies in the North. The Haitian contractors who work for Disney, for example, admit that their profits are about three times higher than a company in the USA could make. This is because American companies have to give their workers better pay and conditions.

Protest in the North can help

In some cases, such as the GAP* and Nike, public protest has forced the companies to accept that they have some responsibility towards the contract workers who make their products, and there has been some improvement. However, it seems that Disney, whose products are made in about 3,000 factories around the world, has not been moved by the protests.