Wikileaks: US Intervention keeps Haiti’s Minimum Wage from going up to $0.61/hr— raised only to $0.31/hr

I may have to rethink the next purchase of Levi’s:

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year … As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6#ixzz1OKINCcxu

WikiLeaks Already Announces Next “Dump”: A Major Bank/Financial Institution

The next Wikileaks will be about a major U.S. Bank. 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that early next year, a major U.S. bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out.

And now everyone’s clamoring to find out which bank will be the subject of the massive data breach.

Will it be the biggest US bank? Asked Forbes’ Andy Greenberg, who interviewed Assange.

“No comment,” said Assange.

The one clue we get is this:

“With regard to these corporate leaks, I should say: There’s an overlap between corporate and government leaks.”

Perhaps that means it’s a bailed out bank. But really, no one has a clue.

Here’s the bulk of what Assange did say:

Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings.

The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

Early next year, the Wikileaks document, which Assange compares to containing the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial, will hit. 

Obviously this is huge news. We’ll have to wait for more information.

Click here to read the full interview in Forbes >
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-next-wikileaks-will-be-about-a-major-bank-2010-11#ixzz16jDM4fpL