The Rise and Fall of the Haitian Labor Movement

The story of organized labor in Haiti so far has been a short and unhappy one. Trade unions have had a role to play only during the short period between the 1946 elections that made Dumarsais Es t ime president and 1963, when Francois Duvalier dissolved the organized labor movement . The budding unions were wiped out of existence before they had really accomplished anything. In the present chapter we will deal with the rise and fall of the Haitian labor movement. We will try to find out why and how the movement surfaced in 1946, what role it played during the subsequent decade-and-a-half, how it was silenced, and why the movement failed.