Congress doubles the industrial wage and garment workers are exempted

Haitian law tied the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, and manufacturers working under contract to American firms pressed the government to amend it. In 2009, after a run of protests, the Haitian Congress agreed to lift the daily minimum for industrial workers from seventy gourdes, about one dollar sixty nine, to two hundred gourdes, about four dollars eighty two. Apparel workers did not receive it. The Association des Industries d'Haiti and its partners abroad negotiated a separate figure for the garment sector of one hundred and twenty five gourdes, three dollars a day, with the remainder phased in to October 2012. By 2014 the legal minimum stood at two hundred and twenty five gourdes. The Solidarity Center put the daily cost of living at one thousand and six gourdes, which left a worker on the legal wage earning about a quarter of it.

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.

Haitians began settling in New York City between 1915 and 1934, during the American occupation of Haiti. A larger flow came between 1957 and 1971 under Francois Duvalier and his son, and boat arrivals began around 1972. The early leadership expected to go home. It ran hometown associations aimed at conditions in Haiti and at removing the Duvaliers, and it discouraged members from spending time on American politics, which it treated as a distraction. The habit outlasted the reason for it. When Yvette Clarke gave up her city council seat after winning election to Congress, ten Haitian candidates entered the race for it. Activists asked for a single agreed candidate to stop the vote fragmenting and nobody withdrew. Mathieu Eugene won that seat in 2007 and became the first Haitian American to hold elective office in the city. Clyde Vanel became the second in 2016, in a New York State Assembly race.