Tico
Almeida
A few months after I graduated from college in 1999,
I took a student-outreach organizing job with the AFL-CIO.
That fall, I spent several months in Seattle speaking
to high school and college students about sweatshop
issues and organizing for the protests of the WTO Ministerial
Meeting. My partner in the student-organizing project
was Cathy Lowenberg, and we were hired to create student
turnout to a labor-sponsored rally and march on November
30, now known simply as N30. Despite a strong progressive
tradition in Seattle, and despite my previous experience
with student organizing through the nation's first
chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops, this
job turned out to be far more difficult than I had
expected. On some of the more frustrating days, I got
a first-hand view of the in-fighting among the member
organizations of the "Seattle Coalition," but
in the end, I was proud to have been one of so many
participants in the launching of an international movement
to globalize respect for workers rights and environmental
protection.
I was impressed with the student activists at the
University of Washington from the first time I stepped
on their campus. In early October I attended a WTO
protest planning meeting, and the room in the student
union was full of well-informed and enthusiastic students.
However, when discussion turned to planning strategy
for the opening day of protests on N30, I first realized
how challenging my job would be. The AFL-CIO, Sierra
Club, Washington Council of Churches, Pubic Citizen
and other groups had already announced that they would
begin N30 with a large rally at Memorial Stadium--
with speakers from all of the participating organizations
-- followed by a large march into downtown Seattle
where the Ministerial meeting would actually take place.
I had assumed - incorrectly - that students would want
to start off their day of protest as part of this collective
effort.
At that first meeting, one particularly influential
student leader stood up to announce, "I think
I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don't
want to march with the A - F - L --- C - I - O." She
was able to elongate each of those letters and add
such disdain to the pronunciation of each that I think
many Republicans would have been jealous of her ability
to express contempt for the American labor movement.
Her proclamation was greeted with many nods of agreement.
The majority of the students seemed to be in favor
of skipping the rally being sponsored by the other
progressive organizations, and instead marching downtown
alone on a completely different route.
As I left the student union building, I tried to find
an explanation for the anti-labor sentiment among these
student activists. Some of the ugly chapters in the
AFL-CIO's history are one possible explanation. Although
the accomplishments of organized labor in the past
century include things such as raising wages and benefits
for millions of workers and supporting the civil rights
movement before most white Americans warmed to the
idea of equal rights for African-Americans, some of
the AFL-CIO's past foreign policy positions have rightfully
been questioned by progressives. One fellow Seattle
organizer recounted that when he was organizing on
campuses 20 years ago, students would refer to him
as a member of the "AFL-CIA," in reference
to Labor's cooperation with Ronald Reagan and other
Republicans in the drive to squash unions in places
like Central America. Also, the history of anti-immigrant
stances by American unions is particularly disturbing.
However, under new leadership, American organized labor
has been building stronger ties with unions in the
developing world and has completely reversed its position
against immigrants. These much-needed changes, along
with outreach to students through Union Summer and
graduate student organizing, has warmed the opinions
of many campus activists toward the AFL-CIO in recent
years. Thus, I think the resentment of many Seattle
students was based on a difference in policy position
on the particular issue of the WTO.
The AFL-CIO's position - along with unions from more
than 150 other countries - was that the WTO should
be reformed, but not abolished. The WTO and other trade
agreements include standards and enforcement mechanisms
(including sanctions) for commercial interests such
as intellectual property rights. However, parallel
mechanisms are missing for the internationally-recognized
labor standards that have been set by the ILO. The
AFL-CIO's push for labor provisions to be included
in trade agreements -- which was actually the position
of the entire International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions -- was labeled by many organizations in the
Seattle coalition as "weak" and "timid."
Although each of the organizations participating in the N30 rally
had its own position on the WTO -- ranging from abolition to "No
new round" to reform - the UW and Seattle Central Community
College (SCCC) students were hesitant to march with any organization
that did not match their position on abolition of the WTO. Over
the course of the next few weeks, their plans shifted back and
forth between participating in the rally and boycotting it all
together. In the end, the fact that they could not secure the
police permits for a separate march route, as well as reiterated
invitations by many of the other organizations, led to a compromise:
the UW and SCCC students would skip the rally and instead organize
their own series of speeches at a site away from Memorial Stadium,
but they would then meet up with the other organizations and march
together towards downtown Seattle.
The interesting thing is that the harsh feelings towards
organized labor seemed to be only a local Seattle student
phenomenon. Two national student organizations, United
Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and Student Environmental
Action Coalition (SEAC), both sent many student representatives
to the rally at Memorial Stadium. Again, the policy
stance of these organizations is a likely reason: The
official USAS position paper on the WTO was very internationalist,
and explicitly supported the ICFTU's position on linking
trade and labor rights, whereas the local students
wrote an extremely isolationist policy position paper
that called for an end to all current and future trade
agreements. However, despite the official position,
there were still divergent opinions about the reform/abolish
question among students in groups like USAS. Yet, some
USAS students who disagreed completely with the AFL-CIO's
reform position attended the Memorial Stadium rally
anyway because, as one student told me, "after
paying quite a bit of money to fly all the way to Seattle,
I'd rather attend a rally where the speakers will be
union activists from across the globe as opposed to
a rally where the speakers will be mostly white 20-year-olds
just like me."
At other campuses, such as Seattle Pacific University
and the University of Washington-Tacoma, as well as
at many high schools, I encountered much less resentment
towards the AFL-CIO and a greater openness towards
attending the Memorial Stadium rally. During my time
in Seattle, I gave more than 50 classroom presentations
-- ranging from small high school classes to large
college lectures -- in which I recounted my experiences
visiting sweatshops in Central America and combined
that narrative with an argument in favor of linking
labor standards with trade agreements. For many of
these presentations, the teacher or professor had also
invited speakers from other organizations, so at times
I was joined by speakers on my left who argued against
all international trade and at times I was joined by
speakers on my right who argued that the international
trading system should not include rules for workers'
rights or the environment.
I'm not sure what percentage of students to whom I
gave a presentation attended the UW student rally vs.
the Memorial Stadium rally vs. neither, but I think
that my most valuable contribution to the student discussions
that went on across Seattle during those months was
a challenge to many students to think of the trade
debate in a different way. In some of the classrooms
or lecture halls, the teacher or professor would begin
by announcing that students would be hearing from both
the "pro-trade" and "anti-trade" sides
of the debate; And I really enjoyed being able to begin
my presentation by arguing that the AFL-CIO and ICFTU,
the organizations I was representing, didn't really
fit into either of those categories. I hope that the
effect of these class discussions was to let more students
-- whether they were activists or not -- know that
there is a third option that combines the expansion
of international trade along with enforceable rules
for labor rights.
My most frustrating experience came just a few days
before N30. Cathy Lowenberg and I had arranged for
the AFL-CIO to pay for two buses to pick up 100 students
at UW-Tacoma and bring them directly to Memorial Stadium
for the rally and then drive them back to their campus
at the end of the day. Without this help, many of these
students probably would not have been able to attend
the protests in Seattle, and the AFL-CIO was happy
to expand the range of people that could participate.
However, just days before the event, we received a
call from one of the lead UW-Tacoma students in order
to inform us that they had been convinced by the Public
Citizen student organizers to boycott the Memorial
Stadium event and attend the smaller UW student rally
instead. This made for quite an embarrassing situation
for Cathy and me; at the daily morning meeting at which
all of the AFL-CIO organizers announced how many more
people they had gotten signed up to attend the rally,
we had to announce that we 100 less. It was also quite
disturbing that one of the coalition partners, which
had endorsed the Memorial Stadium rally and even had
a speaker there, was willing to spend its resources
trying to convince people to attend one event versus
another rather than trying to increase the total number
of people who would turn out. Luckily, by the day before
N30, we had convinced the UW-Tacoma students to change
their minds and they came to Memorial Stadium.
The first half N30 was quite inspirational. It used
to be that the politics of trade pitted American workers
against foreign workers in an "us vs. them." But
the 35,000 individuals who gathered at Memorial Stadium
on that Tuesday heard something very different. We
heard workers and unions from rich and poor countries
alike stand together and say, "We want rules for
workers' rights to be integrated into the global economy." There
was a speech given by a worker from the US, a worker
from Mexico and a worker from South Africa, together.
There were also speeches from workers' advocates and
union leaders from Malaysia, Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean,
Central America, as well as from the US, Canada and
Europe: all of them in solidarity with the same demand
for the core labor standards to added to the WTO rules
and to be linked to all trade accords. As Zwelinzima
Vavi, of the South African trade union confederation,
argued at the massive rally, we want to "link
worker rights to trade rules to change the balance
of forces for workers in the developing countries."
After the rally, the UW and SCCC students -- with
amazing street puppets and enormous signs in hand --
all joined in and began the march towards the Ministerial
Meeting together with the other protest groups. I was
so glad that this happened. Despite our disagreements
on highly technical points about the WTO, all of the
groups that made up the Seattle Coalition agreed that
the current set of trade policies were hurting workers,
consumers, farmers and the environment, and for the
first few miles of the march, we walked together in
opposition to the status quo of trade policy.
Eventually, the marchers split in two directions:
tens of thousands heading towards the WTO meeting with
the hopes of "shutting it down;" and other
tens of thousands favoring a peaceful sit-down protest
in the streets surrounding the hotel where many of
the WTO delegates were stuck waiting while the events
played out further downtown. This second action was
particularly important because it created a safe protest
option for families who had brought children, for senior
citizens, and for those who hoped to reform, but not
abolition the international trade system.
A few blocks away from this sit-down protest, members
of the anarchist "Black Block" were beginning
to smash windows and light fires. The Seattle Police
Department was beginning its crackdown on both the
violent and non-violent protestors. And I imagine that
at that point, any journalists who had written news
stories about the international union solidarity witnessed
at Memorial Stadium just a few hours earlier were scrapping
those stories in favor of accounts of the storming
of Starbucks or NikeTown.
In the end, I think it was the series of teach-ins
and marches and peaceful protests - at times with slightly
different messages, but with a common goal of democratizing
the global economy - that made the "Battle of
Seattle" such an important event. Those who focused
only on broken glass, tear-gas and rubber bullets missed
the story entirely.
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