DAY ONE | DAY TWO | DAY THREE | DAY FOUR | WRAP UP
--Larry Fahn, Sierra Club President
Our groundbreaking Sierra Club/Steelworkers CAFTA education
tour of the Pacific Northwest really started to show results by midday today,
with a flurry of announcements from Congressional offices.
The day started early as Steelworkers' boss Dave Foster and I appeared for
an 8:00 morning interview with Lynn Benson, who hosts a highly rated
drive-time radio show on KLAY, an AM station in Tacoma. Just as we were calling in at 7:50 I received a call from Congressman Earl
Blumenauer who wanted to thank Dave and me for making it to his trade forum
at the University of Portland on Monday.
The KLAY interview, scheduled for 10 minutes, lasted for nearly half an hour
as the host probed into the reasons why extending the NAFTA investment
provisions to Central America would perpetuate the devastating "race to the
bottom" in terms of labor and environmental standards, and threaten some of
Washington's most important environmental laws.
Next we drove to Everett, Washington for a district meeting with Congressman
Rick Larsen's Chief of Staff, Jeff Bjornstad. I had joined Sierra Club's
senior trade representative Margrete Strand for a meeting with Larsen in his
DC office last month, and he was quite reticent then to take a position on
CAFTA but promised to study our materials closely. During the course of
this morning's meeting Bjornstad left the room and returned a few minutes
later to announce that Rep. Larsen was joining four of his centrist "New
Democratic Coalition" colleagues, and coming out in opposition to CAFTA!
Two of those colleagues, Ellen Tauscher of California, and Adam Smith of
Washington, had been targets of the Sierra Club and Steelworkers'
collaborative effort. This was the kind of news we had been hoping for this week, and we left
Larsen's office with smiles all around.
We had a lunch meeting at a funky Seattle diner with popular Page 2
columnist Joel Connelly of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Joel seemed
genuinely impressed with the degree of cooperation on display between one of the
country's largest manufacturing unions and its most venerable and
influential environmental group. Although he regaled us with stories of
early Sierra Club conservation efforts in Alaska and tales of early
Seattle newspaper strikes, he was particularly interested in our take on
the politics of trade and the chances that we could actually derail the
latest installment of Bush's "free trade" agenda.
Then it was downtown for an editorial board meeting with The Seattle Times.
As is often the case with major dailies, these guys seemed conservative,
gruff and initially hostile. As the meeting progressed they became quite
engaged and seemed to really appreciate our position on the spiralling
budget and trade deficits under NAFTA, the increase in outsourcing of jobs,
and the threat to state sovereignty by NAFTA-like provisions that could
overturn health, food safety and environmental regulations. The meeting
ended on a friendly note when the editorial page editor announced that his
wife's 81-year-old uncle had just joined the Steelworkers as an associate
member. We responded by telling how at last night's town hall meeting
in Fife, several Steelworkers joined the Sierra Club, and some Sierra Club
members signed up as associate Steelworkers. We left cautiously optimistic
that we had changed some minds about CAFTA.
That optimism was reinforced about half an hour later, when one of the
Times editors phoned to let us know that Congressman Brian Baird (the
former Sierra Club Group Chair, whose office we had visited yesterday in
Vancouver) had just announced that he too was joining the opposition to
CAFTA! By now we were ecstatic. Four Congressman had turned our way in two days !!
Back at the hotel we worked on a new joint press release and made a series
of phone calls to Representatives Smith, Larsen, Baird and Tauscher, and
also to Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Artur Davis of Alabama to extend our
personal thanks for their wisdom and courage to come out early against
CAFTA.
The day was capped up by a great reception at the Sierra Club's Seattle
office where field rep Roger Singer had gathered a large group of
volunteers and an impressive Mexican buffet of tacos, guacamole and beer to
celebrate our interim CAFTA results, and the great success of the Cascade
Chapter in the state legislature in Olympia, capped off by the passage of
the nation's second "clean car bill," that will reduce greenhouse gas
emissions of all cars sold in the state.
We're on a roll in Washington!
...
--Dave Foster, Director, USW, District #11
Today we were rewarded for all the hard work of our organizers, members and volunteers! Representatives Smith, Larsen, and Baird all announced their opposition to CAFTA. We were sitting in Representative Rick Larsen's office when their announcement was released. All the telephoning, the leafletting, petitioning, and the organizing for the Sierra Club/Steelworker tour paid off.
The Democratic congressional delegation from Washington and Oregon has played a key role in past trade debates, often delivering the decisive votes in getting trade agreements ratified. However, the flagging job statistics in the Northwest, concern about the loss of environmental standards, and overall concern about the direction of the Bush administration and its lack of regard for keeping American workers in the global economic game has convinced these key lawmakers to send CAFTA back to the drawing table.
This was a great victory for workers and environmentalists today. And it couldn't have happened without the foresight of the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers to join together to create one powerful message.
My hat is off to Larry Fahn, Board President of the Sierra Club and to Susan Knight of the Club's Responsible Trade Program. USW associate member organizer Joel Hanson and communications specialist Maurice Henderson did yeoman's work along with many other local organizers and volunteers from both organizations. As always, the Fair Trade Coalition was front and center in the activity along with Global Trade Watch.
I'm headed back to Minnesota now while Larry and his crew carry on the fight for one last night of activities!
Photos: Susan Knight/Sierra Club collection; all rights reserved.
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