Put your holiday shopping dollars to work at Fair Trade Coalition gift sale

November 5, 2012 by

Holiday shopping season is right around the corner. Shoppers looking to give gifts but avoid products made in sweatshops should mark Dec. 2 on their calendars; that’s when the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition will hold its annual Fair Trade/Union Made Holiday Sale.

The sale features products made by workers treated fairly and ethically by their employers or distributors, from artisan crafts from around the world to clothes made by union members right here in the U.S. Items for sale will be provided by Ten Thousand Villages and Union House, the all-American retailer based in Wyoming, Minn.

The sale will run from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Dec. 2 at the CWA Local 7200 Hall, 3521 E. Lake St., Minneapolis.

The holiday sale benefits the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, a nonprofit coalition of 50-plus faith, labor, environmental, family-farm, consumer and human rights groups, advocating for trade policy that promotes social and environmental justice.

“We know that workers across the globe get mutual benefit when they stand in solidarity for their rights, and this event is being held to promote the values of the movement for Global Solidarity,” coalition director Josh Wise said.

Entertainment and refreshments also will be provided. For more details contact Josh Wise at josh [at] citizenstrade [dot] org. Or call 952-828-5474.

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: , , , , , ,

St. Paul Steelworkers pitch manufacturing policy to Dems’ platform committee

August 3, 2012 by

Bob Ryan, a Steelworker from St. Paul’s Rock-Tenn paper-recycling plant, addresses the DNC platform committee.

Eighteen of the nation’s most prominent lawmakers listened last weekend as two Steelworkers from St. Paul testified about the importance of revitalizing the U.S. economy with initiatives designed to grow middle-class manufacturing jobs.

Bob Ryan and David Hallas, members of the United Steelworkers union, addressed the committee charged with drafting the Democratic Party’s platform in advance of its national convention Sept. 4-6 in Charlotte. The Platform Committee met in Minneapolis the weekend of July 27.

Ryan and Hallas offered committee members several suggestions for supporting American manufacturers and the middle-class workers they employ, including infrastructure investments, “Buy American” laws and trade agreements that level the playing field for domestic manufacturers.

“My manufacturing union job at the paper mill has given me a good, middle-class standard- of- living,” Ryan told committee members. “America now desperately needs a Democratic vision for how to address our national and local economic … challenges to keep us a strong economy in the global marketplace.”

Ryan is a member of Steelworkers Local 264, which represents 500 workers at the Rock-Tenn plant in St. Paul’s Midway district. Hallas is a member of Local 7263, representing 350 workers at the Gerdau Long Steel plant, located off Highway 61 and Interstate 494.

Ryan reflected for committee members on what the Rock-Tenn plant has meant to his family, which enjoys a “good, middle-class standard of living” as a result of his job, he said.

But like many manufacturing jobs, Ryan’s has been threatened in an era of global competition, as companies are increasingly able to exploit cheap labor supplies overseas. Rock-Tenn, a paper recycler, competes with companies that collect waste paper from municipalities and, in turn, ship it to recycling companies in China.

“Waste paper is now the largest export by volume to China,” Ryan said. “Instead of exporting waste paper, we should keep it here to create and sustain good jobs for value-added products in the U.S.”

To protect jobs like Ryan’s, he said, Democrats must commit to policies that reward companies for keeping jobs in the U.S. The party’s leaders also must commit to confronting China and other countries that fail to abide by the rules of fair trade, particularly when it comes to currency manipulation and protectionism.

“The Asian tiger refuses to play by the rules of global trade and sees trade as a one-way ticket to our market, without our having the competitive access to their own markets,” Ryan said. “This must stop.”

Hallas offered another suggestion for revitalizing the manufacturing sector: pairing increased investment in public infrastructure with “Buy American” laws that ensure the materials used to build and repair highways, bridges and water systems come from U.S. companies whenever possible.

Hallas talked about the pride he and other workers at Gerdau took in producing the 63-millimeter anchor bar bolts that secure the new Interstate 35-W bridge to bedrock in Minneapolis.

“I remember well that as the steel bars moved from one work station to the next, we steelworkers reminded each other of our skills and the importance of what we were doing,” he said.

Hallas also responded to criticisms of “Buy American” laws – that they create inefficiency and waste, that they could spark trade wars with other countries.

“Most industrialized countries already utilize their own domestic procurement requirements,” Hallas said, pointing to “Buy Canadian” laws and “Buy European” laws in Canada and the European Union. “Providing a preference for domestic content is fully within the rights of the United States.

“As national polling shows, Americans not only support U.S. manufacturers and their workers, but they also favor ‘Buy America’ preferences when their tax dollars are spent on public infrastructure projects. American voters understand what’s at stake: good-paying jobs and the strength of the U.S. economy.”

The U.S. economy’s manufacturing sector was hit particularly hard during the most-recent recession. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry lost 2 million jobs – or 17 percent of its workforce – between December 2007 and December 2009, when U.S. manufacturing employment fell to its lowest level in six decades.

Efforts to stem the tide of job losses took a hit last month, when Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have eliminated a tax credit U.S. employers use to move jobs overseas – and replaced it with a 20 percent tax break for the costs of moving jobs back to the U.S.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fair trade activists to Cargill: What’s the big secret?

July 20, 2012 by

Members of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition protest outside Cargill’s offices in Hopkins.

If free-trade agreements like the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership are in the public interest, then why are they negotiated in private?

That’s the question supporters of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition asked during a July 9 rally in Hopkins. The coalition of labor, environmental and agricultural organizations is mounting a public campaign to pressure the Obama administration into opening Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to public scrutiny.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an 11-country free-trade deal that could eventually encompass half of the world,” coalition director Josh Wise told a crowd of about 50 demonstrators. “It’s huge. It’s big. And the public is being entirely shut out.”

So, too, are journalists and members of Congress. The agreement could create legally binding policies regarding agriculture, workers’ rights and intellectual-property rights – without any input from U.S. lawmakers during negotiations.

Not surprisingly, 132 members of Congress have signed a complaint, addressed to the Obama administration’s chief trade negotiator, that Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have not been sufficiently open to public or congressional scrutiny. Protesters in Hopkins echoed those concerns.

Protesters line the sidewalk outside Cargill, protesting the company’s influence on Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which are closed to the public.

“We could say that transparency is synonymous with truth,” Colombian fair-trade activist Gerardo Cajamarca told the crowd via a translator. “When we’re demanding transparency, we’re also demanding truth and justice.”

Cajamarca and other demonstrators gathered outside offices of Cargill, the multinational food- and agriculture-based corporation headquartered in the Twin Cities. Cargill is one of a handful of companies granted access to – and influence on – Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.

That multinational corporations have been granted access to the trade talks worries fair-trade activists, who suspect the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be written to benefit companies like Cargill at the expense of workers, small farmers and the environment.

“It is lies that companies like Cargill use to impose free-trade agreements,” Cajamarca said. “They have told the world that free-trade agreements are going to bring prosperity and progress and development to the rest of the world. This is false.”

Indeed, the track record of existing free-trade agreements – NAFTA, CAFTA and the Korea Free Trade Agreement, among others – has not been good, particularly for manufacturing workers in the U.S.

Bob Ryan, a representative with the United Steelworkers union, said companies already are flooding the American market with cheap products, made by low-wage workers overseas. Free-trade agreements only make that process easier, and that’s bad news for American workers.

Ryan offered this example: The Korea Free Trade Agreement, he said, enables automakers like Nissan to build cars with cheaply made auto parts and export them to the U.S., where they compete with cars built in the U.S. by Ford and General Motors.

“Ninety-five percent of every car that’s made in the United States, the Steelworkers represent the workers who make those parts,” Ryan explained. “Every car that comes into the United States (from Korea) is one less job for us.

“Companies like Cargill, they’re just out for their pockets – nobody else’s. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care what they do to workers. That’s why we’re here today; we’ve got to stop these rotten trade agreements.

“We should keep these jobs in America.”

For more information on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to get involved in the struggle for fair trade, visit the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition’s website.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fair Trade Coalition plans rally against corporate control of trade pact

June 27, 2012 by

Negotiations are underway on what experts say will become the largest free-trade agreement in the world, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But as important as this deal will be for workers worldwide, it has been negotiated behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny.

On July 9 the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition will stage a rally to protest these secret negotiations. The coalition of labor, environmental and agricultural organizations will take its message to one of the multinational corporations granted access to TPP negotiations: Cargill.

The rally will begin at 10 a.m. outside Cargill’s offices at 9380 Excelsior Boulevard in Hopkins. Activists will call on U.S. trade negotiators to release their proposals and let the public see what its own government is doing.

“The only people who have access to these negotiations are ‘cleared advisors,’” the Fair Trade Coalition says in a flier promoting the rally. “These people are corporate lobbyists, including from Cargill, that have used their financial clout to get in the room. That’s right, corporate lobbyists have more access to laws than our own members of Congress!”

Click here to read Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition Director Josh Wise’s column about TPP negotiations, published in the April 2012 Union Advocate.

TPP negotiations are scheduled to resume next week in San Diego. Nations included in the talks are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the U.S.

The agreement could create legally binding policies regarding agriculture, workers’ rights and intellectual-property rights – without any input from U.S. lawmakers during negotiations.

Not surprisingly, 132 members of Congress have signed a complaint, addressed to the Obama administration’s chief trade negotiator, that TPP negotiations have not been sufficiently open to public or congressional scrutiny.

Drafts of the agreement leaked to the public suggest it will grant corporations broad new powers, including the right to skirt domestic laws and regulations by filing suit before international “trade tribunals” – something Obama promised he would not support during the 2008 campaign.

Free-trade pacts have been notoriously bad news for American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1994, cost the U.S. nearly 700,000 jobs, most of them in manufacturing, according to a 2011 study by the Economic Policy Institute.

For more information on the July 9 rally, contact Josh Wise at 952-818-5474 or josh [at] citizenstrade [dot] org.

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
«Previous Page