Report from Seattle

AFL-CIO Marches Against WTO

by Charles Walker

The following eyewitness report from Seattle is followed by two commentaries by the author assessing perspectives and divergent currents within the tentative new alliance between labor and anti-globalization activists.

The AFL-CIO strategists had a bold game plan. Hold a mass rally of unionists and their allies at a large Seattle stadium, march to the meeting site of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and then hold a “Silent Sit-Down,” blocking the entrances and preventing easy access for the 3,000 WTO delegates.

In effect they would shut down the WTO opening sessions. Surely, tens of thousands of union sit-downers on Seattle’s damp streets and sidewalks would have been vividly dramatic. Perhaps dramatic enough to gain the attention of the corporate media and put the spotlight on organized labor’s demands regarding the WTO. As it was, the AFL-CIO rally and march, as well as the speeches by union officials, were greatly under-reported by the big business media.

The march was held on November 30. The next day Seattle’s main paper, the Post-Intelligencer, ran a smallish union rally article on its fourteenth page. In an overview article, the next day the New York Times devoted only the four final paragraphs of its article about Seattle to the AFL-CIO actions, again on the fourteenth page.

Perhaps the sit-down idea was taken from an earlier page in labor history, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Or perhaps from the more recent Tiananmen Square sit-down that challenged Peking’s ruling elite. Perhaps not. In any event the little publicized “Silent Sit-Down” didn’t come off. Why isn’t clear. Perhaps the Seattle cops’ earlier skirmishes with young alienated men and women and the youth’s many sympathizers made the organizers cautious. Perhaps the organizers didn’t have enough monitors on the march route to coordinate a large-scale action.

Or maybe it was simply that the organizers didn’t do a good job. That’s suggested by the unusual occurrence of having key labor representatives, including AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, deliver their stadium speeches after more than half of the marchers had left to begin the march. Actually, only a rear-guard of a thousand or less were present to hear Sweeney, the rally’s final speaker.

The many international presidents on the rally rostrum, from Steven Yokich (Auto Workers) to Jerry McEntee (AFSCME), to James P. Hoffa (Teamsters) and John Sweeney, sounded much alike. Even the most leftist, such as ILWU head Brian McWilliams, who correctly said that workers’ interests transcend local and national boundaries, called for “fair trade” instead of “free trade,” as though profit-driven, capitalist international trade, should be as “fair” to workers as domestic bosses and their capitalistic commerce are, and that workers should settle for that.

The union tops also called for a seat at the WTO table, as though they would act in workers’ best interests, unlike when they join labor-management groups, and tripartite set-ups consisting of labor, bosses, and government officials that invariably swindle workers of the gains they make through independent, non-tripartite actions, especially when they hurt the bosses in the pocket book.

Like the others, George Becker (Steel Workers) agreed that organized labor should have a place at the WTO table. But he added that if the WTO wasn’t changed, then a movement should be started to get the U.S. out. “Fix It or Nix It,” he proclaimed.

Presumably, such a movement would include the environmentalists and human rights activists, 10,000 of whom joined the march as it moved along. While most of those organized oppositionists do a fairly good job of describing the problems of life under capitalism, they are not as good when it comes to proposing solutions. Many seem to be calling for a return to the status quo of yesteryear. Withdraw from the WTO, many say. But they do not propose answers to the capitalist trade relations and exploitation that would remain. Some seem to be calling for a return to a “mom-and-pop store” type of capitalism, as a replacement for corporate capitalism. Some voice a nostalgia for a mythical Norman Rockwell small town way of life.

Basis for a New Movement

Nevertheless, the basis for a new social justice movement was evident in Seattle. Even a movement whose anti-corporatism is only implicitly anti-capitalist would open a new and hopeful period in working class politics here and abroad. And unlike the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, such a new movement would join together unionists, students, and a broad array of activists. A marcher’s hand-made poster captured the new possibility: “Turtles and Teamsters — United At Last.”

At the AFL-CIO rally the audience, some 20,000-strong, was generous in its applause. It seemed that those speakers who sounded like they were calling for strong actions that included the ranks got the more enthusiastic responses. But no one’s words got more cheers and shouts of approval than that of a Caribbean trade unionist who proclaimed that the rally and march were not just an American union demonstration, but a “demonstration of the world’s working class!”

December 3, 1999