From sweatfreepdx at riseup.net Wed Jul 5 12:27:10 2006 From: sweatfreepdx at riseup.net (Deborah Schwartz) Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 12:27:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Sweat-Free-PDX] Sweatfree Updates Message-ID: <2526.sweatfreepdx.1152127630.squirrel@mail.riseup.net> See below for updates on the sweatfree movement nationwide. Locally, we are in the process of rebuilding the PDX Sweatfree Coalition. If your organization would like to endorse the ordinance, please contact me. -- Deborah Schwartz Coordinator Portland Sweatfree Campaign 503-320-2166 (cell) 503-236-7916 (office) --------------- 1) Berkeley joins San Francisco and L.A. as the 3rd US city to allocate funding for a "Sweatfree Ordinance". 2) News from the 1st fair trade town. Fair trade towns require coffee and chocolate that the city purchases for its events to be made under "fair trade" conditions, which is based on price provided to farmers. Sweatfree ordinances are broader in scope and call for disclosure of factory locations, code of conduct which is more than just a wage standard, independent monitoring, etc. ------------------------ 1) Dear Anti-Sweatshop Activists, On Tuesday night, Berkeley became the third city in the United States to allocate funding for a ?Sweatfree Ordinance? that would prohibit the city government from purchasing any and all goods produced in sweatshops. Berkeley joins two other Californian cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, as the only governments to set aside enforcement funding for such an ordinance. A diverse coalition of over 30 labor, faith-based, student, and community groups in Berkeley pushed for ordinance funding. The City Council approved $25,000 for initial funding and vowed to revisit the issue again in December during the mid-year budget review. The Sweatfree Berkeley Coalition, with recommendations from the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission and the Commission on Labor, requested a recurring $60,000 and it is our hope that this gap in funding will be filled in December. Ordinance language is being finalized and will be reviewed by city attorneys in the next few weeks. Council members voiced interest in the idea of a multi-city and state consortium that would operate as a third party non-profit monitor, similar to the USAS-developed Workers Rights Consortium. Until this new consortium is finalized, we hope that the WRC will operate as the independent non-profit monitor for the Berkeley Ordinance. Let?s celebrate this victory and work to pass similar legislations WITH FUNDING in cities and states around the country! For more information, contact Global Exchange Sweatfree Campaigns at sweatfree at globalexchange.org, 415-575-5541 or visit www.globalexchange.org/sweatshops. In solidarity, The Sweatfree Team Global Exchange 2017 Mission St #303 San Francisco, CA 94110 800.497.1994 ext 232 sweatfree at globalexchange.org ----------------- 2) http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16866479&BRD=1675&PAG=461&dept_id=18168&rfi=6 Delco Times Everybody's Hometown? That sounds fair Gil Spencer, Of the Times Staff 06/30/2006 For years, Media has called itself Everybody's Hometown. But a nickname change is in order. Media can now call itself "America's First Fair Trade Town." Eat your heart out, Swarthmore. What, you ask, is a Fair Trade Town? Why, it's a town with a social conscience. It's a town that is willing to pay a little bit more for a cup of coffee or a bar of chocolate in order to make sure the people who picked the beans were treated well and paid a "livable wage." It's a town that cares that the farmers in Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico, who harvested the crops, did so in an environmentally sensitive and sustainable way. It's a town that makes sure that "Fair Trade" coffee and chocolate are available for purchase to residents and is the only type of coffee and chocolate served at municipal functions. "It's so exciting," says Elizabeth Killough, who is a member of the borough's new Fair Trade Committee. Borough councilmember Monica Simpson agrees. "This is just the beginning of the movement here," she says. "We are on the tip of the iceberg." In order to qualify as a "Fair Trade Town" certain criteria must be met. A group called TransfairUSA certifies that the farms where the beans are grown are run in a humane way. No child workers. No slave labor. In the case of coffee, according to Elizabeth, Fair Trade also guarantees that the farmer gets $1.26 a pound for product, instead of the lower market rate of 11 to 26 cents per pound. It does this by "cutting out the middleman." What people end up paying is about what they'd pay for high-end premium, boutique coffees, she says. Today Fair Trade coffees are available all over Media and elsewhere. Of course, you could go to the Acme and spend a lot less on the lowest grade of Maxwell House. Millions of people do. "Americans are noted for drinking the worst coffee in the world," Elizabeth told me. But we are getting more refined in our tastes. And we're plenty rich enough to pay more to help improve the lives of those who do the grunt work of picking the beans. The beauty of the Fair Trade movement is it doesn't really impose costs on products that people don't pay voluntarily. It started back in 1992 in Europe. There are now some 300 Fair Trade towns there. Does the movement actually help the people it purports to help? Elizabeth says it has helped raise "millions of people out of poverty," but that appears to be a gross exaggeration. Not even the Fairtrade Foundation makes that claim. On its Web site, Fairtrade focuses on individual families and case studies to show the good that it has done for specific people. More like hundreds (or at best a few thousand) have had their lives improved thanks to Fairtrade. More could be done. The greatest obstacle poor people from Second- and Third-World countries face when it comes to trade opportunities is the lack of truly open markets. For all of our big talk about believing in free markets, protectionist practices and tariffs here and abroad are still the order of the day. They still give rich countries an advantage, with poor and large corporate interests over the little guys, especially in farming. Alex Singleton, of the Globalization Institute, an early skeptic of the Free Trade movement, pointed this out. "We do not have free trade in farming," he wrote. "Rich countries engage in unfree trade. Developing country farmers are held back by unfree trade, not free trade." Getting rid of tariffs and government subsidies to agri-businesses would go a long way to helping Third-World farmers get and stay in the game. Still, when you think about it, there is nothing wrong with a group that goes out and rates how farmers in developing countries operate and then asks interested American consumers to voluntarily reward their good and hard work by paying a little more (sometimes a lot more) for their joe and chocolate. And there is nothing wrong with a town that encourages it. It was Hal Taussig who brought the idea of supporting these farmers in this way back to Media in 1999. He was among the first to give money to Transfair, the American-based Fair Trade group, after visiting a coffee co-op in Mexico. As the founder of a local charitable foundation called Idyll, Taussig has been anything but. Tomorrow, the 81-year-old leaves for South Dakota, where he's looking to help an Indian tribe get into the wind-farm business. "When I first proposed (Media become a Fair Trade town)," he told me Thursday, "I saw people's eyes glaze over. Now they seem really pleased and excited about it." All that coffee had to help. Gil Spencer's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at gspencer at delcotimes.com From sweatfreepdx at riseup.net Thu Jul 20 17:14:21 2006 From: sweatfreepdx at riseup.net (Deborah Schwartz) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:14:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Sweat-Free-PDX] Sweatfree Update Message-ID: <4005.sweatfreepdx.1153440861.squirrel@mail.riseup.net> Sweat Free Coalition 1) Important Sweatfree Coalition Meeting Come to an important sweatfree coalition meeting for all campaign endorsers and interested individuals. At the meeting we will review initial campaign efforts, plan upcoming events, and discuss continued pressure on our city officials for the adoption of a sweatfree ordinance with funding for strong enforcement mechanisms. When: Tuesday, July 25 Time: 7pm Where: Liberty Hall For directions see: http://www.liberty-hall.org/location.html 2) Sweatfree Campaign Update The Portland Sweatfree Campaign will be featured on the radio!! Tune into KBOO (90.7 FM) tomorrow at 2pm for a lively discussion with Portland Sweatfree Coordinator, Deborah Schwartz and former sweatshop worker from Saipan (currently residing in San Francisco), Chie Abad. We will discuss the campaign underway in Portland and San Francisco?s victorious passage of a sweatfree ordinance. In other good news, the sweatfree ordinance is receiving strong support from officials at City Hall. Commissioner Sam Adams has committed to introducing the measure and almost all of the Commissioners, including the Mayor, have announced their support of the concept. We are pushing for a unanimous vote. Also, our list of campaign endorsers is steadily growing. If you are receiving this message, it is likely you are a campaign endorser. If your organization has not endorsed, but is interested, please contact the campaign coordinator, Deborah (sweatfreepdx at riseup.net). A partial list of endorsers includes: Alliance for Democracy AFSCME Local 189 CWA Local 7901 Global Exchange ILWU Local 5 NALC Local 82 Oregon Fair Trade Campaign (OFTC) Portland Central America Solidarity Committee (PCASC) Portland Jobs with Justice Portland Peaceful Response Coalition PSU Progressive Student Union VOZ 3) National Sweatfree Victories States, cities, towns, colleges, high schools, and even baseball teams nationwide are now sweatfree. This past month, high schools in Vermont, Illinois, and Colorado affiliated with the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent, non-profit sweatshop monitoring organization. Also, activists pressured the first Major League Baseball team, the Pittsburg Pirates, to become sweatfree. Victory for the Anti-Sweat Shop Pirates http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060731/zirintyner Major League Baseball's All-Star game is supposed to be a breezy exhibition of the sport's brightest stars. It's also a place for baseball's corporate patrons to be wined, dined and reassured about the current state of the game. But at this year's All-Star game in Pittsburgh, the party was crashed by a bull-headed group of about seventy activists determined to change the way the corporate game is played. The Pittsburgh Anti-Sweatshop Community Alliance (PASCA) held a spirited rally outside Tuesday's game at PNC Park followed by a march to Roberto Clemente Bridge. The procession was a celebration of something anti-sweatshop activists had never been able to claim with Major League Baseball: Real progress. For several years, PASCA has tried to get the Pirates to address the unfair working conditions in some of the factories where their apparel is produced. For several years they've been treated the way other National League teams treat the Pirates: like a doormat. But as the All-Star Game approached, PASCA's dogged work finally paid off. A citywide debate was ignited when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recognized PASCA's work in a recent editorial that asked, "Would you mind if that Pittsburgh Pirates shirt you bought last week was sewn by a fourteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh during her twelfth hour of labor in a factory that pays her in pocket change?" Baseball's initial response was to go on the attack. In a letter to Pittsburgh activist Tim Stevens, Ethan Orlinsky, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Major League Baseball Properties, said MLB was "proud of the accomplishments of our licensees [who] provide gainful employment to tens of thousands of people, in all cases in what we understand to be full compliance with all applicable labor laws" and asserted that "statements criticizing Major League Baseball and MLBP's licensees for engaging 'sweatshop' labor are without merit." Orlinsky demanded that PASCA supply concrete proof of sweatshop abuses. They were ready. Anti-sweatshop leaders responded in writing to even offering to help set-up a proper mechanism for monitoring and enforcement of labor rights. Bjorn Claeson, Director of SweatFree Communities, a national network of anti-sweatshop organizers that includes PASCA, told us, "It's mind-boggling that someone representing Major League Baseball can make these claims at this day and age. They can listen to one of their own licensees, or probably several of their licensees, who are now publicly admitting to a series of chronic human rights violations." Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Workers' Rights Consortium, which monitors the production of apparel for colleges and universities, also says that there's no longer a dispute about "the central fact that there continue to be substantial labor rights violations in the supply chains of major sports apparel brands." All of this wrangling served to keep the issue in the public eye. On the morning of the big game, the Pittsburgh City Council passed a resolution urging "companies and organizations that...have benefited from the continuous support of this city...to behave in a way...consistent with the morals and values of the people who provided them with the opportunity to succeed." Baseball finally blinked. Larry Silverman, VP and general counsel for the Pittsburgh Pirates wrote to PASCA promising to review the information and give it "proper attention and consideration...once the All-Star Game has concluded." This was a real breakthrough for PASCA. "We aren't against the Pirates, we are against the piracy of people's rights and people's humanity. When we put on a [Pirates] shirt we want to know that it's a shirt we can wear with dignity because the people who made the shirt were treated with dignity. [We want] the Pittsburgh Pirates to be a leader, a league leader, not in hits, not in home runs, but a league leader for justice," said Stevens, who represented PASCA in the negotiations with MLB officials, and chairs the Pittsburgh-based Black Political Empowerment Project. While the Pirates didn't go so far as to sign a pledge to develop and promote "sweat-free procurement and licensing standards," the confrontation with PASCA opens the door for Major League Baseball to follow the lead of colleges and universities that have agreed to adopt codes of conduct and independent monitoring of working conditions in factories producing their apparel. A Pirates spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. PASCA member Celeste Taylor is optimistic. "As the light shines in, the industry isn't going to be able to stand up to the pressure." Anti-sweatshop activists can claim some real progress as a social movement. Claeson described it as "potentially a breakthrough in the anti-sweatshop movement" because the group is shifting its impact from campus to the major leagues. Some of PASCA's key members are alums of the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). "These campaigns are going to be successful when we figure out how to tap into the USAS alumni base [which is] a group of people with a tremendous shared learning curve about this issue... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to win this campaign at this point," said Kenneth Miller, a founding PASCA member who was in USAS at Indiana University. "You do the same kind of bargaining, you do the same kind of creative organizing, only you're smarter and you're older and you have more resources...We can have a direct and immediate impact." Dave Zirin can be reached at dave at edgeofsports.com. Derek Tyner is a free-lance journalist living in Washington DC. He can be reached at derektyner at hotmail.com. -- Deborah Schwartz Coordinator Portland Sweatfree Campaign 503-320-2166 (cell) 503-236-7916 (office)