By the Madison, WI General Membership Branch of the IWW 

Bosses wage war to make money and workers are the ones who die in the process.

This fact should be obvious to most people. Yet many workers – along with their supposed unions – end up stoking the engines of an infernal war machine.

While many may secretly question the sanity of a capitalist system that sacrifices them and their children as cannon fodder on the altar of corporate profit, few are willing to challenge the power system behind such relentless warmongering.

It is indeed hard to tell when one war ends and another begins, when the current military industrial complex feeds itself, churning out fresh excuses and victims on a regular basis. The earlier “War to End All Wars” ends up leading to the latest “War on Terror.”

Of course, one’s notion of “terrorism” depends upon who is dropping bombs on whom. Guernica, Hiroshima, My Lai, Fallujah – all now serve as painful reminders of the bloodletting capacity of ruling elites to kill innocent people for their own short term self interest.

Why would working class folks want to go along with any of this?

Granted, there are those directly caught up in the military industrial complex who have few choices left. Soldiers, whether conscripted or recruited, find themselves in a “dog eat dog” world. Factory workers or university researchers may think the only way to butter their bread is to work for the Pentagon. Like selling slaves or harpooning whales, it can be hard to give up a “good” paying job, making anthrax or throwing grenades.

That elites could care less about workers is even more apparent when the latest warfare binge is used to curtail existing labor rights and bust more unions. Soldiers that survive the horror of war to return home still end up treated just like any other throwaway temp worker – dumped on society’s curb and left to fend for themselves. Are exploited Iraqi workers or crippled Afghani veterans really any different from those in the U.S.?

Thankfully, there have always been those who could not sleep with the complicity their work entailed and chose to take direct action instead. Roman gladiators joined slave revolts. Catholic missionaries supported indigenous rebels. French trade unionists sabotaged ordinance in solidarity with Algerian revolutionaries. U.S. sailors sank their own ships to make sure they didn’t reach the shores of Vietnam.

History is replete with examples of regular working class people who have successfully resisted the forces of militarism. Once you realize that the root cause of violence is often exploitation, it is much easier to identify the enemy that is at hand.

Better yet, there are those who go beyond challenging the status quo and are now actively building a new world from the ashes of the old. Destructive activities – like making bombs and dropping them – do not create a hopeful and prosperous future for anyone. Solidarity, mutual aid, common good, cooperation – those are the values around which one builds a better peaceful world. Economic conversion, though, requires cultural transformation. Can we learn nonviolent conflict resolution and ignore the orders to fight each other instead?

One labor union that has always opposed war, and still does, is the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Founded in 1905 in Chicago, many early IWW leaders were tossed in prison or deported for daring to ask why bosses were sending workers to kill each other in the trenches of WW1. Today, members of the IWW are still speaking truth to power - refusing to pay war taxes, joining counter recruiting efforts, supporting liberation struggles against imperialism, and otherwise seeking to halt the military industrial juggernaut in its tracks.

By John Peck, IWW 

Ever wondered why the fair trade label only applies to products from outside the U.S.?

Why are all the fair trade certifies located thousands of miles away from the producers?

How can corporations that are so unfair towards workers, farmers, and consumers in the U.S. get away with selling and promoting themselves as fair trade?

What ever happened to the idea of applying fair trade principles in our own backyard?

Bringing Fair Trade Home to the U.S.

By John E. Peck, Family Farm Defenders

Ever wondered why the fair trade label only applies to products from outside the U.S.?

Why are all the fair trade certifies located thousands of miles away from the producers?

How can corporations that are so unfair towards workers, farmers, and consumers in the U.S. get away with selling and promoting themselves as fair trade?

What ever happened to the idea of applying fair trade principles in our own backyard?

It is pretty ironic to realize that virtually all of the certified fair trade products now sold in the U.S. – coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, fruit, rice, olive oil, clothing, handicrafts, etc. – originate outside the country. This reality appears downright hypocritical when one understands that such a double standard could only exist thanks to a fundamental perversion of the fair trade model itself. More simply put, fair trade in the U.S. – like the organic sector – has come to suffer an acute case of corporate cooptation.

This wasn’t always the situation. When fair trade first came to Madison, WI a decade ago, the new Consumers for Fair Trade group made its debut with community organizing around two popular products – coffee and cheese. Within short order, Equal Exchange fair trade coffee was available in many locally owned coffee shops, and Family Farmer fair trade cheese from Cedar Grove was on the dairy shelf in local grocery co-ops. Back in the early heyday of fair trade, there was no distinction made between imported and domestic items, since it was held that everyone deserved economic justice– coffee pickers in Nicaragua and dairy farmers in Wisconsin alike.

This “fair trade for all” approach still guides much activist work in places like Madison in the 21st century. The Fair Trade Holiday Fair, which has been hosted by Community Action of Latin America (CALA) for ten years running (www.calamadison.org), includes all types of vendors selling both locally made and imported items, as long as they follow fair trade principles. Just Coffee, Madison’s 100% fair trade and fully unionized roaster (affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the only labor union that recognizes worker collectives (www.iww.org) has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding five years ago. Family Farm Defenders has now sold over 12,000# of cheese, worth $50,000+ in fair trade income for struggling dairy farmers. In spring 2005 Just Coffee and Family Farm Defenders teamed up to launch a fair trade school fundraising initiative, enabling dozens of schools to offer fair trade items such as coffee, tea, cheese, and chocolate to parents and children who would rather not have to peddle corporate junkfood.

Unfortunately, the dark side of neoliberal globalization has also reared its ugly head, and in many communities market-driven fair trade has eclipsed all other options. When Starbucks first came to Madison in 1998 to open its flagship outlet on State Street near UW, the manager dismissed fair trade and implied that local coffee drinkers (and protesters) were ignorant of trends in the wider gourmet coffee world. Of course, years later Starbucks has now become the largest fair trade coffee seller in the world, even though fair trade still accounts for less than 2% of its multi-billion dollar business. Like Walmart (which will soon claim the mantle of largest organic grocer in the U.S.), Starbuck’s token effort appears larger than life when it’s the biggest gorilla on the block. Those fair trade advocates and socially responsible businesses, which laid the foundation for “another world is possible,” now find themselves marginalized by opportunistic carpetbaggers.

Let’s look closer at some of the obstacles that now frustrate efforts at real fair trade:

Certification: It is important to have independent third party verification of standards. Unfortunately, much certification in the U.S. has now become a dumbing down exercise for consumers and a costly extortion tactic for producers. Rather than having an informed and meaningful economic relationship as fair trade implies, shoppers have been trained to look for a trademarked logo and put their conscience on autopilot. Certifiers like Trans Fair have sought to create their own monopolies and many would argue have now fallen captive to their largest customers, like Starbucks. In the worst case scenario, certifiers end up running interference as corporate public relations apologists since that is how their bread gets buttered. Conflicts of interest abound, undermining public confidence in the entire fair trade system. Meanwhile, impoverished rural producers are stuck in the position of paying thousands of dollars for a dubious certification procedure that seems more like another version of neocolonial exploitation. As with free trade, many in the South would argue that the North has no business unilaterally imposing fair trade conditions either.

Labor Rights and Living Wages: The primary objective of fair trade is to bring economic justice and workplace dignity to farmers and workers. It would seem odd, then, that the fair trade price for the sector’s flagship product - coffee - has been “stuck’ at $1.26 per pound ($1.41 per pound for organic) for over a dozen years now. A real fair trade system would have the producer in the driver seat, determining a parity price that covered their cost of production and gave them a decent household income (adjusted for inflation). Realizing how wrong it is when a few powerful buyers wield undue influence to suppress market prices, Just Coffee is now paying between $1.56 and $2.00 per pound to its suppliers. A similar situation applies to the Family Farmer fair trade cheese project where producers have enjoyed a 25% gain in their return on rBGH-free milk over the last few years. The $20/100# they now receive is nearly double that set by corporate traders in Chicago (www.familyfarmdefenders.org). Workers at both Cedar Grove Cheese and Just Coffee earn a living wage, plus benefits, as part of the fair trade system. In contrast, Starbucks is trying to bust an IWW-led union drive amongst its barristas (www.starbucksunion.org) and even uses prison labor to bag its fair trade coffee.

Transparency: Another principle of fair trade is democratic accountability, and this is rigorously enforced against producer cooperatives in the South, whose books must be constantly open to public scrutiny. Yet, this rule does not apply to the same corporations in the North who reap the greatest profits from fair trade. Apparently, the commodity chain enters into a black hole of proprietary information once it crosses the U.S. frontier. While 100% fair trade roasters like Just Coffee are proud to post their producer contracts on their website (www.justcoffee.net) and share solidarity stories of the relationships they’ve developed with communities from Chiapas to Ethiopia over the years, this is not the case for a player like Starbucks. Instead, one hears tales of price gouging, corruption, insider trading, racketeering, ghost buyers – all the worst hallmarks of corporate capitalism. Sadly, there is no internal policing mechanism left when the major fair trade certifiers are bought off.

Amidst all this doom and gloom, there are encouraging countervailing pressures. In 1999 the Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) issued a call for domestic standards in sustainable agriculture and this soon led to an excellent collaborative paper on this very topic (www.rafiusa.org/pubs/Social Justice?_final.pdf). A local fair trade network has cropped up in the Twin Cities, involving producers in MN and WI (www.localfairtrade.org), and in August 2006 Organic Valley hosted the second domestic fair trade working group strategy session at its headquarters in La Farge, WI which drew 75+ activists from across North America, including several migrant farmworker leaders. Just Coffee has joined with twenty other ethical fair trade roasters in an umbrella organization, Cooperative Coffees (www.coopcoffees.com), to better pool resources and mount a serious challenge to the corporate fair traders whose only real interest is profiteering. United Students for Fair Trade (www.usft.org) continues to organize both on campus and off, educating the next generation of fair trade consumers, holding would-be fair trade outfits accountable, and building coalitions with other struggles for worker rights, food sovereignty, and global justice. One such joint project is the Justice From Bean to Cup campaign that is targeting – you guessed it – Starbucks.

Will fair trade go the way of organic – just another marketing moment ripe for corporate picking? Or can a grassroots coalition of consumers, workers, and farmers reassert that people still come before profit under a genuine fair trade system. Stay tuned!
 

Resolution on the IWW Starbucks Workers Union

Passed, October 30, 2006, at the TAA General Membership Meeting, Madison, WI

WHEREAS Starbucks baristas have built an organizational presence at seven Starbucks Coffee locations in New York City and Chicago; and

WHEREAS the Starbucks Coffee Company has maintained a virulent practice of illegal, unjust, and anti-union campaigning, resulting in an order of the National Labor Relations Board that Starbucks reinstate workers who were unlawfully fired and cease and desist from interfering with workers’ rights to organize; and

WHEREAS Starbucks has continued to interfere with its workers’ rights, by firing four more workers in New York City for protected, legal union activity; therefore be it

Building off the massive turnout at the April 10th immigrant rights rally in Madison, the Madison General Membership Branch of the IWW will be supporting the call for a General Strike call by the Latino/a community.

Madison IWW members will be working towards turning out as many folks as they can for the convergence on the State Capitol, to be held at 12:00 noon, May 1st. To facilitate this, the branch will be encouraging all local IWW jobshops to close their doors on that day. Two collectivly owned businesses with IWW members, the Madison Infoshop and Two Degrees Coffeshop, have already indicated their support.

The Madison IWW will be urging other workers to call in sick, take a personal day, or whatever, so that "business/terrorism as usual" does not continue. They are hoping to have a visable presence in the May 1st march and rally and have already printed General Strike posters, as well as a flyer with the May Day resolution of the IWW General Executive Board in Spanish and English. Their overaching theme will be: "No Borders, No States."

On April 22nd, Earth Day, Madison area union activists are launching a union organizing drive targeting restaurant and service workers employed on State Street and downtown Madison with the help of internationally acclaimed musicians, David Rovics and Alistair Hulett.

Officially titled, the Madison Downtown Workers Union (MDWU), the organizing drive is an effort to unite thousands of workers in hundreds of workplaces -- taverns, restaurants, cafes and retails shops -- across the city. IWW members believe that in building a union, workers will gain the power to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions. Unlike traditional unions, the IWW seeks to organize cooks, wait staff, dishwashers, bus persons, bartenders and baristas, shop clerks and others across multiple shops and job positions into One Big Union.

By Dana Hooker - Wisconsin State Journal, April 21, 2006

Bartenders, servers, baristas and others who work Downtown could soon be carrying more than your food or drinks. They may also be carrying union cards.

Local organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World union hope to sign up some of the over 4,000 Downtown Madison employees, many of them students who work part time in small businesses - a notoriously difficult group to unionize.

"(Downtown has) a very good concentration of similar kinds of workplaces and ones that are generally ignored by other unions because of the small size and the transient nature of the workers," said Amy Mondloch, an IWW member and lead organizer of the campaign.

But this wouldn't be a typical union, where labor leaders try to get a majority of the employees in a workplace to sign up and form a union.

Industrial Worker - February 2006 

The Madison (Wisconsin) General Membership Branch has launched a campaign to organize the 400 or so businesses in the downtown area. The campaign began last Fall by canvassing the district, gathering contacts in dozens of shops, and is now well on the way to mapping the entire district.

The IWW Downtown Workers Union has opened an office at State and Gilman streets, produced a brochure on Workers’ Rights in Madison, and is working to build a strong union presence among these low-paid, hard-working, unorganized workers. They are working to establish new industrial union branches in IUs 640 (restaurant and building service) and 660 (general distribution), and to build an ethos of solidarity unionism that will give these workers the tools to win some of the good things of life.