Seattle 1999, Creating a Two-Sided Battle

Suren Moodliar: I’d to reflect on your understanding of the meaning and import of Seattle both for that particular political moment and for our current one. In order to get there, can you tell us how you came to be in Seattle in 1999?

Jeremy Brecher: Good. Maybe I could start with a little background? I trace my path to Seattle and beyond that, through involvement with issues of globalization, to the time, in the early 1980s, when I was doing a labor history of the people who had worked in the brass industry in Waterbury, Connecticut. As we were doing this history, the brass industry was collapsing around us. Plants were closing all the time. They were being put up for sale; they were being milked. This industry that had been the lifeblood of the region was obviously dying. I had a colleague who said, “Well, we have to look at the way in which the global economy and global corporations are determining this and responsible for it.”

I said, “Oh no, we’re doing a local study of workers in this community. We’re not going to divert ourselves to a lefty global analysis because this is a unique opportunity to explore and present the real nitty gritty of a working-class industrial life.” Meanwhile, the plants kept closing and eventually I decided that my colleague, Jan Stackhouse, was right and we did have to address what the heck was going on that was making all these plants close.

I don’t think the term deindustrialization was even common yet, but that’s what we were watching. As we dug deeper, we discovered that the companies that dominated the Naugatuck Valley were closing the factories there and opening new operations or purchasing facilities all over the world. They then used that to whipsaw the unions in the Naugatuck Valley into accepting concessions and wage cuts. They were able to tell if you don’t accept lower wages and the other things that they demanded, you are going to be just shut down and not have jobs sitting here anymore. That’s how I discovered globalization. That is what eventually set me on the course that got me to the Battle of Seattle.

Suren: At that time – in the early 1980s – rearmament and a new Cold War was setting in. How did that impact worker perceptions?

Jeremy: Well, I’m not sure I can give you an adequate answer to that. The reality was that the industry had an “Indian Summer” during the Vietnam War because they made brass and there was a huge demand for the traditional brass munitions. The real collapse of the industry began right after that. I started being connected there probably in the mid and late ‘70s and that’s when the collapse of the industry really began. There were tens of thousands of jobs that were lost in that post-Vietnam period and there was no revival. So I can’t really tell you how it relates to an overall politics and economics of rearmament.

Suren: Okay. I imagine then that an early stopping point on the way to Seattle was the writing of Global Village or Global Pillage (Brecher and Costello 1994)?

Jeremy: Right, right. In fact, that was a result of our discovery of globalization. We actually had workers who we were interviewing and talking with in the Naugatuck Valley who said, “If we cut our wages and accept these wage cuts and then unions in other places accept wage cuts, then the companies would come back to us and tell us we have to cut ours again and where’s labor going to end up at?” That’s how I learned about the “race to the bottom.”

The brass workers that we were dealing with understood the idea of the race to the bottom and a competitive lowering of wages and working conditions that would be created by playing workers off against each other. That led directly to the core idea of Global Village or Global Pillage: capital was relocating its operations around the world in order to put workers and workforces and communities and whole countries in a competition with each other. That was at the core of what globalization was all about. No one was using the term yet, as far as I knew, but that’s what was going on. We also had workers in Waterbury explain to us that their employers were moving jobs. For example, I remember one brass worker saying, “My company just set up a factory in Saudi Arabia and that is where my job is … ”.

My long-term collaborator Tim Costello and I have written about labor issues starting with Common Sense for Hard Times in the ‘70s (Brecher and Costello 1976). We were watching this and watching other manifestations of what came to be understood as globalization, and I won’t run through them all now, but there were numerous pieces of what was going on that went by names like offshoring, the growth of the euro dollar market, and various other things that seem pretty unrelated but eventually came to be different aspects of what you would describe as globalization.

The other thing that we thought about in response to that was – if capital’s going global, if production is going global, if finance is going global – how can workers respond to this? We are embedded in a set of practices, mentalities, and strategies that are based on the national economy and fighting capital within the national economy. Suddenly we’re being outflanked and are seemingly powerless in the face of capital’s ability to move anywhere and play workers in different countries against each other.

So we began looking: are there any growth points for a worker internationalism? We were familiar with worker internationalism of an earlier era, but it was largely built around either the idea of a communist internationalism, led by the Soviet Union, and largely responsive to its state interests, or a kind of anticommunist internationalism led by the International Confederation for Free Trade Unions and behind them, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and to some extent the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), if it comes to that.

This was not a model that we thought was terribly useful or that we found terribly attractive on either side. Was there something new that was developing that would respond to globalization? We discovered the first traces of something new with the emergence of cooperation between workers across the US/Mexican border. There was also the rank and file collaboration among workers of several nationalities through an organization called Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE). There were also various other fledgling efforts at new forms of international cooperation of labor, very often in conjunction with other kinds of social movements and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). So they’d function not just as part of an organized trade union movement, but very much as part of human rights movements and other emerging forms of transnational cooperation, people’s movements. As we uncovered those, we wrote about them as much as we could and eventually both the analysis of globalization and the description of fledgling efforts at what we came to call globalization from below, came together in Global Village or Global Pillage.

Suren: I’d like to learn more about the actual networks in which you were embedded preceding Seattle, for example, what kinds of relationships did you have with trade unions and formations? Did you have relations with the emerging Direct Action Network (DAN) and other entities like that?

Jeremy: Right. Well I should say it’s a long time ago. My memory isn’t completely clear and it was a complex story with a lot of crossovers. But I’ll give you the bare bones of what I remember about it. First of all, when we published Global Village or Global Pillage, we did a lot of interviews and talks with people in the labor movement and more broadly, focusing on a new labor response to globalization.

Among the people who picked up the book was Representative Bernard Sanders, Bernie Sanders. One day I was taking a little nap and the phone rang and the voice at the other end said, “This is Congressman Bernie Sanders and I’ve just been reading Global Village or Global Pillage and we’re trying to organize some fights in Congress against the International Monetary Fund and would you do some work for me?” I was totally flabbergasted, but I ended up working part-time for him on globalization issues. That also brought me in contact with another range of people, a lot of NGOs of various kinds that were, first of all, fighting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then fighting the World Trade Organization (WTO) – so a lot of the farm groups, including Citizens Trade Campaign and numerous others.

In Bernie Sanders’s office, I was also working with Brendan Smith who was very young but extremely knowledgeable about the ways of Washington. Although he was less than half my age, he was my supervisor and teacher in how to operate inside the Beltway. Brendan and I put together an omnibus piece of legislation called “the Global Sustainable Development Resolution” in which we tried to integrate all the proposals for addressing problems that the global economy was creating for people and the environment. ¹ We were drawing in the very diverse range of activists and organizations that would be needed in order to support such an effort.

The other personal piece is that I was invited to Seattle for a symposium on strikes at the University of Washington that was a primarily a commemoration of the Seattle General Strike of 1919. I gave the opening lecture, which was entitled “World Crisis and Worker Response, 1919 and 1999.” This was in March 1999, and I tried to connect the world economic crisis that immediately followed World War I with the crisis that was represented by (among other things) the Russian Revolution. I went through the Seattle General Strike and then looked at what was happening with the global economy and attempts by the global corporations to create a new structure through the World Trade Organization and other new institutional forms that were being developed for the global economy at that time.

I don’t want to say that my lecture is what caused the Battle of Seattle (laughs), but there’s a very nice quote from Ron Judd, the Executive Secretary Treasurer of the King County Labor Council in Strike! (Chapter 10) in which he talks about some of the local labor people who were going to that conference and coming away and saying, ‘“In a perfect world, we’d repeat 1919.” The basis would not be “because we got problems with employers in the maritime unions” (the basis of the 1919 general strike). It would be “we got problems with employers on the planet, raping and pillaging the planet, right?” Whether that actually contributed … who really knows? But I feel very good about having set that frame in the talk I gave. So that was another connection.

The other piece I’ll mention is that we made a documentary movie also called Global Village or Global Pillage (1999). We had the premiere, the first showing of it in Seattle.

First of all, it was shown to the AFL-CIO Executive Council that had a special meeting there. We probably showed it in a hotel room and then it was shown in the stadium. It was the first event on the day of the big rally. There’s a joke I make about it. It was shown very early in the morning, like 10 or 11 AM and there were very few people there. It was long before the large masses of people arrived for the event in this stadium. I say that Global Village or Global Pillage was shown before an audience of 20,000, before the audience of 20,000 arrived.” Maybe there were 200? I don’t know. Anyway, that also put us in close touch with developments on the labor side in Seattle and I don’t believe I had direct contact with DAN, but certainly with Citizens Trade Campaign, the Public Citizen people, and the agricultural people and so on.

Suren: So you travelled to Seattle as part of the labor movement, albeit someone with strong connections to people outside of it. In a contemporaneous article by Bruce Shapiro (1999), you are quoted describing the labor movement’s goals for Seattle; they saw it, including the stadium rally, as part of their effort to educate their members about globalization. I imagine that’s why Global Village or Global Pillage was screened there. But what was your sense of the rank-and-file workers’ consciousness? Especially those who may not have been part of the trade union bureaucracy or leadership – what was their consciousness of globalization at that point? Certainly, from your description of the Brass Valley, workers had a fundamental understanding of what was going on, but by the time 1999 comes around, would you say that workers were in need of yet more education or were they more interested in solutions?

Jeremy: Let me thread my way into this. Let’s go back and say that traditionally, since World War II, the mainstream of the American labor movement had been strongly allied with American expansion abroad and strongly supported so-called “free trade,” but American–dominated free trade. Then as other countries began recovering from World War II and manufacturing grew in the rest of the world and became more competitive, that began eroding the jobs of American workers and you had a sharp turn toward protectionism and economic nationalism. They were all versions of economic nationalism, but tending towards the protectionist version of economic nationalism starting at least by the ‘60s and continuing more and more – as more and more jobs were lost.

Then you have two big factors. One is deindustrialization and the very visible loss of jobs, which was often blamed on a version of globalization but often articulated in terms of “workers in other countries are stealing our jobs.” So, an economic nationalist response to globalization was very strong, and I can go on and on in detail about that but in the interest of time I won’t. “Toyota bashing” was the phrase that was used to capture that mentality. Then NAFTA, its passage would put American workers directly into competition with much lower-paid workers in Mexico. It had a huge impact on American workers and especially industrial workers. The WTO, coming in that context, very much seemed like NAFTA all over again or “NAFTA-on-steroids” as it was sometimes described.

But the failure of the anti-NAFTA movement and the failure of economic nationalist strategies meant that workers were open to thinking about some other kind of approach. The approach of we’re-raising-the-floor, extending labor and environmental standards, really was something that was widely discussed, and significant parts of the trade union movement in the United States said, “We have to go down this road. We can’t stop global competition by putting up walls. It won’t work. The global economy is not going to be defended against that way. We have to put a floor under the standards of people in other countries.” I wouldn’t say that it was the predominant opinion, but there was a very significant shift in that direction, and that is what people like Ron Judd believed. Let me segue from that to your question about what were the forces there and what was it like on the ground, and labor and Direct Action Network (DAN) and all that …

Suren: May I interrupt you?

Jeremy: Sure.

Suren: I’d like to have a higher resolution picture of the County Labor Council’s expectations given the context. We have this international gathering of the WTO, we are five years into NAFTA, it’s also the 80th anniversary of the general strike, and we have a city that at that time still had a substantial industrial working class. Was it their sense that they needed to do much more member education rather than say push for particular pieces of legislation or other ways to raise the floor?

Jeremy: Well, first of all, let me say if somebody wants to explore this question in greater depth, there was a wonderful series of interviews that were done and I think they’re available online (WTO History Project 2001). The Judd interview that I quote in Strike! (Brecher 2014) is there, but there’s a bunch more from many different perspectives. You might want to reference that because obviously they have a lot better understanding. First of all, Seattle’s King County Labor Council decided it wanted to do a major educational campaign around these issues in the greater Seattle area.

The thing that really impressed me is they started going out to every community organization, local union, whoever they could find, doing presentations that did not start with saying that this is a threat to your job and your wages. They started by talking about what the new trade arrangements meant for a peasant family in Latin America, and gave particular examples of actual families and villages. They started from that and then they explained the race-to-the-bottom based on that. It was a well thought-out approach to getting beyond a nationalist framework for thinking about this. So they started with education … and it was months before the WTO meeting.

I think their perspective was initially an educational one and then showing labor as a social force that was going to stand up to this and had an alternative approach. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other things were happening and the most important were that the AFL-CIO and some of the unions decided to get involved. How they were going to get involved and what they were going to do, there was a whole tussle over. I think that probably the main, most powerful groups saw it as an attempt to either kill the WTO or influence Clinton administration policy to have labor and environmental standards in the agreement. And they did influence them in the desired way in the end.

Anyway, that was probably the mainstream approach. I think there were people fairly high up who saw it as part of a reorientation of the labor movement both at the top and more broadly. There were people who were passing around Global Village or Global Pillage and showing it at high levels, including to the AFL-CIO executive board. The AFL-CIO nationally put in the money for the big events and the stadium and stuff like that. There was constant jockeying or jostling between the different forces in the AFL-CIO, and the local Seattle people and the national people didn’t have exactly the same approach to things.

But then the Citizen Trade Campaign really pulled together an enormous range of NGOs of all kinds: religious groups, environmental groups and I could go on and on. That became a big diverse force in its own right, and then the emergence of the Direct Action Network was another – an extremely important player in the whole picture. They’re the ones who said, “We’re going to shut down Seattle and by doing that, we’re going to shut down the WTO.”

All of these forces came together. They were all in communication with each other to a greater or lesser extent, but they were certainly not on the same page in terms of objectives, and strategy and tactics. First of all, the local trade union people turned out in huge numbers and that’s why you had 25,000 people in the stadium and tens of thousands on the streets. So that was one force. The AFL-CIO nationally put in the money and hired the big stadium. There were other subsidiary events also and yeah, they had staff. They brought in people from outside Seattle in pretty big numbers too. That was also an important factor.

Unless you had mass mobilization for legal activities, involving a huge swath of NGOs and churches, I don’t think the direct action would have had anywhere near the impact it had. So even though there were tensions and conflicts, the cumulative power of all of them together was way beyond what it would have been otherwise. Environmental organizations, especially the Sierra Club, were a big factor. In the NGO stream, they were probably, along with Citizens Trade Campaign, the strongest.

In the most dramatic moment, the police turned tear gas and then rubber bullets against DAN. But DAN did a fantastic job of organizing affinity groups, with spokescouncils at all the intersections around the convention center and the hotels where delegates were staying. In fact, they succeeded in stopping the city, and through that, stopping the delegates from actually getting to the WTO meetings.

For people in the big rally, there was never a statement from the podium. You had 25,000 people in this stadium and there was never a word said [to them] about what was going on in the streets. There were rumors. People would say to the crowd around them, “I heard that there’s something going on there. They’re teargassing demonstrators out in the city.” Then finally the Direct Actions came into the stadium and went around and started saying, “You people have to pay attention to what’s going on out in the streets.”

When people left the stadium after the rally, AFL-CIO monitors tried to steer them away from downtown and from where the confrontations were. But as soon as they began hearing what was going on, they just went around the monitors, ignored them, kind of pushed them out of the way, and streamed towards where the action was. Thousands and thousands of people poured out of the stadium and into the streets. As one of the monitors told me, nothing could have prevented those people from going that way. I don’t know if he was secretly wishing he was with them and just using that as an excuse. This was a high-ranking AFL-CIO official.

They poured down there in large numbers and meanwhile the police were using rubber bullets and tear gas and the whole WTO operation was in fact completely blocked and prevented from going forward. They couldn’t hold the opening ceremony! They canceled the opening ceremony. So that’s the gist of it. Then the police more or less rioted that night and all transportation was shut down. I had walk miles to get to the place I was staying, for example.

Then basically the next day was still chaos and partially as a result of what had happened in the streets and also the lobbying of the NGOs, the delegates from the Third World got cold feet about the whole thing and concluded they had been sold a bill of goods by First World countries that were promoting this thing, who told them they would get all kinds of trade concessions. These would be basis for the Third World to build their export economies, but then when they got down to actually negotiating, they were not offered anything. They found out that what they had been led to believe was being offered by First World countries in terms of markets for their products was a fraud.

The idea that they were going to get a global agreement broke down primarily over that. Also, Clinton, in order to get some concessions to labor, changed his approach and insisted that they were going to have what came to be called sidebar agreements for labor and environmental standards. Countries would have to agree to these if they were going to be members of the WTO; most the Third World countries hated this. They saw it both as an exercise of imperialism and almost extra-territorial rule over their domestic affairs. They also believed that it would be used as a vehicle for protectionist purposes. It wouldn’t be used to raise labor standards in the Third World, but it would be used to further exclude Third World goods.

The whole thing came crashing down and then there was the police repression; it intensified largely at the urging of the Clinton administration and led to huge popular opposition in Seattle. There was a lot of anger about the role of the police and then the National Guard that was also sent in. Eventually lawsuits established that in fact the police had been oppressive and essentially created what was called a “constitution-free zone” around the WTO.

I think these are the main aspects of the events themselves. Should we go into what it means for today?

Suren: Before doing that I, I’d like to understand the import of those events for people at the time. One strand of thinking is that Seattle was really important to the activist political culture, that it created a layer of people who subsequently, at least until September 2001, would go around the world and challenge the ruling class at its various summits and gatherings. A different, perhaps complementary strand argues that Seattle did not really mean anything for the American people or the American working class as a whole. I don’t happen to subscribe to that point of view, but how would you respond to it?

Jeremy: Well, I think it was a big event and it did a lot to define globalization – not as this wonderful thing that was going to create this wonderful economic growth and jobs and rising standards of living, but as something that was being imposed by global corporations and was probably going to suck for working people. That doesn’t mean that every single worker had that opinion of it, but it significantly changed the framework of discussion and essentially created another side. It made it a two-sided battle instead of a one-sided battle. I say you’ll find an extreme but still perceptive characterization of that in the Shapiro (1999) piece.

There was a long string of other demonstrations that followed around the world. Some of the other meetings of the WTO were actually shut down. There was a significant impact on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings. I think eventually it became a tactic that was repeated so many times that its impact diminished. There were limitations to what came to be known as the Global Justice Movement, where it went and what it could do. It’s a whole other interview to try to spell out all of that. But there are a few things that stand out to me. I think that in terms of long-term effect, the development of globalized social movements has been a powerful and lasting achievement. It wasn’t caused by the Battle of Seattle, but the Battle of Seattle was a crucial node in its emergence. And I guess the great, great, great grandchild of that is the Global Climate March that we had in September [2019], where it was just natural for people to think in terms of a global problem, and we’re going to address it through a global movement. If you went back and looked before Seattle, it would be impressive how little there was of that kind of thinking.

So it made a very big turn, and now it’s almost taken for granted. If you’re going to do something and somebody in another country has the same kind of problem, you’re likely to get in touch with them, and talk about it, and have some demonstrations on the same days, and stuff like that. It’s just commonplace. It was not before the Seattle era. I think that that is the big, big positive.

I think there was not a success in formulating what a global alternative would be. The main kinds of alternatives people thought about were, “Well, let’s go back to national economies and not have all this globalization.” It was not a viable or even useful way to address the problems of globalization.

Another approach was economic nationalism. So, well, let’s stop these other countries from stealing our jobs and ruining our economy. There was always a lot of that in organized labor, but also in the population and in other sectors, and in the political system. We have a sort of great grandchild of that in the Trump administration’s tariffs and economic nationalism. And I don’t think the movement ever really laid out effective global alternatives to globalization, although Tim Costello and I did in fact offer some alternatives (See Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000).

Another major weakness I see is that globalization dismantled a kind of global Keynesian macro-economic regulation that was mostly conducted by the IMF and by the coordination of national economies (mostly through the IMF, although in other ways as well). And when that was dismantled, people hated the IMF so much – it imperial role, its structural adjustment policies – that there was very little attention to the fact that its more constructive role in little things like preventing recessions and depressions had been dismantled. As a result, it appeared that there was no alternative to an economic war of all against all, and there was no way of dealing with problems like inadequate global demand that had been the fundamental macro-economic problem of capitalism since it first invented how to have a world depression.

Our failure to even understand and point out the significance of that is what has led to one global crisis after another, so far culminating in the Great Recession. And who knows what we’re on the cusp of now? Most significantly, the failure to develop any alternative to the Great Recession other than even more austerity and more neo-liberalism meant that eventually we did get another alternative, which is Trumpism – aggravated the class war combined with aggravated national economic war. And that’s what we’ve got to replace globalization as we knew it. There is still, as far as I can see, no extended discussion on the left about what an alternative would actually be. The national framework for understanding these questions is still so deeply embedded in people’s paradigms.

In some parts of the European left, as they just faced one disastrous version of austerity after another, there’s been a move towards a transnational alternative. And I guess there’s one more thing I would say here. To me this problem is completely entwined with the questions of climate change. The most hopeful possibility is the idea of a global Green New Deal, which would establish global labor standards, global minimum conditions of life, and other elements of the Green New Deal. We should have been trying to do this with globalization – as a means of addressing the absolute necessity for protection against climate change. The European developments that I was referencing have, to a considerable extent, been formulations of a transnational and global Green New Deal. To me, that is the legitimate grandchild of the Battle of Seattle and the movement for globalization-from-below.

Suren: Although I’d like to follow the economic thread a bit more, and also the questions around climate change and the kind of social movements that have emerged there, I’d like to take us in a slightly different direction: in a recent speech in response to Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn points to the danger that Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit plans would produce a Britain that would be Americanized, without significant environmental protections, longer work weeks, fewer benefits, less vacation time, a Britain that was a the mercy of “the biggest American corporations.” And he went through a list of topics that are very familiar to us from the 1990s and from the Seattle period. The big difference, however, is that back then, in the 1990s, he was just a relatively junior and isolated member of parliament. By 2019, he had become the Labour Party leader. Similarly, the Bernie Sanders you described of the 1990s, with his Sustainability Act, is today a viable political candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. How do you see that political shift having happened in spite of, or perhaps because of, the ascent of the right? Did the shifts produced by Seattle revive these left-wing figures from the 1970s and ‘80s?

Jeremy: That’s a very interesting question. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but without getting too dialectical, I think that what we have seen is the failure of globalization, the failure of neoliberalism, and now the failure of nationalist, quasi-fascist, and militarized and beggar-your-neighbor economic nationalist approaches. That’s crashing. And the modest social-democratic, or liberal-centrist responses, Tony Blair-, Joe Biden-type responses, are totally useless and washed away, and have no ability to persuade anybody that they can solve anybody’s problems.

That’s opened a way for ideas that had a brief flowering. And then we’re totally overwhelmed by globalization, neoliberalism, and the conservative juggernaut. It’s really the failure of that, and then the failure of Trumpism and its ilk around the world, that’s opening that door. The one caution I would give is that the fundamental problems of a globalized economy remain insoluble at a national level. And so Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn can have the most progressive national policy in their platforms. If they don’t have a way, or develop a way, to address the fact that we’re in a global economy, and find some way to put a limits and controls on destructive global competition and the race to the bottom, their national plans will ultimately fail, unfortunately.

I wish that was not the case, but realism requires that it be said. After all, there were all kinds of proposals, all kinds of approaches in an earlier era, the Mitterrand national policy, Carter’s economic policy, the first years of the Clinton administration. These were all plans for reviving national economies through essentially national Keynesian macro-economic means. And they were all reversed within a year. And the same thing confronts Bernie Sanders and confronts Jeremy Corbyn, should they come to power. So, that piece of the story has to be addressed or we won’t get beyond where we were in the 1980s in terms of progressive national alternatives to globalization.

Suren: And do you believe that the very youthful anti-climate-change movements are useful antidotes to that kind of thinking?

Jeremy: Oh definitely, definitely. And I think emphasis on the Green New Deal, the core ideas of the Green New Deal, which is after all, largely initiated by a youth organization called the Sunrise Movement. I think it’s spread. …  Well, it’s a part of the program of the youth climate strikes. It’s a very youth-based idea or program. I think that, first of all, it’s very, very internationalist, rooted primarily in a recognition that the problems of climate change are global problems, and can only be addressed globally, but also rooted in a set of values and norms that are totally at odds with an economic nationalist approach to solving problems.

That’s another way in which it is a legitimate offspring of the Battle of Seattle. The Green New Deal represents a complete break with the idea that we have to let markets decide these things, but it’s not a nationalist response to it. It’s an internationalist, a common people’s response.