Storm Is Brewing in Seattle Over Trade

Judging from the fierce debate being waged in church basements, labor temples and City Hall, this laid-back home for Gore-Tex-clad, latte-sipping software developers has become the front line in a battle over the fate of civilization.

The incongruous occasion for such excitement is a meeting about trade: cotton tariffs, insurance markets and the like.

The landmark meeting of the World Trade Organization doesn’t begin here until Nov. 30, but in a real sense it is already underway. For months, the citizens have been passionately lobbied for and against the WTO by activists and officials from near and far.

There is street theater, guerrilla training and mudslinging. The White House has dispatched Cabinet secretaries here to sing the praises of trade. The Internet sizzles with protest rhetoric. The City Council holds forth on Burmese human rights.

And Seattle police are on alert, given the riots that have erupted in Geneva and other cities where the WTO has met recently.

Protesters are headed here from around the globe, including France’s anti-McDonald’s crusader Jose Bove and India’s feminist author Vandana Shiva, and there are rumors that militant groups in London and elsewhere plan to infiltrate the nonviolent protests.

It’s a commentary on the profound change afoot in the world economy that a gathering of trade bureaucrats has become an international magnet for protesters and a street-level referendum on the power of the WTO.

It is also a commentary on Seattle, the most trade-dependent city in the nation but also a bastion of earnest liberalism where the trade-offs between jobs and, say, sea turtles don’t sit well with everyone. In a city known for progressive politics, this debate has fostered new, and not entirely comfortable, marriages among those opposed to the forces of globalism.

“This is the kind of stuff that can cause a Republican law-and-order politician to march in the streets with the Socialists,” says King County Councilman Brian Derdowski, an iconoclastic Republican who has become an outspoken WTO critic.

When the trade ministers of 135 nations descend on the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, there will be at least 750 accredited organizations on the sidelines--versus 12 in Uruguay in 1986, the last time a round of trade talks was launched. Tens of thousands of unofficial types are also expected.

WTO opponents insist they are not attempting to blacken Seattle’s reputation or turn the gathering into a millennium version of Chicago 1968, when the Democratic National Convention became the site of a bloody brawl between anti-war protesters and police officers.

But they consider this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to draw the world’s attention to what they consider the dark side of globalism: a laundry list of sins such as Third World debt, overlogging of tropical rain forests, child labor, the safety of bioengineered food, even the transport of dangerous pests in ship ballast water.

“We need to have environmental rights, consumer protections and labor rights protected just like intellectual property rights,” says Michael Ramos, an official at the Washington Assn. of Churches, which is organizing a religious procession that will culminate in a giant circle of hands around the convention center.

In the forefront are labor and environmental activists, traditional supporters of the Democratic White House, which has been rotating Cabinet secretaries in and out of Seattle to try to defuse the tensions.

But when Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Carol Browner and Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman came to town last month, angry hecklers shouted them down.

An effort by the King County Council to offer a simple welcome to the WTO delegates turned into a high-stakes poker game, with council members being heavily lobbied by business leaders, Democratic Party heavyweights and labor and environmental groups.

The final result was a halfhearted resolution offering a carefully worded plea for “free and fair” international trade and a “respect for basic human values.”

Even candidates for five seats in this month’s Seattle City Council race were forced to take sides, with half of them promising to join the protesters on the streets.

This rising clamor has tested the patience of the Seattle host committee, which has organized a series of public events before and during the WTO meeting for critics to debate the issues.

Led by Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp., Seattle’s business elite has ponied up millions of dollars to host 5,000 WTO delegates, officials and journalists, ensuring their city’s moment of global glory. But large corporations from other parts of the country, either uninterested or anxious to steer clear of the mudslinging, are balking, leaving the host committee $3 million short of the $9.2 million it needs with just a few weeks left.

And media-savvy activists--from Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen to the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society--have proved to be formidable adversaries, even inviting the media to watch them train would-be demonstrators in scaling skyscrapers and chaining themselves to buildings.

Lacking the big bucks of their corporate-backed opponents, these groups have used creative acts of rebellion and the Internet to spread the word.

Shortly after the official WTO Web site was established (www.wtoseattle.org), a counter site appeared with a similar address (www.seattlewto.org) to give viewers instructions on how to join the “mobilization against corporate globalization.”

In another sabotage attempt, fliers bearing the WTO logo were distributed to Seattle businesses inviting them to apply to the host committee for reimbursement for lost sales during the meeting. No such program exists, muddying the picture for store owners already worried that the WTO meeting will scare away holiday shoppers.

Noah Kenneally is a 24-year-old member of a street theater group that is building giant puppet caricatures of world leaders and anti-trade heroes. In one popular depiction, the WTO is a huge octopus whose tentacles are strangling clean air, old-growth forests and workers of the world.

“People putting their bodies on the line are taking risks, but we can also do it in a festive and celebratory way,” says the soft-spoken Canadian, who is volunteering full time in the crowded Seattle office of the Direct Action Network, a leading anti-WTO group.

Ray Waldmann, the Boeing executive on loan to oversee the host committee’s largely volunteer operation, is convinced many of the WTO’s critics would prefer attention-getting stunts to a true debate on the issues.

The exasperated executive, echoing concerns expressed by many Seattle leaders, fears decorum will give way to chaos when the WTO delegates arrive. He predicts that will leave many foreign officials even more determined not to give in to the democratic clamor.

“If demonstrators trash the city, that will backfire,” Waldmann warns. “If the demonstrators stop the cars of foreign diplomats and throw eggs, it will make them less willing to listen.”

Here in Washington, the many faces of trade are much more than an academic debate.

Seattle Mayor Paul Schell sees both the promise and pain of trade and the pressures it creates. Cross Lake Washington and you drive through prosperous waterfront neighborhoods populated by Microsoft millionaires. But Seattle’s high-tech boom has dramatically pushed up home prices and other living costs, contributing to the shortage of affordable housing and long lines at food banks.

Schell hopes the WTO meeting will launch a global discussion of ways to improve a trading system that, while far from perfect, is a “reality, not an option.”

“Who can be for child labor?” he asks. “But if the [alternative] is nobody eats, we must come up with another way to put money into the economy.”

As the headquarters for big-time exporters such as Boeing, Microsoft and Weyerhaeuser Co., this state depends on trade for nearly 1 in 3 jobs, the highest ratio in the country, according to a recent study by the University of Washington.

WTO advocates, such as the Washington Council on International Trade and Washington State China Relations Council, argue that expanded trade will create markets for Boeing aircraft and eastern Washington wheat and help developing countries produce low-cost goods to fill America’s Christmas stockings.

But this picturesque region of forests and fishing villages also boasts some of the nation’s most powerful, and militant, labor unions and environmentalists, who decry the export of jobs to nations with low wages, lax environmental standards and dubious human rights records.

“The rest of the world thinks all Americans are consumers and all we care about is lower costs,” says Ron Judd, executive secretary treasurer of the King County Labor Council. “But we care about environmental quality. We care about community standards. This should not be a race to the bottom.”

This tug of war between economic self-interest and social and political concerns can be viewed through the eyes of Bill Johnson, president of the Machinists District Lodge 751.

He represents 35,000 hourly workers at Boeing, the giant aerospace firm locked in a bitter competition with Europe’s Airbus Industries. Since the first of last year, Boeing, which now employs 202,000 people worldwide, has slashed 36,600 jobs.

Boeing wants to get China, one of the world’s fastest-growing airplane markets, into the WTO, where it would be forced to reduce barriers to foreign firms. But U.S. unions are strongly opposed to China’s entry until it allows independent unions to operate and improves working conditions.

“It puts us in a difficult spot,” admits Johnson, who is encouraging his members to join the WTO protests. “I want to be conscious of the things happening in other parts of the world, but I also want to be conscious about Boeing’s ability to sell airplanes.”

So far, such differences have played out here in a mellow, congenial fashion, an attitude as much a part of the Northwest as sodden skies and Chinook salmon.

After all, this is a city where the police have been known to lend protesters their megaphones so they can get their points across more clearly. During a trade demonstration here in 1993, protesters shattered pieces of glass as a show of discontent--and then carefully cleared away the shards.

But Seattle police are budgeting $6 million to cover additional officers and overtime and a stockpile of tear gas and other crowd control equipment.

Assistant Police Chief Edward Joiner expects his biggest headaches to be juggling motorcades, managing traffic congestion and maintaining buffer zones between supporters of countries with strong historical animosities, such as India and Pakistan.

But he also warns protesters, foreign or domestic, not to mistake Seattle’s open arms for an invitation to chaos.

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CONFLICT OVER LABOR

Third World nations balk at Western bid to put workplace concerns on agenda. C1