Under a large BMWE banner, more than 30 U.S. and Canadian BMWE members from BN and UP Lodges 144, 159, 309, 389, 757, 1092, 1426 and 1734 as well as their families joined over 30,000 other trade unionists from around the world marching through downtown Seattle on Tuesday, November 30, 1999.

BMWE joined working people worldwide to demand "Fair Trade Not Free Trade" and to protest the World Trade Organization's (WTO) threat to our jobs, health and way of life. In solidarity, the International Longshoremen's union shut down every port from Alaska to San Diego on November 30. Seattle taxi drivers, though unorganized, staged an impromptu wildcat strike in support of labor.

Trade unionists assembled in the rain beneath the space needle to hear AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and others denounce the WTO, then lead 30,000 people in "organized confusion" toward the WTO meeting place downtown. Environmentalists, farmers, politicians and religious leaders joined labor, peacefully laughing, joking, dripping and occasionally sitting down in the street.

"Turtles and Teamsters -- United At Last." This handwritten sign symbolized an unprecedented alliance among groups which have often been at odds in recent history. Labor, enviros, farmers, preachers--all had different primary concerns but all united against the WTO's exaltation of multinational corporate power above that of democratically elected national governments. Rank and filers of various groups picked up a better understanding of and tolerance for members of other anti-WTO groups as they marched, chanted and sang together.

The WTO saw the alliance as a threat, but one prominent member commented "So they got together for a walk. It won't last." An apparent reference to management's perceived long-standing policy of encouraging labor, environmentalists and farmers to fight among themselves.

Senator "fast-paced Paul" Wellstone marched and spoke everywhere. Wellstone compared the WTO to the railroad robber barons of the 19^th Century. Over 100 years ago, protesters--including the BMWE--fought to civilize the national economy with the eight-hour day, the RLA, the RRA, and health care. In Seattle he said "we are here today--a broad coalition--to civilize the global economy--to say the global economy has to work for working families, work for the environment, work for the family farmer and work for senior citizens."

WTO at a Glance

The WTO was created in 1995 at the "Uruguay Round" of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which has existed since 1946. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the WTO consists of 135 countries linked by trade-based, international treaties. Seattle was WTO's first major meeting and the first meeting of trade ministers away from a quiet, cloistered, secretive setting.

The WTO is, in effect, becoming a multinational, corporate-based world government by creating a system where trade rulings can override national, state, and local laws. WTO tribunals composed of appointed (not elected) bureaucrats, meeting in secret with no input from labor and with no appeal process, have ruled many democratically passed laws effectively void as "barriers to trade."

While WTO membership is nationally based, its decisions are dominated by the needs and instructions of multinational corporations. Labor, farmers, environmentalists, and citizens have no effective voice. This means that the WTO strictly regulates intellectual property and corporate patent rights, but has no standards for labor, human rights or the environment.

In the WTO, nations become tools of the multinational corporations. For example, the U.S. government went to bat for Chiquita Corp. at the WTO, forcing several Central American countries not under contract to Chiquita to stop growing bananas.

The WTO already voided U.S. laws that protect dolphins and sea turtles from death in fishermen's nets and told the state of Massachusetts it could not refuse to buy products made by slave labor in Burma. Many more WTO cases are pending, including a challenge to a French public health law banning import of asbestos which kills 2,000 each year.

What's in it for Us

Much of what makes our rail lives bearable and safe is rooted in federal or state law. Our retirement, our wages, our right to work, our health benefits--all of which we take for granted--all derive directly or indirectly from the Railroad Retirement Act or the Railway Labor Act. The following scenario is not too unreasonable.

Every railroad transports foreign-made goods and is thus involved in world trade. Assume a major railroad--a multi-national corporation--wants to stop paying federally mandated contributions to railroad retirement. Management induces one of its client nations, often one it has major financial holdings, to file a complaint with WTO that the Railroad Retirement Act unreasonably raises the transportation costs of foreign goods in the U.S. and is, therefore, a "barrier to trade." The complaint is heard by an appointed bureaucrat from a third WTO member nation, say Mynamar (Quick! Where's Mynamar? What is Mynamar?), where retirement as we know it may or may not exist.

Management's client nation presents its case to the tribunal in secret. The U.S. reply, if any, is also secret. Neither the BMWE nor any other labor organization can participate. The ruling of the third party is final. It cannot be appealed. The WTO tribunal has the power to effectively rule the Railroad Retirement Act null and void.

A similar process could be used to replace us. Management's client state or a cheap labor country on its own initiative could file a complaint with the WTO that BMWE's RLA-based out contracting rules and U.S. immigration law are "barriers to trade" and therefore void, freeing management to hand our work to the lowest bidder worldwide.

Rail mergers could present rail management with opportunities to use WTO tribunals to eliminate troublesome, unnecessary, bureaucratic "barriers to trade" such as FRA safety rules, FELA, labor protection, or even STB approval of the merger itself.

Still wonder why BMWE worries about the WTO? Or why you should vote?

Gandhian Non-Violence

Developed by Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and India in the early 1900s, non-violent passive resistance involves deliberate, public , pre-advertised violation of an unjust law, often involving taxes or race-based restrictions, and using the resulting arrest and publicity to emphasize the unfairness of that law in an effort to have it changed. A variation of this strategy is deliberate, organized violation of minor laws, such as traffic ordinances, to call public attention to a perceived threat to the public good.

Both venues require informing local authorities of one's intent to violate a legal code and the purpose of doing so. Gandhian principles also mandate accepting legal punishment, however unjust, for the deliberate violation. Gandhi spent years in jail to end British colonial rule in India.

In the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, Rev. Martin Luther King used passive resistance to undo segregation statutes. In the early 1900s, a trade union, the Industrial Workers of the World, used passive resistance to overturn state laws prohibiting union organizing and criticizing one's own government.

In Seattle, some non-labor groups trained thousands of people in Gandhian non-violent, passive resistance and announced their intention to block streets months in advance of the WTO. Rather than simply arrest and remove the protesters as was expected, Seattle police reacted like Sheriff "Bull" Conner did in Alabama in 1963--with tear gas, clubs, grenades, bullets, and beatings of protesters and Seattle citizenry. In the resulting fiasco, the media focused on the graphics of opportunistic property damage by a very few uncontrolled anarchists, local drug thugs and of a "well organized police riot."

Thanks

BMWE, especially the members who participated in the Seattle march, extends grateful thanks to the designated law firms of Bricker, Zakovics and Querin; Ingebritson and Associations; and Stevenson and Arnold, as well as Grand Lodge itself, all of whose financial and logistic support made BMWE participation in the WTO protest possible.