Protesting the World Trade Organization

ALESHA DAUGHTREY, Interview by April Eaton (2000)

In late November 1999, members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened in Seattle, Washington, to open negotiations on international trade agreements. The Clinton administration sided with Republicans and supported free-trade negotiations lowering tariffs. Opponents decried globalization’s effects on labor and the environment. The Seattle meeting incited antiglobalization protests that ultimately disrupted the WTO talks. Alesha Daughtrey, a field organizer for Global Trade Watch, a division of Ralph Nader’s national consumer advocacy organization, Public Citizen, describes her role in the protests.

AE: [W]hy did Global Trade Watch choose to get involved in the protest?

AD: Well, we’ve been fighting a lot of the more indecent parts of the WTO along the way. We are the only organization in the United States that focuses full-time on international trade and investment issues. There are lots of other organizations that do great work, but we’re the only one that is entirely devoted to it. So we’ve been doing a lot of monitoring … and research into the WTO’s record and … also just sort of keeping tabs on what the scoundrels are really up to.… When the Ministerial time and location was announced … we thought, well, nothing like this has ever happened in the United States, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up to really bring a lot of NGO and public pressure to bear on the institution, and also to try and turn the organization around in a way that we had been wanting to do, and it was finally on our turf and we could. So, we immediately jumped in and started working on the organizing and the analysis and the PR war and all that.

AE: And how would you describe or summarize the activities of Global Trade Watch at the protest?

AD: We provided … a lot of logistical support … [a]nd … a lot of programming and coalition building for national and international NGOs.… We did a lot in terms of mobilization with unions and NGOs and through getting the word out there to community groups [and] … to fair trade organizations on the state and local level.… But, for example, as soon as they announced the location, we reserved a bunch of venues in Seattle. We secured hotel rooms, we secured nearly all of the youth hostel[s] in downtown Seattle, we secured half a dozen other venues — churches and halls and things like that. Not necessarily with any particular program in mind for those, but with the idea that if we weren’t going to use them, someone else would, and if we didn’t get in immediately, all of these things would get snapped up by the WTO Host Committee.

AE: How did that end up? Did you end up on specifically as Global Trade Watch mobilizing those people to come to Seattle, stay in those places and participate in activities that you organized, or was it kind of a mix?

AD: A lot of it was coalitional. We do a lot of our field outreach and coalition building through a national fair trade coalition called the Citizens Fair Trade Campaign, which we helped to found a number of years ago. In terms of the mobilization, a lot of that was done through CTC, and the CTC partners include a number of different labor unions, mainly the major industrial unions, like the Teamsters and Steel Workers and UAW, as well as UNITE, but also the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, some additional consumer’s organizations, National Family Farm Coalition, the Rural Coalition, some religious groups, including United Methodist Church, Board of Church and Society. So it’s fairly broad-based.…

AE: How would you summarize the message that your organization was trying to get out during the protest? What was your sound bite? If you wanted to make one thing known, what would that be?

AD: The WTO is an undemocratic and unaccountable organization that works to promote the profit margin over the interests of the people. We feel that international trade is necessary and inevitable. But the rules by which that trade is governed need to have more to do with the interests of citizens than with the back pockets and cash wads of a couple corporate CEOs. And we want to make sure that there is a balance consideration. Obviously people are always going to be concerned with their profits — it’s business, we understand that, we accept that. But we think that needs to be balanced with concern for the rights of workers, basic human rights, protecting the environment.… [On]e of the things that I think was really important after the NAFTA fight several years back was that was the first time, I think, that labor and environmentalists had really been able to dedicate themselves to the same project and begin to see eye to eye. But what happened in Seattle was a deepening of that.… I think that a lot of the union leadership was a little bit more hesitant about the direct action than say some of us were, because that wasn’t something that they’d had a whole lot of exposure to and experience with, and they weren’t sure how that would shake out. We weren’t sure how it would shake out either, but we knew it was worth a try. So, that was somewhat of a challenge.…

AE: What would you describe as the biggest successes in your experience and the organization’s experience in Seattle and, also, things that maybe didn’t go so well? …

AD: I think the best part about it, frankly, was the fact that this coalition emerged. And it’s sort of interesting how, for years people have been talking about the Washington consensus as something that’s never going to bend, never going to break. And I think we’ve found the one thing that can, the Seattle coalition. And people will refer to that now, I see this in news clips, even in the mainstream press where they refer to the post-Seattle coalition, by which they mean faith-based, family farm, laborer, environmentalists, students, all of these movements converging and becoming far greater than the sum of the parts.… I think that it did quite a lot to sort of re-energize the left a little bit. I think it has been really hard over, especially over the last four years, but really over the last eight, because I think a lot of liberal/progressives sort of saw a Democrat in office and after the Reagan-Bush era figured that their work was done here. And they were willing to sit back, and they figured Clinton was a nice guy, and that was all there was to it. And people got really rather complacent, even though it soon became clear that not that much had changed in the White House or anywhere else. And I think having that magnitude, having a demonstration on that level was something that nobody had really seen in years, in decades actually. And I think it was a big reminder of how much power people actually had. That was good. I wasn’t around for the anti-war demonstrations or for the civil rights demonstrations. And I think a lot of younger activists really sort of saw this as something that became their movement.… What seems to have happened was, they heard about Seattle in the news and they saw the photos from there, and they thought, there really is something wrong with this WTO thing, and there really is something wrong with the global trade and investment system, and it is very unjust, and it’s not democratic, and it’s not working well for the people.… And I think that contrary to the myth that a lot of younger people are slackers and not politically connected and disinterested in government, in the way society is headed, I think it has really done a lot to bring the student and youth movement alive in the United States, which is good, because it’s been asleep for too long.…

AE: … [Ho]w much of this would have been possible without the Internet? …

AD: There’s been a lot of cry about how great the Internet is and how it revolutionized organizing and how Seattle wouldn’t have been possible without it. I think the case for the Internet has been a little overstated. I have really come to the conclusion that the numbers that were generated in Seattle would have been impossible without the Internet. Because there were so many people literally who arrived on November 30, because on November 29 they saw a live stream video of what was going on in Seattle, and they just decided they had to get in the car and drive up from Portland or San Francisco. And people literally got in the car and drove all night to get there. And it was also really good for sending around calls to action and letting people know what the mobilization points were, what the plans were. So people arrived and they already had some sense of what to expect, what was going on, who to talk to, and how the week would go. I think the level of detail and that information would not have been possible. Ride boards, housing was arranged via the Internet, all of this stuff, it made it logistically a lot easier on that level. But I think what really set the work in Seattle apart from some of the subsequent protests has been that there was a huge amount of local organizing going on and local coalition building and education and outreach. And I think, I’m not foolish enough to believe that everyone in Seattle was just thrilled to have the WTO there, much less the protest, much less the tear gas. But I think people at least had some understanding of what was going on. They understood, even if they did not agree with the protesters’ purpose and reasoning for being there and for choosing the tactics that they did. And I think it made for a much more effective message opportunity.…

AE: Going back to the Internet, is that a big part of facilitating your ongoing connections with partners that you have been partnered with for a long time or that you have reached that you’ve come into coalition with?

AD: Yeah, we operate about a half dozen list serves here. Some of them are very closed strategy lists that are just for key coalition partners that we work with around the country. Others are far more broad and include thousands of subscribers. And they include the action alerts and updates and things like that. Email on the Internet is really important for a lot of the international work that we do. We do try to have some type of conference call every six to eight weeks at least, although we’re hoping to go to monthly soon. And we’ve tried to have physical meetings once a year. But in terms of day-to-day things, checking up on different projects that each of us has agreed to take on or whatever, it’s too hard to mess with the time zones, so definitely it’s good for that.

AE: Did you mention, I think you did, some pretty close relationships with labor unions. Is that long-standing, or new, more recent, Seattle centered?

AD: Fairly long-standing. We worked for a lot of unions on the NAFTA campaign, as well as on the Fast Track campaigns of ’97 and ’98. We are closest with the major industrials.…

AE: Shifting a little bit to questions about yourself and your own views, first of all, how did you get here? How did you end up doing what you’re doing? …

AD: I spent the week before the Ministerial [conference] and the week of out there [in Seattle]. I came away with a very, very different take on all of this, because I had believed in all of these things, like I said, but it wasn’t personal. And suddenly, when you’re standing in the middle of the street, and you’re watching somebody half a block down in a wheelchair be beaten by two police in riot gear, and when you’re washing tear gas out of the eyes of an eight-year-old child, you start to realize that there is obviously something going on in that Convention Center that they’re protecting. What is it that they would fight this hard to protect? And I had always had this theory, simple-minded though it was, that the police were there to serve and protect me, since they were my tax dollars at work, right? Wrong. And I just thought, okay, so what is it that’s creating this? And, of course, I knew what the answer was. But for the first time, it became a very personal thing, where these were not just being visited on people via a plant closing, or things that do affect real lives in very real ways. You don’t get much more real than this is in your face, than physical conflict on the streets.

Alesha Daughtrey, interview by April Eaton, WTO History Project, University of Washington, August 17, 2000. Transcript at http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/interviews/Daughtrey.pdf.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS