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» Breaking News: New York Times article on our historic victory on front page of NYT website!
Just over a year ago, Russell Athletic announced it would close Jerzees de Honduras in response to workers’ organizing efforts. During that year, USAS organized the largest boycott in the history of modern student activism. Now, as a direct result of our efforts, we have won an unprecedented victory — the company has agreed to meet worker demands to reopen the factory and re-hire all 1200 workers, who have been without jobs for 10 months or more. View the details of the agreement here.
Landmark Victory: A Precedent is Set
This is one of the most significant youth-led campaign victories in recent times and one of the most significant campaign victories of the global justice movement. No one has ever forced a multinational corporation to reopen a facility it shut down in the global race to the bottom. This victory has also proven that together, we can successfully fight back when those in power take advantage of the economic crisis to attack working people. We should take strength and inspiration from the example of the workers of Jerzees de Honduras. We can fight back — and WIN — against policies that benefit a privileged few and hurt our communities.
Thank You!
Your campus organizing, e-mails, faxes, phone calls, direct action and donations were essential to winning this campaign. We are standing on the shoulders of previous generations of activists. We built on top of USAS victories of the past twelve years, from the sit-ins in the late 1990s that resulted in supply chain transparency and university labor codes of conduct to the formation of the Worker Rights Consortium in 2000. As Russell and SITRAJERZEESH work to implement this agreement, please continue to support our efforts by making a tax-deductible donation to USAS. We need your continued support to sustain our movement.
The struggle continues! ¡La lucha sigue!
In solidarity,
United Students Against Sweatshops
So if you hadn’t heard, Power Shift Regional Summits have been happening all over the country (check out the map for a summit in your area). This weekend, Power Shift Pennsylvania pulled off our own summit at Penn State University.
While I hope to submit additional posts on the overall turnout, content of each panel and activists work around the first week of Senate hearings on the Kerry-Boxer bill, I want to start with the discussion that I found most interesting–the panel I facilitated on How Coal & Natural Gas Disrupt Communities and Degrade the Environment.
Presenting were Andrew Munn, from the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), Jay Sweeny and Brady Russell from Clean Water Action (CWA), Stephanie Simmons from both CWA and the Sierra Club, and Raina Rippel from the Center for Coalfield Justice and the newly formed Alliance for a Coal-Free Generation.
Andrew has been working and living in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia, working with communities affected by Mountaintop Removal. Jay and Brady have been working with communities affected by Natural Gas drilling into the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, along with Stephanie. And Raina has been doing some amazing organizing against Longwall Mining in her community.
With 50 days left before the COP-15 international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, we’ll need a serious shift in climate (figuratively speaking) for any significant shift in climate (literally speaking) to happen after the close of negotiations on December 18th.
Developed and developing nations remain at an impasse over two major points of negotiation–who will incur the brunt of the costs to help developing countries adapt to climate change, and who will take the lead and stop pouring green house gases into the atmosphere. So, what are young people across the country doing to shift the climate state-by-state as our leaders remain stagnant and unproductive? Power Shift.
As a college-age environmental activist, I’ve always felt a divide between the Green movement of my parents’ generation and that of my own. Celebrating Earth Day each April is almost an afterthought for the environmental student group at American University, though in 1970, it singlehandedly defined a movement and a generation. Going to Sierra Club meetings with my parents is always a little alien to me as well – the older, affluent, white attendees couldn’t look more different from the young people (from increasingly diverse backgrounds) that I see at protests in Washington, DC.
With this knowledge, it’s all too easy to forget that I’m asking many of the same questions and fighting many of the same battles today that my parents did 40 years ago.
Two weeks ago, I joined twelve other members of Eco-Sense, American University’s environmental sustainability group, at a screening of Earth Days. This new documentary looks back at the roots of the Green movement, using exclusive footage and interviews with America’s legendary movers and shakers to trace its evolution through the decades. From Rachel Carson, the first Dirty Dozen, and the ground-breaking 1970 Earth Day, you witness the development of a radical movement that has finally—for better or for worse—become mainstream.
Perhaps the most powerful message of the film is that change cannot come from a movement that is partisan, polarized, and exclusive. Wealthy and poor, Democrat and Republican, developed nation and developing nation, and black, white, and brown need to once again recognize their common interests in the Green movement. After all, the first definitive pieces of environmental legislation in the US—the Clean Air and Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act—were products of a bipartisan effort for change in the 1970s, largely forwarded by Richard Nixon.
One of the speakers present at yesterday’s Global/Local Exchange, Priva Ha’angandu, traveled from Zambia to represent the impact of G20 policies on poor countries.
While Priva advocated debt forgiveness to those he spoke with, he also warned that countries like Zambia, which are benefiting from the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, are forced to adhere to certain conditionalities, such as privatization of public works and financial deregulation, which disadvantage have radically disrupted the country’s ability to pay for important human services like education and healthcare.
Many among the G20 dissenters worry that this week’s talks will result in a resurgence of the IMF, which was practically defunct until recently due to demand for reform. I, and many others, ask the simple question: how can the answer to a debt crisis be more debt?
On a separate note, check out the comment that was posted in response to Priva’s video:
“We already have a forum for the globally irrelevant, collectively indigent national regimes of the world, it’s called the UN, and it’s a supranational joke, just like the G20 would be if we let every country in to blabber about whatever struck their fancy. To exemplify the problem with this video’s logic on an individual level: If you were a successful professional meeting 19 of your other societally upstanding friends, would you want your meeting to be interrupted by degenerate vagrants?”
It is this kind of ignorance and misguided hatred that cannot be tolerated in global politics, nor the American psyche, if we aim to resolve any of the world’s problems. I mean, did he just call Priva–a highly educated young man, working with international networks for responsible lending and finance–a degenerate vagrant?
Thank you Priva, for joining the People’s Voices events, for sharing the experience of Zambia, and for being part of the solution.
Check out more at: http://www.g20media.org/node/123
Been catching up on what took place in different parts of the city last night.
Check out these two links and let me know what you think. What would you do if this happened on your campus? How would you react?
Police Attack Students at University of Pittsburgh (Video)
Pittsburgh Riot Police Trap University Students on a Staircase and Deploy Chemical Weapons (Video)
As I brace myself for my final year at American University, graduate level classes, and a highly uncertain job market at the end of the tunnel, I’m (at least a little) comforted by my experiences at AIDemocracy this summer. This organization’s ability to connect the dots between global issues (socio-political stability, food security, local organic agriculture initiatives, US aid policy, and child mortality rates, for example), rather than viewing them in isolation, has always appealed to me. I find myself almost looking forward to writing my senior thesis and diving deeper into these systemic issues that impact global development, global health, and global peace and security.
Over the last few months, many of my micro-level experiences and personal relationships have come to fit into a bigger puzzle of US foreign assistance and trade policies. Researching and blogging about progressive alternatives in the development field has shown me that effective solutions are out there, that their supporters do exist in the public policy arena, and that I’ve actually seen many of these approaches in practice with my own two eyes. My experiences abroad have taken on new meaning and weight, and I’ve realized that young people like myself are, while not scholarly experts, some of the best equipped proponents of such policies.
We are an online generation, the first group of young people fully familiar with Google, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Skype, and WordPress. Yes, this has made some of us lazy, overweight, and phenomenally uninteresting. I would counter that it has made far more of us open-minded and better attuned to global problems. All of that Facebook chatting with acquaintances around the world is worth much more than we generally admit—it’s time we started using it to shift the national policy dialogue about global development, global health, and global peace and security.
It’s been a comfort to share experiences with my fellow activists this summer, to learn we’ve traveled and worked in some of the same communities in the developing world, and to build relationships within the movements for global justice that we’ve chosen to be a part of. It’s been a pleasure getting to know so many of you this summer, and I hope you’ll stay in touch – you’ll always be able to find me through the AIDemocracy network. Meanwhile, I hope to share my continuing research on global development initiatives this fall!
Want to learn how to get more involved in a cause you care about?
Come to the New Media and Youth Action Conference and learn why your involvement is key to making a difference!
This free, one-day community forum on progressive social issues like health, environment, global and local development, and cultural diplomacy will be taking place September 1, 2009, in New York City. Register at the conference website and connect with other activists, community organizers, and organizations working on youth outreach.
Not in the area? No problem! Join the interactive online community at the event site and start discussions with youth activists across the US and the world. Videos from the conference will be broadcast on the site as well.
Join and share your ideas!
Yesterday, I barely managed to squeeze into the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on “The Case for Foreign Aid Reform: Foreign Aid and Development in a New Era.”
The room was packed with young people, and spectators overflowed into the hallway. Senator Robert Menendez jokingly asked Dr. Jeffrey Sachs if he had invited his university classes to attend. As pleased as I was that the Senator noticed our presence, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he misunderstood our reason for being there—we may be interning on the Hill or for advocacy organizations in D.C. this summer, but we are also voters, taxpayers, and activists. We packed into the SFRC hearing like sardines because we are interested, informed, engaged, and passionate about politics, not for extra credit.
The truth is, older generations still fail to take young people seriously. It’s the fault of both sides; Menendez needs to realize the significance of young people’s presence at that hearing, and we students need to make more calls, write more letters, cast more votes, attend more meetings, and raise our voices outside Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the blog world. The social networking sites our parents hate may serve as a valuable tool to connect us with the rest of the world, but affiliating with groups or causes is nothing more than mere affiliation if we don’t use that network to act. As more and more of us study abroad and gain first-hand perspectives on the world’s challenges, we’re exposed to innovative and collaborative approaches to global development and security. Young people packed the SFRC hearing because we want to know whether our government—the country with the richest economy in the world—is pulling its weight and supporting these solutions.
Wednesday’s SFRC hearing was designed to address this question: Are U.S. foreign assistance programs working?
