10 years after the ‘Battle in Seattle’

This year, in Seattle and elsewhere, union, environmental and community activists will take time in the coming weeks to remember the protests and strategize how to carry forward the "Spirit of Seattle."

Before the Seattle protests, few people ever heard of the WTO, a secretive organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, that promotes and enforces multi-national trade agreements. But the world public was increasingly aware that growth in worldwide trade did not benefit workers or the environment.

WTO didn't create the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs. U.S. trade balances were tilting in China's direction long before that country joined the WTO, for example. And Mexico had begun creating duty-free "maquiladora" export-processing zones in the 1960s. But the WTO served to "grease the skids," by lowering tariff and "non-tariff" barriers to trade. For its corporate clients, workers' rights are among those "barriers."

The WTO is like a slow motion coup d'état," Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, told the Northwest Labor Press. "It's the main delivery mechanism for the model of corporate globalization we've seen implemented in the last couple (of) decades. And it imposes policies that go way beyond trade: Deregulation, privatization, and promotion of offshoring to countries with the lowest wages."