Image: Participants in a Detroit movement-building workshop in July discuss intersections between NAFTA and local fights. From left to right: LaVita Tuff of BlueGreen Alliance, Mike Schulte of Communications Workers of America, Anthony Torres of the Sierra Club’s trade team, and Sierra Club volunteer Vincent Martin.
2017 was a difficult year, to say the least. From Charlottesville to Trump’s Twitter feed to Hurricane Maria, the forces of white supremacy, misogyny, and climate crisis have been on grotesque display. But it was also the year of #MeToo, #NoBanNoWall, and #Resist. Women toppled sexual predators, Black Lives Matter activists toppled confederate statues, and undocumented immigrants marched unafraid.
How did the movement for trade justice fare in the 2017 maelstrom? As with everything else, Trump brought threats, but people across the country brought hope.
The year started off with Trump claiming credit for the death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a corporate deal defeated by a movement of millions of people. His administration then got down to business trying to replicate much of the TPP in closed-door talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Instead of reversing NAFTA’s damage to communities across North America, Trump’s administration proposed using trade policy to finance a xenophobic border wall and line the pockets of corporate polluters. Meanwhile, Trump tried to milk political capital from his “(Corporate) America first” trade agenda by selling it as a gift to workers.
Against this sordid backdrop, the trade justice movement faced two big tasks in 2017. First: preventing Trump from sealing more harmful trade deals under the guise of false populism. Second: building movement power – across borders, sectors, and racial lines – behind a trade vision rooted in justice for all.
This year we made three solid strides toward these goals:
1. Expanding our movement. To block Trump’s regressive agenda and set the stage for future policy change, we need a broad, united, and powerful movement. Trade itself serves as a tool to help build such power, as corporate trade deals have impacted diverse constituencies. Focusing on these shared impacts can help dismantle silos between workers, environmentalists, immigrants, and others, contributing to the movement we need.
Take, for example, a movement-building workshop in Detroit the Sierra Club hosted this summer with the U.S. Human Rights Network and BlueGreen Alliance. Participants included local union, immigrants' rights, environmental justice, and Sierra Club activists. Over two days, we discussed NAFTA’s tangible impacts across the disparate Detroit communities represented in the room.
African-American participants described their fight against air pollution from a nearby refinery that uses tar sands oil imported under NAFTA. Immigrants told of being forced to leave Mexico after NAFTA, in part to escape lead pollution from corporations that moved there to exploit lax environmental laws. Workers recounted the massive loss of factory jobs in Detroit due to that same NAFTA-enabled outsourcing. Participants came away expressing a sincere sense of common cause with the others in the room and their sister struggles.
And the silo busting didn’t stop in Detroit. In November, we organized a congressional briefing in which Movement for Black Lives, immigrants’ rights, union, and Indigenous leaders powerfully exposed NAFTA’s oft-overlooked impacts on communities of color. Over the summer and fall, we worked with partners fighting for workers’ and immigrants’ rights to trace the links between unfair trade, climate change, and forced migration – in a Midwest speaking tour, a webinar, a new briefing paper, and events from Ottawa to Atlanta to Mexico City.
While building power through partnerships, we also strengthened Sierra Club’s trade capacity. In the first six months of the Trump administration, our corps of trade volunteers grew five-fold. We capped the year’s growth by launching a new trade leadership committee, led by volunteers nationwide, from Long Beach to Detroit.
2. Crafting a shared trade vision. Our growing movement needs a positive trade vision to rally behind and to use as a yardstick for judging Trump’s trade agenda.
Right after the defeat of the TPP, the Sierra Club launched a new, critical component of this trade vision – 15 concrete proposals for a climate-friendly model of trade. A few months later, we joined leading environmental groups in applying such proposals to NAFTA, generating a shared environmental platform and a grassroots toolkit for the deal’s replacement. Expanding on these proposals, we partnered with union, consumer, and family farmer organizations to create NAFTA replacement platforms rooted in benefits for workers and communities across North America.
3. Exposing Trump’s corporate trade agenda. By amplifying our shared vision for NAFTA’s replacement – from local town halls to the halls of Congress – we are exposing the dangers of Trump’s polluter-friendly NAFTA 2.0 plans.
This year we partnered with unions to write op-eds that present a NAFTA replacement agenda embraced by workers and environmentalists alike. From the New York Times to the Washington Post, we spotlighted the yawning gap between this agenda and that of the administration.
We also spoke out. This year, Sierra Club volunteers and staff spoke to about 15,000 people at trade events in over 20 cities, including forums with U.S. senators, panel discussions, and town halls. In each, we offered a progressive antidote to Trump’s xenophobic and polluter-friendly NAFTA agenda.
We also asked members of Congress to raise their voices. In over 100 congressional meetings and 125,000 online actions, Sierra Club volunteers and staff called on Senators and Representatives to take a stand for a NAFTA replacement centered on people and planet. Throughout the year, congressional leaders responded by doing just that, setting the stage for next year’s show-down over the future of NAFTA.
There’s no reason to sugar-coat the pain of this past year, but we also must recognize and build on our wins. Your activism in 2017 offered grounds for hope – grounds on which to build an even bigger, bolder movement in 2018. For that, we thank you.