Excerpts from 

Globalization in Your Own Front Yard 

By the Campaign for Labor Rights Jul00

How to order the complete booklet

DOWN ON THE FARM

Small farmers are up against huge corporations. The large growers drive prices down and set the standard by paying poverty wages to farmworkers exposed to toxic chemicals during the day and housed in crowded, unsafe conditions by night. Biotech agribusinesses produce genetically altered seeds dependent on specific pesticide brands.] The rapidly disappearing profession of beekeeping provides a glimpse into problems faced by family farmers trying to survive in a global economy which has come under corporate control.
     Although pollination by honey-bees is vital to agriculture, honeybees no longer survive here in the wild. Since arriving with a swarm of shipboard bees, the South Asian bee mite has moved across North America in the last decade, destroying every wild hive in its path. Bee survival now depends on treating hives with chemicals to which the mites are becoming resistant.
     Several countries want to export non-native honeybees, a practice long banned in the U.S. due to biological risk. Transporting live plants and animals outside their native habitat promotes the spread of pests, as the devastation caused by the bee mite clearly demonstrates. Under World Trade Organization rules, however, the burden of proving specific risk falls on U.S. beekeepers unable to underwrite a costly legal battle.
     As in agriculture generally, honey has become a globalized commodity. Agribusiness producers in Argentina, one of the world’s largest exporters, are flooding the global market with honey harvested by underpaid workers. In Argentina as in the U.S., the small producers are being driven out of business.

- Chuck Hunt, visiting professor, University of Oregon

---

 

WAL-MART

Those cheap prices come at a heavy cost: destruction of our communities, union busting in the U.S. and sweatshop abuses around the world. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer and, in the view of many, the world’s biggest corporate bully.
     Members of United Food and Commercial Workers in Racine and Milwaukee, Wisconsin didn’t want Wal-Mart moving in and putting local, unionized grocery stores out of business while doing everything possible to keep its own employees from forming a union. They put up billboards, formed alliances with neighborhood and religious activists and got in touch with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which has filed share-holder resolutions raising questions about the company’s labor practices abroad.
    When Wal-Mart moves into a community, it pays for a blitz of advertising until it succeeds in driving local stores out of business. Then it pulls back, leaving the local newspaper to twist in the wind without ad revenues, and ships all its profits back to company headquarters in Arkansas. Under banners boasting of Wal-Mart’s "made in the USA" policy, shoppers can find tables piled high with clothing made in offshore sweatshops whose location the company refuses to disclose.

-  UFCW Local 1444 www.ufcw.org

---

POULTRY

Virtually all poultry in the United States is raised and processed under a system giving multi-billion-dollar corporations absolute control over the farmers and workers who put the product on our dinner tables. While profits for companies have soared 325% in 10 years, net return for farmers has dropped, with many having to leave the land. Poultry farmers invest over fifty percent of the capital in the industry through their land and poultry houses. The companies impose take-it-or-leave-it contracts which farmers are afraid to challenge.
     Waste run-off from farms and processing facilities pollutes land and water, threatening other industries and the health of communities. The companies consider the cost of fines for polluting cheaper than implementing adequate disposal systems.
     The processing plants employ mostly African-American and (often undocumented) Latino workers. Birds whiz by on the line at a rate of over 90 per minute. Pressure to keep up forces workers sometimes to relieve themselves on the floor rather than take a bathroom break. Many suffer from repetitive motion disorders. Untrained workers using equipment without safeguards risk losing a limb. Wages are not enough to bring workers up to the federal poverty line and inadequate health coverage for workers leaves community charities to take up the slack.
     On the Delmarva Peninsula - encompassing Delaware and parts of Maryland and Virginia -the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance brings together people from diverse racial, ethnic and social backgrounds with a common interest in winning justice from the poultry companies. Through public education, pressure on elected officials and other grassroots activism, the Alliance is exposing the social cost of cheap chicken.

- Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance, dpja@dmv.com

---

Globalization in Our Own Front Yard

Other sections include:

• Structural Adjustment Comes Home

• Cross-Border Alliances

• McSchools For A McFuture

• Corporate Welfare Hits A Home Run

• Behind The Label

• Sweatshops Without Walls

• Nike University

• The $.$. Sunbeam

• Titan Tyrant

• Assembling Solidarity

• Abolish The Death Penalty

• Justice For Janitors

• Hotel Workers

• Environmental Racism vs Environmental Justice

• The South And The Global South

• Day Labor

• No Homes, No Justice, No Peace

• Plus Contacts and "Glossary with an Attitude"

Editors: Staff of Campaign for Labor Rights (Trim Bissell, Emily LaBarbera-Twarog, Melinda St. Louis) CLR@igc.org
Layout: North Winds Graphics ranney@sover.net
Published in the U.S., July 2000 by the Alliance for Global Justice. Second printing, Sept. 2000.
Printed in the U.S. by Inkworks, a worker-owned union shop.
The contents of this booklet may be freely reproduced provided that their source is acknowledged.
ISBN 0-9679024-1-X

To order additional copies send mail orders to:
Campaign for Labor Rights
P.O. Box 5061
Eugene, OR 97405

For Visa/MasterCard payment, contact:
Campaign for Labor Rights
Phone: 541/344-5410; fax: 541/431-0523
Email: CLR@igc.org

and provide:

• Your name exactly as it appears on your card

• Credit card number

• Expiration date

• Include your postal address.

Orders outside the U.S.: By credit card payment only. Postage costs vary.

If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org