ON JULY 17, 2017, BYD, the world’s largest electric-vehicle manufacturer, signed an agreement to recruit and hire 40 percent of its Los Angeles workers from communities long underrepresented in manufacturing. The possibility of good new jobs shimmered for women and people of color, veterans and the formerly incarcerated living in poor, depleted towns around Los Angeles. BYD committed to fund expansive apprenticeship and training programs and even to provide transportation for workers and trainees who do not own cars. This was not ordinary corporate behavior.1
The agreement was negotiated by Jobs to Move America (JMA), a coalition of labor, community, environmental, and philanthropic groups directed by Madeline Janis and working to bring manufacturing back to US cities. And these would be union jobs. SMART (the sheet metal workers’ union) would represent workers and help BYD design apprenticeship training. Two days later, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach committed to invest $14 billion to replace their fleets of diesel trucks with electric vehicles. This marked a huge next step toward cleaning the air around the busiest ports in the country, a project LAANE had launched more than a decade earlier. And it created a need for electric vehicles produced by companies like BYD.2
Meanwhile, on the South Side of Chicago a new factory was rising. After a fifty-year hiatus, trains would again be built in the Windy City. Linda Nguyen was there at the groundbreaking, representing JMA. Nguyen led negotiations between Chicago’s Transit Authority, unions, and Chinese railcar manufacturer Sifang. The company agreed to invest $100 million in a state-of-the-art factory, hire from the surrounding community, and establish training and apprenticeship programs. These, too, would be union jobs. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would design training programs and represent many newly hired workers. The Transport Workers Union would represent the rest. After decades of offshoring, union manufacturing jobs were returning to the Midwest. And it was not Donald Trump (or his allies) who brought them.3
When New York announced a $3 billion purchase of 1,025 subway cars, one of the largest mass transit purchases ever, city and state officials said they were not just buying “trains that will improve New York’s transit system” but working to “create good jobs and revive manufacturing in our communities that need it the most.” After months of negotiation by Janis and Nguyen, President Obama’s transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx, sent letters to city transport agencies nationwide lauding new public purchasing criteria written by JMA. They called it the “U.S. Employment Plan.” (The Trump administration Department of Transportation rescinded that support in August 2017.)4
Still, JMA’s plan remains a blueprint for mass transit purchases by city and county governments in New York, Illinois and California. The plan, as adopted by these local governments, required every company bidding to build city buses, trucks, and trains to indicate how many local jobs they would create, how they would ensure that women, veterans, and people of color were trained and hired, and how they would use clean, renewable energy. It also outlined mechanisms to ensure transparency and compliance. Researchers estimated that New York City’s transit purchase could create thirty-three thousand well-paying local jobs.5
What became the US Employment Plan was first rolled out in Los Angeles. After years of lobbying by LAANE and labor unions, Los Angeles Metro announced in 2015 that, in awarding contracts worth $1 billion for the purchase of 247 new railcars, it would score proposals based on how much production would be done in Los Angeles, how many jobs the project would create for communities suffering chronic underemployment, and how clean the trains would be. City experts said the project could create as many as ten thousand local jobs.
“For too long, American transit agencies have purchased buses and passenger trains for our cities without considering the ability to use these dollars to create quality jobs and generate opportunities for struggling communities,” said JMA activist Rudy Gonzalves. That is beginning to change. Unlike others who have promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, JMA is doing it. They are, as they say: “Making Our Transportation Dollars Go the Distance.”6
Across the world, outside Cape Town, South Africa, another jobs creation movement is fast growing. In Philippi, a township known for violence and hopelessness, a farmer cooperative has taken root. In 2011, a group of mostly older women with exceptional gardening skills began growing wine grapes in their yards—the first wine grapes planted on the Cape Flats since before World War II. Virgin Wines in the UK funded their dream of turning those grapes into exportable wine. A little revolution had begun.7
Philippi arose from the wholesale resettlement of black families under the Apartheid Group Areas Act of 1950, says Nomhle Zondani, a township girl turned wine marketer. “Before the resettlement of people in the 1960s, the Cape Flats had vineyards. All of them are gone now but the soil is still fertile. We want to bring this part of Cape Town back to its former glory.” The goal is to create as many new jobs as possible. In addition to farms, they are opening a wine-making school, restaurant, and bottling plant.
Western Cape vintner Graham Knox says that the limestone-rich soil in the Gugulethu section of Philippi township is a vinicultural treasure, as good as the land on which white-owned wineries have stood for centuries. South Africa is a top-ten global wine producer because of that soil. The women of Philippi have only little plots between tin shacks and abandoned factories, dirt roads and railroad tracks, but they are using them to bring change. Almost all field-workers in the Cape’s multibillion-dollar wine industry are black. Until recently, fewer than 3 percent of owners were.
Since the late 1990s, black-owned and collectively owned wine estates are taking hold. Many hope that producer cooperatives will bring economic opportunity and improved labor conditions to the region. None of these success stories is more unlikely than that of Township Winery. Its wines—Little White Lies, Outlaw, and Storm—evoke the turbulent history of race-gender labor relations in South Africa’s fields. Zondani directs marketing for Township wines. Like many poor students, she had to drop out of college, unable to pay tuition. Broke and jobless but interested in making a career in wine, she found Knox and real estate developer Kate Jambela. They were willing to invest in Philippi.8
The growers are excited, sixty-four-year-old Judith Xabanisa says. “I always enjoyed farming but I never thought I’d be growing grapes.” Arlene van Wyk says: “I have been poor all my life. Now today, even the farmworkers’ kids . . . can become farmers. . . . Black people will have opportunity to have our own vineyards.”
Zondani says she “had to explain to the community that this is not going to bring easy money, that the success would come once we harvest.” But Xabanisa hopes her work will lay the foundation for a family business. “I am hoping to pass on the skills I have learned to my four children and grandchildren so they don’t end up in the streets or as criminals.”9
So far, the results are promising. “People can’t believe that something of this great quality came from a group of women with nothing,” says Nkosi Madotyeni, who manages a Cape Town liquor store. Philippi Little White Lies Sauvignon Blanc sells well there. “Things are changing slowly but surely,” he says. “It’s inspiring to watch.” By 2017, Township wines were being sold to five-star restaurants in South Africa, as well as the UK, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and China. And sales continue to grow.
An hour away, in the Western Cape with its centuries-old estates and deeply rooted Afrikaner nationalism, a black producer’s cooperative is now bottling wine at Koopmanskloof—a venerable white estate. It has been majority worker-owned since 2007, when owner Stewie Smit transferred 51 percent ownership to two hundred workers. The winery is now managed by Rydal Jeftha, a former field-worker who lives on the land.
Thandi winery (Xhosa for “nurturing love”) is another producer collective, majority owned by 147 worker-families. Thandi was South Africa’s first BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) project, funded through 2003 legislation to redistribute some of the country’s vast resources to citizens of color. Thandi was the first winery in the world to win Fair Trade accreditation. By 2009 it was self-sustaining. Worker-owners run every phase of production from planting and picking, to marketing across Africa, Europe, and Asia.10
To compete with the region’s older, larger white-owned wineries, these collectives have had to build economies of scale. Fourteen black- and woman-owned wineries have banded together into the Treasure Chest Collective. In recent years, these new collectives have sponsored township wine festivals that draw tourist dollars to Gugulethu, Soweto, and other townships in South Africa, supporting local businesspeople, creating decent jobs and income. They promote “Women in Wine,” “Cape Dreams, “African Roots.”
There are also several hundred employee-owned, democratically run companies in the US. As of 2017, 160 had organized into the national Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and aligned with European co-op federations in a “movement for workplace democracy and economic justice.” Allied with and often funded by labor unions, worker cooperatives have become particularly popular among Latinx immigrants in the US who have formed trucking, housecleaning, and home-care cooperatives.11
Outside Santa Cruz, California, a different fair farm model has been offering hope for more than thirty years, improving workers’ lives, along with the health of consumers and our planet. Swanton Berry Farm founder Jim Cochran traces his roots to farmworker cooperatives. Swanton is not a producer’s cooperative but it boasts the first stock ownership plan in US agriculture. Of the eleven thousand employee stock ownership plans in the US only some are majority owned and operated democratically. Swanton is one of those.
The people who founded Swanton were an interesting mix, disciples both of environmentalist Rachel Carson and union leader Cesar Chavez. In the mid-1980s, they started the nation’s first organic strawberry farm. Most berry farmers then and long afterward were wedded to methyl bromide, says Cochran, a chemical used to kill house termites. It enabled farmers to get a 50 percent higher yield than organic farmers could, but it was “deadly stuff,” Cochran believed. Swanton’s founders decided to try something different.
They were ultimately proven right. By the twenty-first century, methyl bromide had been banned in the US and many other countries because of its toxicity and the damage it did to the ozone layer. But California strawberry farmers, arguing they couldn’t grow their crop without it, were exempted from the ban. Activists fought to change that. The UFW, MICOP, and other farmworker groups documented the pesticide poisoning of farmworkers and their children. Cochran offered proof that you could grow strawberries organically. Finally, in 2016, methyl bromide was banned completely.12
Swanton’s founders always wanted the farm to be more than an environmental beacon. When he became self-sufficient economically, Jim Cochran began trying to find “a way for farmworkers to get a better deal in the system.” Organic farms were already being certified so that consumers would know they could trust farmers’ growing practices, Cochran said. Why shouldn’t farms be certified for their labor practices? “If we can do that with fertilizers and plants and soil,” he asked, “why can’t we do that with people?” Cochran worked hard to convince other farmers, but it was an uphill battle at first. “There wasn’t much interest in the organic community in . . . certifying labor standards,” he says.
So Cochran reached out to the United Farm Workers. In 1998, Swanton became the first unionized organic farm in the country. Contract negotiations were “an excellent learning process,” Cochran says. There is a myth that labor relations will remain harmonious on organic farms if we just don’t talk about the issues. Labor “was not being addressed in any formal way by other farms,” he says, “and I felt it was really important to do that.” Swanton workers have a union contract, health and dental plan, vacation pay, paid sick leave, and a stock ownership plan. The farm gained one of the most stable workforces in agriculture, with workers who stay for ten and twenty years. And when Swanton workers retire, the company buys back their stock, so they have savings to live on. As Swanton’s workers purchase ever greater shares of the company, says Cochran, the farm is returning to his roots in producer cooperatives.13
Swanton’s environmental and labor practices have won numerous awards. In 2002, it won the EPA’s Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for pioneering techniques for growing berries without methyl bromide. In 2003, Swanton became the first US farm chosen by Social Accountability in Sustainable Agriculture (SASA) for a pilot audit to establish international standards for agricultural labor. Cochran and his partner Sandy Brown were invited by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to testify about fair farm labor standards. Swanton is globally acknowledged as a pioneer and a model.
Swanton’s worker-owners believe consumers will pay for labor justice as they do for chemical-free produce. One of the few US farms that is Food Justice-certified and bears the UFW label, Swanton advertises that on all its products: “Organically Grown by Union Labor.”14
Since 2005, Jim Cochran has been working to expand his model into broader policy. Together with other food, farm, and antipoverty activists he created the Vivid Picture Project, to envision and lay the groundwork for a food, farm, and water system that feeds farmers, urbanites, and farmworkers alike. In 2013, they created the California Food Policy Council. It is now one of two hundred food policy councils across the US that are playing an increasingly large role in driving state and local food policy in fairer, healthier, more inclusive directions.
Among their victories is the Market Match program to make locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables available to food-insecure families and people who qualify for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). This initiative was introduced into the US Farm Bill in 2014. Now between $16 million and $32 million annually are granted to schools and farmers’ markets to enable low-income Americans to enjoy fresh local produce at affordable prices.15
GrowNYC has a similar initiative, providing freshly grown local produce free or affordably through greenmarkets, youth markets, community gardens, and fresh-food box drop-offs. These programs benefit underserved communities that were food deserts not long ago. The projects employ two thousand local residents, and support small farmers around the city.16
On a larger scale, Food Policy Councils and the Roots of Change foundation are crafting and sponsoring legislation to build healthy food policy across the country. In California, the world’s sixth-largest economy, proposed legislation that stands a good chance of passage includes laws improving access to clean drinking water for all, farm-to-school free meal programs, incentives for organic farming, and eased access to land and cutting-edge farm machinery for underserved farmers: young farmers, women, veterans, and farmers of color. Perhaps most important is their Food Chain Workers’ Bill of Rights. The food-chain bill is potentially transformative, they say. One in six US workers labor in food-chain jobs. So do millions more worldwide.
Food First director Eric Holt-Giménez and Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri see similar kinds of coalitions being formed worldwide as “agroecologists build strategic alliances with food sovereignty and agrarian movements.” These alliances, they believe, are creating “considerable political will for the transformation of our food systems.” As Via Campesina argues, the future of our world and its creatures may depend on their success.17
Cotton farming is being transformed as well. And, once again, global worker protest and consumer pressure have catalyzed change. In May 2017, thirteen of the world’s largest clothing, retail, and textile companies, which together use 300,000-plus tons of cotton annually, signed a Sustainable Cotton Communiqué. Signatories included IKEA, H&M, Nike, Inditex, Gap, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, and other mega-companies. Negotiations were led by Prince Charles of England and driven by Marks & Spencer, the company that in 2017 earned the highest rating of any apparel retailer for protecting human rights in its supply chain.
Coalitions of workers, students, consumers, and farmers brought important changes in cotton farming between 2012 and 2017. They proved that cotton could be grown without destroying soil, polluting watersheds, or using child labor. Still, only one-fifth of cotton used by the major brands came from responsible growers. The Sustainable Cotton pact was an important step toward reducing “the negative environmental and social impacts” associated with cotton production. And it proved again that the big transnational buyers are key to improving conditions for workers on the ground.18
Small experiments in clothing manufacturing are also modeling broader possibilities for change. The Dominican town of Villa Alta Gracia is a free trade zone where export garment factories provide most of the jobs. From the 1980s on, workers at a Korean-owned headwear factory tried unsuccessfully to unionize. Activists toured US college campuses to describe their struggle. Student support helped them win the right to unionize in 2003, and with that came large wage increases. But in 2007, the company decamped for countries where it was cheaper to produce clothing, as manufacturers were doing across the Dominican Republic. Everyone in Alta Gracia felt the impact of the plant closures. The town withered.
Then, in 2010, Knights Apparel, the largest provider of collegiate-licensed sportswear in the US and a clothing provider for the National Hockey League, opened a new factory with a radical vision. Knights owner Joe Bozich wanted to show that you can profit by supporting worker justice. The Alta Gracia Project hired workers who had lost their jobs when the old factories closed. It recognized the workers’ union and negotiated and signed a historic contract, agreeing to supply workers’ health insurance, allow independent safety inspections, and pay what is called in Latin America una salario digno, a dignified wage. Alta Gracia workers earn three times the zone minimum and well above the national wage.
United Students Against Sweatshops activists pushed US colleges to have their logo-wear made at Alta Gracia. A sympathetic executive at Barnes & Noble, operator of college bookstores across the country, carried and promoted the product. By 2016, Alta Gracia was providing logo-wear for eight hundred US colleges and universities and moving into the black financially. For the first time, its workers had indoor plumbing, electricity, healthcare, and the chance to finish high school and attend college. Said one worker, “This has allowed us to dream.”
Opening a unionized garment shop with a livable wage and decent conditions was unprecedented in the modern global apparel trade, says Scott Nova, founder and director of the Worker Rights Consortium. WRC, which investigates and certifies labor conditions worldwide, said that despite “a vast proliferation of ‘corporate social responsibility programs’ . . . no major apparel brand is doing what Knights Apparel is doing at the Alta Gracia factory.”19
Knights CEO Joe Bozich says personal tragedy moved him to create a new model for garment manufacturing. In one short period, he lost family members in their twenties and thirties, two of his children faced death, and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His grief and longing for hope fueled in him a “NEED to KNOW that what I’m doing for work every day is making a real difference in the lives of people our business touches.”20
Knights subsidized Alta Gracia for the first few years. By 2015, when Knights was bought by Hanes, Alta Gracia had become self-sufficient. Bozich says he hopes to open more garment factories like it. His slogan: “Changing Lives One Shirt at a Time.”21
Tonlé, the largest ethical apparel manufacturer in Cambodia, represents another compelling model in fashion, offering living wages and safe working conditions while alleviating some of the massive environmental problems generated by garment production. Pioneering zero-waste manufacturing techniques, Tonlé began in 2013 to make clothes from fabric scraps. In its first year, it prevented 22,000 pounds of fabric from ending up in landfills and waterways.
Tonlé provides good jobs for rural women, partnering with village-based women’s weaving collectives to turn scraps into new fabric. Environmentally friendly production techniques save water, and prevent pesticides, toxic dyes, and other chemicals associated with clothing production from entering landfills, air, and water. And, like Alta Gracia, it offers shop-floor democracy to women who would otherwise be working under sweatshop conditions.22
Branding and marketing labor justice is key to the success of small to midsize models like Swanton, Alta Gracia, and Tonlé. Whether it’s Food Justice certification or a union or labor justice label, consciousness is growing worldwide. How fast it grows will depend on the willingness of entrepreneurs to commit to farming and manufacturing fairly, and on consumers’ willingness to research and pay for those products.
Are these small models reproducible on a larger scale? Georgetown professor John Kline calls Alta Gracia “the anti-sweatshop.” He argues that it is reproducible, indeed that it must be. “If this small factory can start from nothing, pay a ‘Living Wage’ and gain market share against well-established, heavily advertised brands,” he says, “there are no excuses why large brands with an existing customer base cannot much more easily afford to pay workers a decent wage.”23
Until that happens, consumers, NGOs, students, and government officials must continue demanding that global clothing brands and retailers be held legally accountable for the safety of their supply chain. The Bangladesh Fire and Safety Accord has done so with dramatic success, says Kalpona Akter, making factories safer for 2.5 million garment workers. Before the accord, an average of two hundred workers were dying every year in Bangladesh garment factories. In 2013, the death toll was much higher. In 2016–17, there were “zero deaths.” Akter credits the accord, with its mandatory inspections and mechanisms for sanctioning companies that do not cooperate.
Still, the original accord is set to expire in 2018. As this book goes to press, global unions, thirteen major clothing brands, and NGOs including Clean Clothes Campaign, United Students Against Sweatshops, and International Labor Rights Forum have signed a second accord that will go into effect as soon as the first expires. “An agreement that holds signatory companies legally responsible for the commitments they made to worker safety is unprecedented in the modern global apparel industry,” Clean Clothes Campaign argued in 2017. There are moves afoot to expand it to other industries and other countries.
In four years, 1,600 factories were inspected, 100,000 safety improvements were made, and there were 7,000 follow-ups to monitor improvements. Accord inspectors were often the first qualified building inspectors to see the inside of Bangladesh garment factories. Eighty percent of safety code violations identified by accord inspectors were remediated. There is much more work to do, but experts call the accord “a massive advance in worker safety.” The challenge is to expand and reproduce it widely.24