Wetlands Works April 2001
Hundreds March in Support of Women Sweatshop Workers
On Saturday, March 3; for International Women’s Day; labor, human rights, and women’s rights activists held New York City’s fourth annual march to build support for women workers organizing against oppressive pay and working conditions.
The “March in Solidarity with Women Sweatshop Workers” was organized by the Global Sweatshop Coalition, and included rallies and leaflettings at stores that use sweatshop labor or sell products made in sweatshops. The event began with a rally at Union Square and continued with a march with brief stops at Food Emporium, Foot Locker, East Natural Deli, and The Gap. The march ended with a rally at the site of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in which 146 garment workers died 90 years ago in March of 1911.
As in previous years, the organizers used the march to build support for ongoing campaigns both in New York and abroad, including;
the two year old campaign by the Community Labor Coalition and UNITE Local 169 to unionize workers at greengrocer shops like East Natural deli;
a boycott of Mt. Olive Pickles in support of a campaign by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC). Mt. Olive Pickles are sold at Food Emporium stores;
a national campaign by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and groups supporting efforts by mostly women workers to form an independent union at the Kukdong Internacional plant in Puebla, Mexico. Kukdong produces sweatshirts with university logos for Nike, whose products are sold at Foot Locker stores. Activists entered the Foot Locker store and handed out small bags of rice—roughly equivalent to the amount a worker is able to eat on a sweatshop wage.
Reclaimed Hardwoods Will Be Used for Asbury Park Boardwalk Renovations
An agreement between Aquatic Cellulose, a supplier of reclaimed submerged tropical hardwoods, and Cecco Trading/Timber Holdings, Ltd. has set the stage for the use of environmentally preferable wood for the Asbury Park boardwalk renovation project.
A five-month-long campaign by Rainforest Relief and The New Jersey Chapter of Sierra Club has led to the use of wood that is not derived from living forests. The groups had opposed the use of ipê - a tropical hardwood logged from the rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon- due to the destruction of rainforests caused by logging and the fact that an estimated 80% of logging in Brazil is carried out illegally. The campaign had forced Asbury Park City Council to postpone awarding the contract to Circle A Construction of Neptune for a number of months. Rainforest Relief even filed a lawsuit in the State Supreme Court because the town had failed to comply with a state executive order calling for the use of recycled materials by state grantees. Asbury Park is using $1 million in state funds for the project in the form of two grants from the Green Acres program of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), but did not include recycled plastic lumber as an alternate in the bid. But the court ruled that Rainforest Relief failed to show that recycled plastic lumber is comparable to ipê and that the project could move forward using the tropical wood.
In the meantime, Rainforest Relief had called on Aquatic Cellulose to quote a price for the reclaimed wood to the town. The reclaimed wood is logged from non-living submerged forests that were inundated when the impound lake was created as the Tucurui dam was flooded in Brazil in 1985. The Tucurui is the largest dam ever built in tropical rainforests. It flooded 900,000 hectares of forests. Three weeks ago, Aquatic sent a quote that was slightly more than what the contractor was paying for the conventional rainforest-derived wood, but there was no response from Asbury Park.
In response to the campaign, legislation was introduced last week by NJ Assemblymen Robert Smith and Gary Guear, Sr. that would bar the use of state funds for the purchase of uncertified tropical woods for boardwalk construction. Shortly thereafter, an agreement was reached between Timber Holdings, Ltd. (THL), the wood supplier for the Asbury Park project, and Aquatic Cellulose, to supply as much of the Asbury Park project with Aquatic's reclaimed wood as can be shipped within the schedule for construction.
"The dam itself was an ecological disaster and we are adamantly opposed to damming rivers and flooding tropical forests", said Tim Keating, Executive Director of Rainforest Relief. "But it only makes sense to now remove the trees and to use them to offset logging in living forests." Removing the trees will also curtail emmissions of methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - produced as the trees very slowly degrade underwater.
Timber Holdings and Aquatic have agreed to an exclusive arrangement for $1.5 million of Aquatic's high quality ipê, which THL will sell for boardwalk projects. This represents 20% of THL's ipê sales for the year. The company sells ipê to New York City and Atlantic City for their boardwalks and to other towns and to lumber yards for home decks.
“We're currently losing an estimated 380 species to extinction every day due to the destruction of tropical forests," said Sunil Somalwar of New Jersey Sierra Club. "Mass extinctions, greenhouse gas emissions, displacement of indigenous people, all so we can have ipê boardwalks and mahogany coffins. These forests and their people can't take any more abuse."
"This is a great victory for the forests, Keating said. "We've campaigned many times in the past against projects that THL was supplying with conventional, uncertified rainforest woods. This represents a large reduction in the demand for logging of tropical rainforests. We're happy to see this wood being used in Asbury Park.”
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