Remembering the Seattle WTO protest 

Those who demonstrated against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 will never forget it. But many of today’s readers were children or weren’t yet born when protesters shut down the city and halted a major international summit. It was a stunning success for a movement against a trade model that put the rights of foreign investors over laws protecting workers and the environment. The WTO – an intergovernmental organization that had been pushing global ‘free trade’ agreements – was never the same again. This month, the Labor Press asked University of Washington labor historian Jim Gregory to walk us through the last big protest of the 20th century.

What transpired over the lead-up to the WTO summit?

It was pretty much a whole year of planning the protests. In January 1999 the Executive Committee of the WTO decided on a Seattle location for a summit at the end of 1999. Right away, organizers who were involved in fair-trade activism started getting the word out to allies like the AFL-CIO that protests needed to be organized: A big showing of opposition needed to be developed in Seattle. Over months, all kinds of organizations began to coordinate and plan for a big turnout, not just local people, but from around the country and the world. At the University of Washington, student groups were coordinating planning.  In Oregon, labor unions and student groups and environmental groups were in touch, especially the month before. Eco-radical groups and social justice organizers out of the Bay Area had learned how to do very impressive forms of civil disobedience with street theater and tactics for blocking. Environmental groups had been using these tactics in the woods to stop clearcutting — blocking roads, tree-sitting. All of that know-how was brought to Seattle. Well before the event, it was clear something very, very special was happening. … The Clinton administration just didn’t know what was going on on the West Coast and thought that coming to Seattle was a great idea. They learned a lesson there.

How did that play out as the summit began?

The summit was supposed to open on Nov. 30. The AFL-CIO had committed to bringing lots of people, running trains and buses and even chartering airplanes to bring union members, especially the Steel Workers union and Teamsters union locals on the West Coast. Then the ILWU, which is often involved in militant labor actions, committed to shutting down all the ports on the West Coast on the day the conference was supposed to open. 

The big day was Nov. 30, and it was a complicated sequence of events that unfolded. What’s the best way to summarize that? 

Well, the protests shut down the opening ceremonies of the WTO and disrupted the events of that day. It set the whole ministerial meeting off in a direction that the organization did not expect, disrupting the ability of delegates to reach the convention center for most of the day. Bill Clinton’s planned speech was disrupted. So Nov. 30 was a shock pretty much heard everywhere. The civil disobedience activists were set up right from the morning to shut down all the intersections around the convention center, by people sitting down in the streets locking themselves into “sleeping dragon” formations through PVC pipes. So the police couldn’t haul them away. Many of the affinity groups that had agreed to block a particular intersection were in place by 7 a.m., before the police thought anybody was going to be there. And a separate plan by the AFL-CIO and the King County Labor Council was for a mass rally at Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, and then a march (to where the WTO was meeting). But by the time the march got under way, things had already moved into a lockdown. Starting about 11 in the morning, police started firing pepper spray, using batons and other weapons including stun grenades — ordered to do so by the mayor and police chief after they couldn’t clear intersections. The police violence against peaceful sitting demonstrators began just about the time that the labor rally a mile away was beginning, and the turnout for that rally was enormous, 25,000 or more people — with great speeches by union leaders explaining why it was so important that organized labor take a stand. Then around 1 p.m., the big march through downtown by the labor contingent began, and it ran straight up into this area which was already being blocked off and where police were using weaponry. The AFL-CIO leadership did not want to engage in civil disobedience, so the labor march turned before it reached those intersections that were blocked. But thousands of people who were marching with the unions just peeled off and joined the crowds that were blocking intersections. So the whole downtown area was just filled with tens of thousands of people, some of them in the front lines, refusing to clear intersections. And the police, on that first day, made very few arrests. By the afternoon, the mayor and governor had decided to call in the National Guard and and declare a “no protest zone,” essentially taking away the rights to enter, and certainly to demonstrate, in that central part of downtown Seattle. It was chaos by midafternoon. TV stations from all around the region were sending crews to witness what was going on. A lot of what they took pictures of was the police violence, clouds of tear gas, people running and screaming. They also caught pictures of “black bloc” anarchists breaking windows in Nike stores and elsewhere. The media coverage, not surprisingly, focused heavily on that. The rest of the week was equally disruptive, but it was not really protesters doing the disrupting. It was the fact that the National Guard was on the streets, that police were using armored cars and really serious weaponry. The day after the (delayed) opening, delegates were meeting, but that part was disrupted too, because of the atmosphere for the delegates and for the NGO organizations, thousands of people representing different trade groups from all over the world. While they could attend the meetings, the tone now was all about “this is wrong.”  The executive committee tended to be pretty heavy handed, and developing nation delegates trying to hold meetings couldn’t even get a meeting room because there was so much suspicion by those in charge of the WTO. So it was disrupted on the inside and disrupted on the outside. There were delegates who came out and joined the protesters in the days that followed. Day three, day four, the police were arresting as many people as possible on the streets. So people who were supposed to be in the conference, who had credentials, in some cases, were arrested. A Seattle City Council member was arrested. They chased peaceful demonstrators who just stood in front of Pike Place Market. They corralled them and conducted a mass arrest. Mass arrests filled the local jail and created new problems because they couldn’t really process all the people who had been arrested and people were being held in very uncomfortable positions for hours. In the end, Seattle ended up paying millions of dollars in damages to people who had been harmed. Some arrested with no cause at all. Others, you know, hurt in the process of arrest and and incarceration. So for the city of Seattle, a whole week turned out to be a very expensive affair.

What impact did the protest have on the WTO?

The WTO was never really the same again. Every later meeting ended with no new agreements. The goal had been to work out new treaties that all the nations would agree to, but the meeting ended with no new agreements at all, essentially representing a kind of walkout by the developing nations. And then in the years that followed, subsequent annual meetings of the WTO were met with big demonstrations, not as dramatic as Seattle. But the idea that the WTO could go anywhere and sit down peacefully and have a quiet little meeting where they wrote new international agreements — that was gone. 

How do you see it as being remembered at this point, 25 years on?

It was an event of enormous significance for Seattle, for the West Coast, for the United States and worldwide. The effects have to do with that message about global trade and changing the conversation, which clearly the Seattle event really helped to do, taking the opposition that had been developing and giving those communities a big victory and a legitimacy that helped continue the talk, the vision, the effort to produce Fair Trade globally.