Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999

In this deeply researched and pathbreaking account, Johnson chronicles multiracial, coalitional labor organizing in Seattle from the late 1960s through the 1990s. Many readers may associate labor organizing in Seattle with the 1999 protest and disruption of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), at which activists criticized the WTO's failure to protect workers’ rights and the environment. Johnson contends that focusing on the WTO protests, many of which were organized by national as opposed to local organizations and were largely led by whites, obscures the less well-known but vitally important ongoing multiracial, coalitional, and transnational labor organizing led by African American, Asian American, Native American, and Chicano activists.Because Seattle was more than 85 percent white, Johnson writes, leaders within the African American, Asian, Native American, and Chicano communities recognized that they needed to work together to break through the racial segregation of the skilled trades, as well as to fight neighborhood displacement and demand public services for their communities. Johnson argues that activists mobilized their communities through identity-based activism that was accompanied by multiracial and class-based calls for solidarity. Building on Lauren Araiza's concept of “bridge leaders,” or activists who moved between communities of color to facilitate coalition building, Johnson identifies several key organizers who forged cross-ethnic coalitions (8). Many of the leaders were located at physical sites of cross-racial activity, especially the St. Peter Claver Center, which received support from progressive Catholic leadership and was the birthplace of many coalitions. These bridge leaders include Bob Santos, who had both Filipino and Native American ancestry and worked closely with African American labor organizers such as Tyree Scott.Central to the organizing of activists of color was the Seattle-based Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office (LELO), founded in 1973 by Scott as an alliance between Black construction workers in Seattle, Asian American cannery workers in Alaska, and Chicano farmworkers in central Washington. The organization hired attorneys and mounted legal challenges to labor discrimination in the 1970s, and received support from judges who sought to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. LELO's legal activism forced the skilled trades unions in Seattle to implement affirmative action and begin an apprentice program for African American workers, resulting in five hundred people of color obtaining jobs in the skilled trades when there had been only a handful before. LELO also successfully sued canneries in Alaska for systemic racial discrimination and won a large settlement in their class-action victory, among other wins for workers of color in the greater Seattle region.During the mid-1970s, many of the activists in Johnson's study joined the US Third World left, which argued that Western attempts to thwart socialist and communism negatively impacted American workers of color, who constituted a domestic “Third World” (133). Johnson views this as a “key moment” when Seattle activists merged multiracial coalition building and worker-led organizing with a growing interest in transnational politics and the realization that the increasingly global nature of capitalism meant that American workers’ interests aligned with those of laborers worldwide, and not with the interests of multinational corporations or nation states (128). Increasingly, as a result of their participation in study groups, women in the Seattle Third World left “injected feminist platforms” into labor organizing that called for the recognition of gender-based oppression against women of color (130). Members of the Seattle Third World left also forged connections internationally through travel to socialist countries, including the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.As with other progressive movements in the 1980s, including antipoverty and feminist activism, Reagan's cuts to social welfare and appointment of conservative judges stymied the efforts of Seattle's multiracial labor organizers. Turning their focus abroad, LELO channeled their efforts into supporting the anti-apartheid movement by establishing construction programs and agricultural irrigation projects in Mozambique. Newly independent from colonial rule by Portugal, Mozambique became one of the many sites of Cold War conflict as socialists, backed by the Soviet Union, successfully battled to gain control of the government. LELO initiated construction and agricultural projects that would put both American construction workers and Mozambique residents to work. LELO had a $20,000 brickmaking machine designed, paid for its construction, and shipped it to Mozambique, where they trained residents to use it to rebuild schools, homes, and other buildings damaged during the war (164–65). Drawing on the expertise of Seattle's skilled African American pipe fitters, they also rebuilt the Umbeluzi irrigation system and helped start new agricultural programs in the area.While LELO's efforts in Mozambique ended by the early 1990s, organizers continued to maintain relationships with labor leaders abroad and in 1997 brought activists from ten different countries to Seattle to participate in the Seabeck Conference. There activists linked the environment and workers’ rights and offered a powerful critique of closed borders, which they argued held workers hostage, while capital flowed freely (202). LELO members also criticized the AFL-CIO's “Buy American” campaigns, which they saw as counterproductive and harmful to efforts to foster international worker solidarity (205). LELO continues to organize transnationally and to advocate for the rights of migrants and workers; at the center of their work is the premise that only a transnational workers’ movement can counter the exploitations of global capitalism.Johnson's account is based on extensive archival research, and the passages from LELO's and other Third World left newspapers, as well as oral history interviews with activists, that she includes enliven the text and provide readers with greater insight into how labor organizers were applying Marxist, antiracist, and feminist analysis to understand how globalization and neoliberalism were shaping working conditions for laborers not only in the United States but throughout the world. A single map is the only illustration; additional images, including photographs of the key organizers, would have enhanced the book and made it more appealing for undergraduate audiences.Ultimately, Johnson demonstrates that local and global labor activism overlapped and were not exclusive. She also shows that labor organizing by people of color in Seattle in these decades was deeply informed by other leftist movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and, as a result, was oriented toward radical, transnational solutions to the challenges of global capitalism. This valuable study will be of interest not only to scholars of labor history and of Seattle and the western United States but also to those interested in left social movements and recent US history more broadly.