One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests

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For MJ Sieber and Mike Tryon—thank god you’re still around

and in memory of Sanjay Iyer and Terry Guerin—I miss you every day

Each person is characterized by their role or position in 1999. Brief bios, as well as descriptions of organizations mentioned in the text, can be referenced at the back of the book.

BEFORE

Lori Wallach, Director of Global Trade Watch: The fight was over the World Trade Organization.

Julia Hughes, vice president of the United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel: A large part of establishing the WTO in 1995 was to create a participative, consensus-based international organization—not unlike the United Nations. It was created to establish rules of the road for international trade and to have a way to enforce those rules when countries go rogue.

Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner: The WTO, like many other international organizations, has always been about the acceptance of reduced sovereignty in the name of the common good. Something like: Given the problems we all have, I accept that we constrain my country’s sovereignty in the name of global benefit.

Victor Menotti, program coordinator for the International Forum on Globalization: The WTO was there to move power from the local and national level into a set of global rules written by the world’s largest corporations at the exclusion of civil society. That raises concerns for a lot of people.

John Nichols, reporter for the Nation: It was establishing the ability to supersede and effectively overrule what the nation-state might do. So even if you won the legislative battle at home, you could be overridden at the global level.

Lori Wallach: The rules being written were things like, You can only have this much food safety, anything higher is a trade barrier. Or, This labeling system you have, it’s an illegal trade barrier. Or, You can’t have this kind of investment rule, you can’t regulate services. All of it is viewed by the WTO as illegal trade barriers.

Deborah James, organizer for Global Exchange: People didn’t realize that under the rules of the WTO it’s illegal to ban products based on production methods. One of the only things you’re allowed to ban is prison labor. But if you say, We don’t want these products in our country because they’re made under exploitative conditions, or because they’re made in ways that damage the environment, it’s actually illegal to say we don’t want those products circulating in our country.

We were telling people this in 1999 and they’d say, Well, we should be able to decide those things.

And we were saying, Yeah, that’s why we don’t like the WTO!

Celia Alario, media liaison at the Independent Media Center: People were seeing the ways in which everybody was affected, no matter what issues were important to you—the environment, human rights, social justice, sweatshop issues—this unchecked globalization and trade was going to affect all of us.

Lori Wallach: It was a battle of ideology. One was a vision of a single constitution for global corporate governance, which is what the first director of the WTO had said was needed. The alternative was making trade rules for countries according to what was interesting to their people and their governments, rules about what they would do when they decided to trade—not one-size-fits-all, top-down, corporate dictates.

Ralph Nader, founder of Public Citizen: There is no such thing as a free market. Can you have a free market when you have monopolistic practices? Can you have a free market when you have big business subordinating small business in all kinds of ways? One-sided franchise agreements? Can you have a free market when you have corporations who often love intricate regulations—not very onerous, mind you, but intricate—and they have the accountants and lawyers to do the work of compliance? Small businesses can’t afford that, so they go out of business. Large corporations have propagandized the innocent and the ignorant in our society into accepting the idea of free markets. That’s the way they legitimize what they do.

Colin Hines, founding member of the International Forum on Globalization: Margaret Thatcher’s most corrosive four-letter word, TINA—There Is No Alternative—was totally absorbed by, not just the status quo people who did well out of it, but also by the intellectually lazy who just said, Well, you know, globalization’s like gravity.

Celia Alario: We were being told, The train had left the station. There is no turning back. This is the way the world is going to be.

Vandana Shiva, founding member of the International Forum on Globalization: We realized if we don’t tell our plural stories—what happened to Indian farmers, what happened to the Southeast Asian countries, what happened to Africa—we will get the typical story of all boats rising. And all boats weren’t rising, some boats were actually sinking.

Julia Hughes: The creation of the WTO wasn’t the end of the job. Processes needed to be put in place that would help bring people together. So, built into the creation of the WTO was the concept of the ministerial. Talking about ministers is more European-speak—the WTO is, after all, based in Geneva. We don’t use that phrase here in the U.S. We have a U.S. trade representative and that person’s equivalent in other countries would likely be a trade minister. Most other countries around the world use that title, minister. So the conferences, which are usually every two years, are called ministerials and the idea of the ministerial is to force countries face-to-face to discuss issues, to keep governments engaged and not just have the Geneva-based community—which is an incestuous thing, the Geneva crowd—making all the decisions. The idea behind the ministerials is to make sure home capitals and officials are also engaged. The objective going into the 1999 ministerial was to expand on the original framework that was set up four years earlier.

Tetteh Hormeku, coordinator for the Africa Trade Network: By 1999, African civil society organizations like ours had come to be very, very unhappy with the way the WTO was evolving. We discovered that the original agreements that were signed were problematic—to put it mildly—especially for Africa. But also, at that point, the big countries, the European Union, Japan, Canada and the U.S.—the Quad—were hell-bent on expanding the agenda further. So, we were opposed to the agreement that was signed already and even more opposed to the effort to expand the agenda.

David Solnit, cofounder of Art and Revolution: At the beginning of 1999, when we heard that the WTO ministerial was coming to the U.S., I thought, Okay, this is our chance to step up like the Zapatistas did, like people in Africa and other parts of the world have.

Lori Wallach: It was either going to be in Seattle, San Diego, or Honolulu.

Ron Judd, president of the King County Labor Council: I had a dream about WTO coming to Seattle—people thought I was crazy. Everybody goes, How do you know that?

I go, Just what my gut tells me. Here’s my conclusion. And I walked them through my assessment of why everybody just loves free trade in Washington State, from our congressional delegation, to our statewide elected leaders, to all of our local, regional, urban leaguers, right down to the county commissioners. Per capita, we’re the most trade-dependent state in the country. The meetings were going to be between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so the common view was no one’s going to show up to protest, all they’re going to do is cut ribbons and celebrate how good free trade is and use Washington and Seattle as the symbol of that. I said, The great thing is, they don’t know we’re going to plan something that’s going to shock the shit out of them!

Colin Hines: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a very old, duffer-y guy from the sixties, was asked, What’s the most frightening thing in politics?

He said, Events, dear boy, events.

Mike Dolan, field director for Global Trade Watch: I had already been in touch with folks in San Diego and I had been in touch with folks in Seattle. Hawai'i would have been hell in terms of organizing—impossible. As much as I’d love it, no thank you—just the buses alone. If they picked San Diego, I knew I’d be putting a lot of energy into a cross-border mobilization. But Seattle was a home-court advantage. The labor movement was there, all the environmentalists, militant liberals.

Victor Menotti: We knew that if they picked Seattle, the forest issues would be big—the Timber Wars were still quite fresh in that region.

four waters, organizer with the Direct Action Network: In 1996, a lot of us came together in Humboldt for what was called the Timber Wars. When Seattle came up, I had been working with Julia Butterfly almost two years at that point. She had been living in a two-hundred-foot-tall, one-thousand-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days in order to prevent it from being harvested.

Jim Flynn, organizer with Earth First!: Somebody once said that you need twenty-five people on the ground for every person in the tree to bring that person food and water. Then there is all the media work that’s got to be done. If you go sit in a tree, nobody will know—or they can do whatever they want to you—so you have to create a media situation so that the cops or the loggers themselves don’t do something really bad, just attack you in the middle of the night.

Hilary McQuie, organizer with the Direct Action Network: The traumatized militant forest activists in the Northwest were such an important strand of what came together in Seattle. I had done a little bit with Earth First! back in the day. Those Eugene, Oregon, tree sits-in—people ended up getting beaten up and getting their hearts broken—those sit-ins really created this energy.

Jim Flynn: A friend took me to some hot springs in the old-growth forest near Portland and that really changed my life, just being in an amazing place like that. I fell in love. Then I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said EARTH FIRST! I said to my friend, What’s that?

She said, It’s an environmental group that is not afraid to break the law to get their point across.

I said to myself, Well, I don’t mind breaking the law.

I was a juvenile delinquent. Joining Earth First! was like putting on an old pair of blue jeans. I was meant for it. It felt very comfortable. It was a community that I could jive with. I had a respect and love for nature, giving voice to the voiceless, fighting the good fight even though victory is never guaranteed and rarely achieved. It’s still fighting the good fight. I quickly became a backpack activist, going from campaign to campaign in a car pool with a bunch of people. It just became the social calendar for me and other people that built community.

Earth First! is pretty well-known in Eugene. There are anarchists involved. We had lots of connections in the community and some people started to see signs on some trees downtown. This was an area where the local annual Eugene celebration took place. It was nothing but a parking lot but in all the medians were huge trees, redwoods included. We knew one of the city council members, a ninety-year-old woman who was disgusted that they were going to cut the trees down before it could even get talked about. So she alerted us.

A group of us conspired to sit in the trees. That was really the entire plan. We thought it would delay the tree cutting until the next Monday night when there could be a council meeting. Not that we had a lot of faith in council meetings, but it’s what we had at the time.

So, in the wee hours of the morning, two women started a catfight outside a bar right next to the parking lot with the trees. It drew all the security guards and allowed the rest of us to get up into the trees. There were fifteen to twenty people who climbed at least four different trees. Most of them were in one huge oak.

At dawn, the police showed up with gas masks on their hips. There had been no confrontation and hardly any communication at this point. The tree with most of the people in it got threatened with pepper spray and they all came down, dragging their feet. Since the police were there with riot gear, the public noticed—people were waking up, word was getting out. Now there are hundreds of people. It’s becoming a big scene and people are getting angry.

They got most of the people out of the trees. This one guy, they got a ladder and used a couple cans of pepper spray on him, mainly focusing on his hands. It’s a skin irritant as well as a lung irritant. Eventually, he chose to come down.

That left me alone in a tree, a sweetgum. I took a firmer stance. I developed a position where I could stand relatively comfortably and then wrap each arm around a different branch until I felt like they couldn’t just pull me off. They tried. They went up I don’t know how many times. Each time the torture got more intense. They were twisting my feet. They were pulling my hair. They were trying pain holds.

Eventually they had a fireman in a bucket lift and he grabbed the back of my hair and yanked down like he was working out in the gym. He was snapping my head back like a Pez dispenser, causing a lifelong neck injury. They used over twenty cans of pepper spray on me. They used up all the pepper spray they could get from Eugene, Lane County, and neighboring Springfield. The pain compliance holds and the pepper spray, nothing worked. It was getting more and more intense and I remained nonviolent.

The police and people on the street are going wild. Long pause. It’s hard to relive this sometimes. Crying. It was getting more and more intense. There was a huge crowd, close to 1,000 people, but by this time I could barely open my eyes because they had pepper-sprayed my face. I was blind. I had a lot of supporters on the ground. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. One said, They’re moving in with more pepper spray, or They are moving out. I knew some of them by their voices. Crying. They were screaming at the cops because they were so outraged.

I don’t want to discount chemical weapons but, in this case, it was mainly cayenne pepper, which has a pain effect but also has a numbing effect in some ways. They were wasting their time by respraying me with the same stuff once I was already drenched. I had my back to them the whole time. Eventually, I said, Is that cayenne all you’ve got? Don’t you have any habañero? They did not appreciate that and started using Mace. Mace was a hell of a lot worse for me. Mace causes all your mucus membranes to start gushing out. I was still able to resist that. Not that I was looking for glory but, on some level, I recognized that I was the last line of defense at that point.

They cut up one of my pants legs all the way to my inner thigh and they were spraying my inner thigh but they weren’t spraying my groin. People say that they pepper-sprayed my balls. They did not pepper-spray my balls.

They started cutting branches away from around me so they could get closer. Eventually, they got to where they could literally put their hands around me. They got a belt around my waist and attached the belt to the bucket on the lift. Then they yanked me. The first time they did it, I almost passed out. I had a really good grip around these two branches but they yanked me with the bucket and it bent me in half right in the stomach area.

They were escalating so I knew the second time would be harder. I knew that if I tried to resist, I would go flying off of there. I couldn’t resist anymore. The second time they did it, I let go and they took me down in the bucket to the ground. I was completely drenched in pepper spray. It was about a six-hour ordeal from dawn until early afternoon, June 1, 1997.

The cops had to put me in a patrol car so they wanted to rinse me off first. They took a fire hose to me because I was dripping with pepper spray and Mace. The pepper spray is oil-based, so spraying me with water had limited effectiveness. It spread the pepper spray to places that it hadn’t already been. So they put me in an ambulance and took me to a hospital. Then I was sent to jail. All of my skin had fully absorbed the pepper spray. It was thirty-six hours of sitting in a jail cell, just marinating. Even one week later when I took a bath, it all just re-electrified. It was like I got into a spicy bath. It was soaked into my skin. My hands were orange for one week. By the time they got me out of my tree, they had cut all the other trees down. My tree was the lone tree from what I heard. I didn’t see it, but as soon as I was gone, they cut it down.

John Zerzan, Black Bloc organizer: There was an energy that was emerging in Eugene, I would say as far back as the Unabomber phenomenon. In ’95 it was huge. You couldn’t get away from it. Right after Kaczynski was captured in ’96, I started overhearing these conversations. These kids were just down with Ted. He had just been arrested. We were going to send him some money for books. They understood the critique of technology and a technological society. They were completely in accord with it. I was just amazed. I started to see that it was way ahead of what we might have thought was brewing. It annoyed the left. I could see that too. They weren’t then—and still are not now—interested in the critique of a technological society.

At the same time, the forest defense was going strong. There was a lot of that building up, getting more militant and getting more folks involved in tree-sitting. There were protests and demonstrations in Eugene around that time especially starting in 1997, your standard street stuff. You could just feel that something was going on.

Suzanne Savoie, Black Bloc organizer: Y2K was coming up so there was a lot of passion around primitive skills and decentralizing, living more natural lifestyles and trying to do away with corporate control of your life. I think that because Y2K was looming, there was this mythology about we’re going to actually be able to break down the global system. I think the juxtaposition with Y2K at the same time that the WTO meeting was happening made it a really interesting time. We were seeing the writing on the wall, the kind of slow-motion apocalypse that was going to lead to the destruction of biodiversity and upend cultures and take away indigenous rights. People said, Well, maybe we actually have an opportunity to turn the ship around right now before things get worse. We have an opportunity right now to try to live more sustainable lives, more in line with the capacity of this planet. There was this feeling that we could do this.

Norm Stamper, chief of the Seattle Police Department: There was Y2K—remember that? Everyone was telling me, Oh shit, Norm, do you realize how much of our systems are out of date? Computerization and the internet are deeply embedded with everything we do. It’s going to blow up!

Ed Joiner, assistant chief of the Seattle Police Department: We had a lot of concerns about what was going to happen when the clock ticked midnight in 1999.

Patrick Collins, National Guard operations officer: Everybody was worried about Y2K. The National Guard was told that they were going to be on alert for Y2K and we had to put together this elaborate plan for how we were going to mobilize people if the end of the world came.

Suzanne Savoie: It was its own kind of weird phenomenon. We were at the turning point of a millennium. That was significant. It felt like we have the opportunity right now to reevaluate our relationship with technology, our relationship with corporations, our relationship with the inequality and social justice and environmental issues in the world right now, at this change of the millennia. It was a wake-up call. Like, We’ve got to do this! It was us saying at this point in the trajectory of humanity, here at the new millennium, we have an opportunity to change course. I was younger then and everybody says you always are a lot more hopeful when you’re younger. But it gave you hope that you were actually going to be able to change something, change the planet, change the course of history.

Mike Dolan: I was in Washington, D.C., at the offices of Public Citizen—on the edge of my seat, waiting to find out which city was going to host this thing.

Lori Wallach: We had a contact in Geneva who was supposed to call me the minute the decision was made about where the ministerial would take place. I got a phone call at two or three in the morning D.C. time. We found out it was Seattle and immediately got phone chains going.

Victor Menotti: When Seattle was announced, we pounced on contacts and identifying issues that would get people involved.

Mike Dolan: The announcement came down and I picked up the phone and started making calls. I was reserving venues and hotel rooms and really grabbing space like crazy. The WTO guys had the Sheraton and the Westin. I wasn’t really interested in those rooms anyway, but I needed to find rooms—any rooms. I was putting down deposits on my credit cards. I was like, I’ll deal with this shit later but, right now, I need the rooms. I got a whole youth hostel, 140 beds.

Lori Wallach: In the middle of the night in Seattle, we started calling hotels and putting down deposits. We originally put them on personal credit cards, significant others’ credit cards, parents’ credit cards, roommates’ credit cards—just to hold venues. All this had to be done quickly because governments would be doing the same thing. By the time the sun rose in D.C.—much less in Seattle—we already had cornered a lot of the market. In organizing, real estate is power.

David Solnit: My initial thought was that it would be in San Diego and that it would be easy to get people there from all the cold parts of the country in November. Just show them a picture of a beach and they’ll come. Then they chose Seattle. There was Boeing and Microsoft on the host committee, so I think it was the big engines of corporate globalization.

Pat Davis, chairperson for Seattle Host: I was president of the Washington Council on International Trade, and we formed a group called Seattle Host and our role was to facilitate the services that were necessary to host the WTO ministerial—the space, the transportation, the hotel accommodations. We also helped inform the public on the importance of trade. We had to persuade the members of Washington Council on International Trade to help pay for it—they were the Boeings and Microsofts and all those, big-time. They had to be persuaded that this had to be funded.

Nick Licata, Seattle City Council member: The council was not part of the budget process. It was a backroom deal, playing out between the civic leaders, Bill Gates, heads of the Chamber. Paul Schell, the mayor, was a Democrat but very comfortable with the business community and knew them very well.

Pam Schell, Seattle’s first lady: Money didn’t matter to Paul. He was a preacher’s kid, the oldest one, and had a great sense of responsibility. He really did everything constantly saying, This is public service. I’m in here for public service.

Nick Licata: The business community in Seattle, for the most part, is socially liberal. They’re still into the market economy but they’re not totally free market. They are large organizations that are concerned about profits, and they’re concerned about trade and that’s where they’re focused. They saw the WTO as a good thing because it was dollar signs. Ca-ching, ca-ching. Seattle is a major port city. A lot of people don’t know that. I think they all thought they’d be able to puff up their feathers as the major corporate businesses in Seattle that sponsored the WTO.

Pam Schell: Paul really wanted to see Seattle do well through the WTO, even before he was mayor. He’d been port commissioner and was part of the decision-making that they should go after the opportunity of hosting the WTO. He was an advocate of Clinton’s free trade. But he was also very tolerant of other positions.

Charles Mandigo, regional assistant specialist for the FBI: Seattle was going to put their mark on the world by hosting the WTO. The mayor, the city itself, was saying, We’re becoming a global force here. You’ve got Starbucks, you’ve got Microsoft, you’ve got Boeing, you’ve got Amazon coming up—they’re all out front. Seattle was definitely prime time. This is going to be the cherry on the sundae. What could go wrong?

Ralph Nader: The WTO is having a meeting in Seattle—wow—we’re going to really give them an experience. At Public Citizen, we were among the first to raise the banner against these trade agreements. I recruited Lori Wallach, who helped start the Citizens Trade Campaign. I saw the WTO right from the beginning as an attempt to pull down treaties. They pull down the higher standards of our country in labor, consumer rights, and the environment.

Noam Chomsky, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: In the 1990s, the few people who were paying attention to the Clinton trade agreements could see what was happening. We were writing about it, but didn’t reach the general public. They weren’t aware that Clinton was carrying forward Reagan’s neoliberal programs in a particularly brutal way. You could see it if you looked, but who looks? I mean, who even knows, for example—even today—that NAFTA was rammed through in violation of U.S. law? The U.S. law requires that labor be consulted on any international labor agreement. They weren’t. In fact, they weren’t even notified until the last minute; it was all in secret. The effect of Seattle was to bring these issues to a much broader audience. Then you start getting people interested, concerned, maybe try to do something.

Maud Daudon, deputy mayor of Seattle: At first it was very exciting. This is a huge deal happening in our city and it’s an important dialogue to have. It’s important to talk about the issues of globalization and it felt like a significant thing for Seattle and a proud moment for the city. There’d been a series of other meetings in Seattle that were not as big as the WTO meeting but they were in the arena of international trade issues. The city was positioning itself as a hub of activity in global trade, partly because we have great ports and we were competing with other West Coast ports.

Pat Davis: Seattle is a port town. I was elected port commissioner in 1986, the first woman—shock and awe to downtown. Laughs. I was not from the establishment. Washington State is the only state in the union which elects its port commissioners. Trade was in so many people’s lives, so many businesses, small and large, and the membership of Washington Council on International Trade wasn’t just Boeing and Microsoft. It was a lot of small businesses that did trade. They were all selling abroad, to Asia particularly, and so they came on board along with the governor and other leaders of the time. In those days, Seattle was small enough that we knew each other, but it was large enough to get things done. It was just the right time.

Gary Locke, governor of Washington: We endorsed it. We were supportive of it and various units of our state government were involved in the advocacy and tangential planning. I thought it was very important that we host big-subject conferences. It’s important to bring world leaders together to talk about coordination of their economies and trade with each other and trade as a way of creating jobs and lifting the lives of people.

Kim Thayil, guitarist for Soundgarden and the No WTO Combo: Seattle’s always had this provincial rent-a-culture attitude, where it understands itself through the rest of the world. I had a roommate who coined the term rent-a-culture, and we all started using it—it was hilarious—because Seattle never really understood itself on its own terms. It saw itself often from external sources: What do people in New York say about Seattle? What do people in LA say about Seattle? What do people in London say about Seattle?

Charles R. Cross, editor of the Rocket: When people think of Seattle in their minds, they’re often thinking of the early ’90s—Singles, the grunge world, which was an analog world. By the time of the WTO, a transition was happening. Big companies were really becoming the drivers of the city. Boeing had been the biggest employer but by 1999, Microsoft was becoming by far the biggest economic engine in the area. There were a lot of tech workers and a lot of yuppies. Housing prices were going up dramatically. Seattle musicians who had lived in $200 or $300 apartments on Capitol Hill were now priced out of Seattle because there were a lot of developments and redevelopments that had started.

Matt Griffin, managing partner at the Pine Street Group: At the beginning of the ’90s, downtown was a pretty good mess. There was a feeling that we have to launch an effort to get people back downtown and take back our city. So I was part of a team that ended up doing the three-block project that became the Pacific Place Shopping Center. Once we announced that, Nike went forward with a store and there were a bunch of other buildings that went forward, that added to the synergy, added to that momentum that we established. There were a bunch of local people that put their heart and put their money in it.

Steve Koehler, chair of the Downtown Seattle Association: There was quite a bit of resurgence at that point in time. I think a lot of major retailers came into the city as a result of that. Then it was just a matter of keeping that going.

Charles R. Cross: It was the beginning of the change from this cheap-old Seattle to a Seattle that would become pretty unaffordable. There was tension already between the artistic community and the tech overlords. By 1999, almost all the early clubs that had been happening for grunge and many of the places that people identified with the ’80s had gone out of business or been redeveloped. Seattle was an extremely business-friendly place. It felt like Bill Gates was the true mayor of Seattle.

Kim Thayil: I knew Seattle from the ’80s but was gone for a lot of the ’90s. It’s like if you’re home with a plant that you’re watering every day, you may not notice it growing because it grows incrementally. But if you’re gone and you come back, you know it’s changed, you know that plant is not the way it was when you left. When I came back after Soundgarden broke up in ’97, Seattle had changed. There were more people, it was busier, there was dysfunction. The city was going through transition. It had grown, but its sense of self hadn’t seemed to have grown with it. It was a big city with a little-city attitude. The gangly kid whose pants are too short.

Lori Wallach: Mike Dolan was dispatched early to find an office. He reached out to groups to figure out who would be our core. The vision I had was that this was going to be one of those moments where the policy and the politics needed to be incredibly synergistic, or it could be catastrophic. We had to make it synergistic.

Mike Dolan: The reason for the Citizens Trade Campaign was to bring in labor, environment, human rights and faith-based groups, plus the family farmers—all the constituents that have a stake in globalization.

Lori Wallach: We created the Citizens Trade Campaign, this cross-sectoral coalition of all these groups that typically would not hang out together but rather fight each other. The entire fucking multinational corporate lobby for the first time in history is united for this goddamn trade agreement. If we don’t unite with the other side, we are going to get played royally and lose.

Mike Dolan: I was the CTC’s field director and what I did from ’95 to ’99 was build the sinews and muscles of that coalition that Lori envisioned. I had state chapters all around the country. I had to build that so that in ’99, I could go to all those coalitions and say, you’ve got to come to Seattle.

I was involved in different pedigrees of organizing, strands from the lateral-anarchy-consensus-decision-making approach, to hierarchical-labor. Being in between those two worlds, it was like an alchemy; the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The challenge was getting those different traditions of organizing melding and working together. I was the reviled reformist from Washington, D.C.—laughs—but I’m actually pretty good at reading the room.

David Solnit: There were different worldviews and different politics. Labor was trying to get a seat at the table, and we were basically saying, "Do