Two activists say unions 'gotta get into young people'
By Jane Birnbaum

Alexandra Bradbury: Carrying on a union-friendly family tradition

As the World Trade Organization meeting brought together many different kinds of protesters in Seattle, it also helped create a new generation of young activists like Alexandra Bradbury, now a senior at the city's Garfield High School. Bradbury helped bring young people together last November to protest WTO policies that unfairly penalize the world's most impoverished citizens. The daughter of a University of Washington psychology professor and of a computer specialist, 17-year-old Bradbury continues today to raise awareness among her high school peers about such issues as sweatshops and the effects of globalization.

Bradbury organized a youth march that took 100 of the 1,700 Garfield students to the Seattle WTO rally. In May 2000, as a member of a group she and her friends call Youth Opposed to the WTO, Bradbury helped create a thought-provoking assembly for 200 of her fellow Garfield students. The students brought together a political science professor and a graduate student who debated an economics professor and a member of a pro-WTO Seattle host organization. "In the beginning, we had some students coming in and saying, ‘What is the WTO anyway?' " Bradbury recalls. "But then they asked questions that showed they were interested."

Bradbury first became active a year ago, when she heard about the WTO's plans to hold its meeting in the United States and a friend of her mother mentioned a Public Citizen-sponsored committee to organize students to protest at the WTO meetings. The issues weren't new to her, however. "Over the past few years, I'd been increasingly concerned with the question of corporate dominance of our society and the priorities that our world places on profits—over the environment, health, diversity and all sorts of other human concerns," Bradbury says. "In some ways, it was heartening for the WTO to show up, because it provided a tangible symbol for a lot of that stuff and provided a means of unifying all these different groups of activists."

Bradbury, who grew up in a union-friendly family where labor songs were sung around the house, felt good about union members' presence in Seattle. "It was especially encouraging to see labor joining with environmentalists and other activists, because these diverse groups are united through their common goal of addressing globalization and the forces of capitalism that are our common oppressor."

As for teens, Bradbury says, "I do think a lot of teens feel like they'd like to change things, except they haven't got a voice. The tradition of unions is to unite and empower the voiceless, and that's the same thing that young people the world over are pining for."

Bradbury recalls that while young marchers cheered unionists they passed during the 40,000-strong WTO rally in Seattle, the teens Bradbury knows don't tend to think about unions. "Young people are encouraged to see the career world as an individualistic thing, that you get ahead on your own, rather than by uniting with your fellow workers," she says. Teens tend not to think much about union issues because that's not their experience yet. So if unions want to become relevant to teens now, she suggests, union members should turn out for common issues—sweatshops, the environment and, increasingly, labor by U.S. prisoners.

		From America@work, September 2000.

"Many of the big issues for youth activists—sweatshops, globalization, the environment, human rights—are global issues," Bradbury explains. "Perhaps unions can best reach out to youth by reaching out across borders."

Sha-King Graham: Channeling anger into activism

New vistas opened for Sha-King Graham when he turned 14. The child of incarcerated parents, he had been shuffled among foster and group homes until his stepmother took him to live with her in New York's Bronx borough. "I was already frustrated," recalls Graham, now 19 and getting ready for his freshman year at New York's New School. "Most people who grew up like I did eventually get involved in criminal activity. I didn't want to do those things, and I wondered how I could deal with my frustration and anger."

For starters, on the advice of his stepmother, a former Head Start worker and community activist, he enrolled in the Bronx Leadership Academy, a small public school that helped prepare him for college. And he became an activist, first joining his stepmother in public housing tenant organizing activities and then becoming involved in police brutality issues when his sister was killed three years ago.

While Graham continues his interest in legal issues as a staff member with a Bronx-based group called Youth Force, which receives funding from the office of the mayor of New York, his activities have broadened to include unions and jobs. "It costs Nike $6 total to produce a pair of Air Jordans, and they pay the Asian kids who make them $1.50 a day," he says. "Who can survive on that? And these companies that make so much money off the sweat of these poor people and then sell their goods at the highest prices in the South Bronx, what jobs paying living wages have they created?"

Graham also is interested in the issue of U.S. prison labor. He recently participated in prison labor actions at Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret stores in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

Graham says his Youth Force experience has given him some understanding of the union movement. "I believe that their purpose is to help people. We believe in a Yoruban (West African) proverb which says that if we stand tall, it's because we stand on the backs of those who came before us."

Graham says most of his peers have "no sense" of unions. They're aware if there's a major teachers' strike, but the young activists he knows have no contact with the union movement except at anti-sweatshop rallies, he explains. "If union leaders could come to our membership meetings and discuss what's going on with them, that would be a start," he suggests. "They could talk about the issues we have in common, like prison and sweatshop labor. It would show they're into young people."