AFSCME Wants To Keep Healthy Water Flowing In Oregon

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:34:02 +0100

AFSCME Wants To Keep Healthy Water Flowing In Oregon

There are a lot of water issues that AFSCME and Multnomah County are weighing in on. AFSCME Council 75 recently signed on to the Renew America’s Water Campaign that calls on Congress to establish a dedicated source of funding for water and wastewater infrastructure. The Renew America’s Water Fund would direct over $30 billion to protect America’s water through:

§ repairing pipes

§ improving water treatment

§ fixing water infrastructure in schools

§ building green infrastructure

§ creating jobs

Multnomah County has started a “Tack Back The Tap” campaign to make sure we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping shared resources under public control. As chair of the Multnomah County Green Team I encourage you all to come out and see the film Blue Gold at a free screening at the Bagdad Theatre at 6:00 PM on Sunday Oct. 17th, followed by a Q & A session with an expert panel.

As I reported earlier in the NWLP we successfully passed a resolution at the 2010 AFSCME International Convention on Water Localization Now is the time to weigh in on an attempt to privatize water here in Oregon. The corporation doing the privatization is Nestle, the world’s largest food manufacturer, and a company that has a detestable record on labor, human-rights, and the environment. Here are but a few examples of what I mean:

From IUF (Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers worldwide)

How many times can a company lie in the course of attempting to undermine a union? It is difficult to say if Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, holds the record (the competition is stiff), but it is certainly an over-achiever…

For three long years, our affiliate SBNIP representing workers at the Nescafé factory in Panjang, Indonesia, has been trying to bargain a new collective agreement, including wage bargaining. Nestlé management responded by retaliating against SBNIP officers and members, creating a company union, pressuring workers to ‘join’ it and even faking signatures on membership documents.

Nestlé are past masters of this technique of repeating something often enough in the hope that it will be accepted as true. This practice has recently been extended to issuing CSR reports which they claim to be in compliance with the requirements of the Global Reporting Initiative, falsely assigning their own reports a grade, and even hiring an outside agency to ‘certify’ its accuracy. As the IUF has shown, the exercise is entirely bogus and can’t hold up to even casual scrutiny.

In Japan:

“Disregard of Japanese Laws and Regulations” Prevailing in Nestle: Anti-union Attack Condemned by the Supreme Court Nestle, the world’s largest food manufacturer widely known through “Nescafe,” is causing trouble in many parts around the globe. Nestle Japan, its Japanese subsidiary, stands out in particular for having provoked division in the employees’ union, for repeated unfair dismissals of employees who challenged the outrageous management practices and for human rights abuses. The company flaunts Japan’s legal system by blatantly disregarding various court rulings and shows disdain for the cultural practice of negotiation by turning a deaf ear to recommendations and injunctions issued by the Labor Relations Commission. Behind the company’s elaborately embellished advertisement campaign, it has
shamelessly violated Japanese laws and regulations. Can we trust such an ethically questionable multinational company?

Or how about Child slavery:

Anticorporate protesters went after Nestlé for its infant formula. Now they’re at it again—this time accusing the company of using cocoa harvested by forced labor. With their bright pink wigs, colorful placards and painted smiles, the crowd in front of San Francisco’s Metreon movie theater last July looked like extreme fans come to celebrate the opening of the latest Willie Wonka film. But these merrymakers had a downbeat message for Nestlé, maker of Wonka chocolate candy. A typical sign read, “Make my Wonka bar slave-free.”

This protest was organized by Global Exchange, a California pressure group that has organized letter-writing campaigns, appealed to lovers to make Valentine’s Day “slave-free” and told parents to mail their children’s Halloween treats back to Nestlé and other chocolate makers who buy cocoa from plantations in West Africa. The International Labour Organization, part of the UN, estimates 284,000 child laborers work on cocoa farms, most of them in one tiny country, Ivory Coast, source of almost half the world’s cocoa. “These are either involved in hazardous work, unprotected or unfree, or have been trafficked,” says the ILO.

Here is an excerpt from a Food and Water Watch article about the situation in Cascade Locks:

The controversial water exchange that would allow Nestlé to bottle and sell water currently being used by endangered fish from the Columbia River Gorge. Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) is considering an application from Cascade Locks and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) for a water exchange that would allow the town to sell ODFW’s spring water to Nestlé to bottle.

“Citizens from the Gorge and across Oregon are deeply concerned about the social and environmental impacts of selling our water to a multinational corporation,” said Lori Ann Burd, Restore Mt. Hood Campaign Manager and Staff Attorney for Bark. “This water comes onto state land from Mt. Hood National Forest, so it really belongs to all of us, and Nestlé’s plan is not an appropriate use of this precious resource.”

Earlier this summer, a United States Geological Service (USGS) report that found ground water levels are falling across the entire Columbia Plateau, a region that includes Cascade Locks. According to the USGS, groundwater levels in the Eastern Columbia Plateau have steeply declined over the past 25 years in 80 percent of the nearly 500 wells measured. Although the sampling did not include Cascade Locks’ groundwater, this study suggests a shrinking supply of water, a resource once thought to be inexhaustible in the region.

“In an area that has always been water-rich, this USGS report is a wake-up call that the abundant supply of water Oregonians have taken for granted is diminishing,” said Julia DeGraw, the Northwest organizer with Food & Water Watch and Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge. “We should not sell our finite water supply to a corporation with a long history as a bad actor.”

Nestlé has asked ODFW to approve an agreement that would exchange part of ODFW’s water at Oxbow Springs with an equivalent amount of well water from the city of Cascade Locks. Nestlé would then buy both the city’s well and spring water to bottle under its Pure Life and Arrowhead labels, pumping an average of 167 million gallons of water out of Cascade Locks every year. While the financial details of the deal have not yet been disclosed, Nestlé has paid an average of $.00225 per gallon where it has brokered similar deals in other areas. A gallon of Nestlé’s spring water sold in single-serve plastic jugs sells for $5.30.

The lack of facts on the ground is a serious concern for Keep Nestlé out of the Gorge, a coalition of 15 environmental and social justice organizations. “How can we know what a sustainable withdrawal of water is when we don’t have a map or adequate baseline data on the city of Cascade Locks’ groundwater?” said DeGraw. “Approving it would be an irresponsible move that could cause serious damage to Cascade Locks’ municipal drinking water source. OWRD should deny this application. ”

Clean, cold water from the spring is crucial for endangered fish living both inside the fish hatchery and in nearby Herman Creek, but scientists have not yet determined whether or not they would be adversely impacted by this proposal. In addition, the water bottling facility would introduce up to 200 truck trips a day to rural roads, increasing traffic and smog in the Gorge and potentially affecting tourism in Cascade Locks.

The Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge coalition members include Food & Water Watch, Alliance for Democracy, Bark, Environment Oregon, Trout Unlimited, Columbia Group Sierra Club and Columbia Riverkeeper. More details about the Cascade Locks water exchange can be found at http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/NoNestleinOR

For all of these reasons and many more I strongly encourage you to get a public comment out as soon as possible to keep Nestle’s vile hands off our water.

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AFSCME Wants To Keep Healthy Water Flowing In Oregon