ASJE's high-priority Working Group projects are sweeping us full
speed into 2001. Please join us for the ASJE Membership Meeting on April 7 and 8 in Portland, Oregon.
ASJE's New Initiatives Working Group has created the Forest
Restoration Jobs program to address the economic, social, and
cultural components of restoration. This program seeks to develop a common body of information available to and informed by both environmental and labor leaders and is a proactive, tangible effort in which both sides will work together for solutions. Long-term goals include the creation of permanent, year-round jobs, physical to technical. The latter include wildlife surveying and GIS mapping under contracts that allow workers and managers to collaborate on stewardship.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas is a proposed expansion of NAFTA to thirty-four nations in the Western Hemisphere. ASJE is mobilizing to stop the FTAA and to prevent more of the environmental degradations and labor force reductions created by NAFTA in the name of "free trade." President Bush is expected to ask before April for "Fast Track" authority from Congress to negotiate the FTAA. ASJE's Global Trade Working Group sponsored community meetings on the FTAA in Portland and across the Midwest this past month, with more to follow in Illinois, Minneapolis, and throughout the Northwest. For more information, see www.stopftaa.com.
On a sad note, after the long labor dispute with Maxxam's Kaiser
Aluminum was settled last September, many of our Steelworker friends at Trentwood Local 338 and Mead Local 329 in Spokane, Wash., were laid off. Maxxam has chosen to resell to California the government-subsidized power provided to its plants.
For more information see
www.uswa329.org/default.htm.
The February 2001 newsletter is now available!
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TOC for Forest & River News, Winter 2001