The Crusade of Christine Ahn:
The anti-globalization movement's rising star

We are living in difficult times. The events of September 11th set in motion large-scale wars against terror, the Taliban, and the regime of Saddam Hussein. But many activists are fighting another kind of war that rarely makes headlines. It is a war waged by corporations and free trade against workers here and abroad.

Shafted: Free Trade and America's Working Poor (Food First Books, 2003) is a unique collection of stories edited by Christine Ahn. Shafted brings together the voices of diverse group of people who have risen up against corporations and transnational trade agreements: A Mexican factory worker who lost everything after being suddenly laid off by Levi's in San Antonio forms a union, a former black farmer in North Carolina fights against corporate agribusiness, and a policy maker denounces the World Trade Organization and North American Free Trade Agreement as "totally stark raving mad."

Thirty-year old Christine Ahn is an activist and writer, and the economic and social human rights program coordinator at the Food First Institute in Oakland, California. She is the recent recipient of a Public Interest Rising Star Award by OMB Watch in Washington D.C., a progressive organization that challenges the White House's Office of Management and Budget. As an activist, she's spent time in shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica and the illusory sweatshop towns along the US-Mexico border. "The same poverty that working people in the U.S. experienced--largely poor people of color--was happening on a global scale. We have to make the links, and that's what I've set my life on doing." Ahn talks to JADE Magazine about fighting the unregulated systems of free trade so prevalent today.

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At such a young age, you've been honored for your public interest work, and your book Shafted has been praised by the likes of Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Klein and Eric Schlosser. Can you talk about that?

First of all, I'd like to say that I am just one of many, many incredible people/activists kicking butt in the world. The "Rising Star" award was really random--it's always about timing and who knows who. I appreciate the recognition, but I know plenty of other amazing activists that deserve the recognition more than myself.

And regarding the praise from Ehrenreich, Klein, or Schlosser--the people whose stories are in the book is why Shafted is being praised. When do we ever hear directly from working people --- particularly low-wage working people like farmers, seamstresses, fisherman, migrant farm workers--what their lives are like?

Can you describe what has motivated your professional career? How did you become an activist and a writer committed to exposing the human rights abuses of free trade?

I am the youngest of ten children. My parents worked as cooks in LA. I grew up seeing how hard they worked and how difficult it was for us to survive, despite them working full time and overtime. And that's the reality of most working Americans, especially those living in "poverty." I've seen statistics that say that up to 64% of people living in "poverty" (that's the official federal level that says that a family of 4 living off of $18,000 is in "poverty") work full-time jobs.

I moved around a lot. I attended 12 different public schools. That's actually pretty common for poor families. But when I was about 7 or so, I went to go and live with my eldest sister in the suburbs outside Washington, DC. I was totally floored by how wealthy she was, how well she lived, with so much abundance while my elderly parents and siblings struggled so hard. Children see things so clearly, so honestly. Ever since then, I just knew at a gut-level that the "system" was not fair and that people suffered all too unnecessarily. And that has been the theme ever since.

I believe we don't think enough about how corporations are multinational, and, as you pointed out, have no allegiance to nations, citizens and cultures. The narratives in Shafted, particularly those of the workers impacted by free trade, describe how communities have been eroded both here and abroad. As an Asian American woman, how do you respond to this specific effect of free trade?

Good question. I was born in South Korea and immigrated to the US when I was three. If you read the story of Lucas Benitez, the farm worker who was a displaced farmer from Mexico, or the story of Feiyi Chen, the immigrant from China, we have to see that immigration and displacement is very much tied to globalization. People often say, "well these people should be lucky that they get to come to this country and work." Clearly, such a statement says so much about that person's intelligence, but it also signals the lack of humanity and compassion. Does that mean that people, whether they are immigrants or not, aren't entitled to a life of dignity and humanity? I think that's one of the most powerful myths about America--you come here as an immigrant, you work hard, and you prosper.

I was just at a conference in Cornell University with a dear colleague and friend of mine who is an organizer in Chinatown in New York City. She was telling me how countless immigrant women come to the workers center with their hands completely distorted because they've spent 15 years working overtime hours and now they can't do any other work. She was telling me how one woman would go to work at the crack of dawn and come home so tired at night that her children rarely saw her. It got so bad that she didn't even know that her son had skipped school the entire year. At what point do we realize that this isn't progress?

Shafted covers a great depth and breadth of voices and yet it is intensely readable. How did you select who would be included and what was the process of editing these various styles of writing?

We had two criteria for picking who would testify (these testimonies were delivered in Congress on June 12th). One was that they were intimately affected by free trade, but the other criteria was that they were doing something to fight against free trade. These are people that aren't accepting the inevitable and they're organizing their communities and their co-workers because they believe in a more just and fair world. These are the people we wanted to bring forward, and all of us have to thank them for doing the work many of us are afraid of doing, or don't have the courage to dream.

What's next for you now that Shafted is published, George W. Bush is slated to win again in 2004, and the war in Iraq and chaos in the Middle East continues? Are you working with other left of center thinkers, writers and activists to help consolidate liberal thinking for a 2008 Democratic victory? What do you urge others to do given this political climate?

Fast forward 10, 20 or 30 years - what do you think will happen to day laborers, or factory workers, or communities like El Paso, where free trade has seemingly devastated everything in its path. Without asking you to be nihilistic, can you paint a picture of where we're headed? Is it a world where all water and other natural resources, healthcare and government welfare of citizens - are all privatized?

First of all, if George W. Bush is elected again in 2004, we don't have to fast forward 10 years. In four more years under his presidency, we might not have a United States of America anymore. I'm afraid that he will have already sold off everything to the highest bidder. But it's not just President Bush. It's the notion that corporations/business can do things better than government, which is very much tied into the notion of the "free market," which we know altogether too well is so far from reality.

I'm not as nihilistic as most people today. Perhaps I have too much faith in the human spirit and the goodness of people and humanity. I think people are too fed up with corporations ruling the world and our lives. Between corporate ownership of the media, people feeling very disconnected because of the way our societies have evolved (TV, suburbs, car/fast food cultures), and the unsustainable way we are leading our lives (I've heard that the number of personal bankruptcies has doubled in the past decade), things have got to break.

Americans, if we really do believe in the greatness of this nation--principles of equality, freedom, fairness, and justice--we will do what's right and restore our democracy. What we need more than ever, is more and more people getting frustrated, getting organized, getting politicized, and getting high on civics. The more we rely on other people or politicians to bring justice to us, the more we will lose control over our destinies. Women, especially women of color, are the future of that movement. Our time has come.