More than 10,000 delegates and observers from around the world are gathered in Bali, Indonesia, for the 10-day United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC). Of the 90 union delegates, more than 20 are from North America, including David Foster, executive director of the Blue-Green Alliance, a partnership between the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. Foster sends us the following update.

In the United Steelworkers (USW) union, we’ve often made the statement:

You can’t fix global warming without fixing global trade.

Nowhere has this observation been more accurate than in the struggles of Indonesia’s main forestry union, Kahutindo. On Dec. 7, the Steelworkers delegates to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) met with the president and treasurer of the union of these embattled Indonesian workers.

The USW is the principle union in the forest industries of the United States and Canada, an industry that has been especially hard hit by the impacts of both global trade and global warming. Tens of thousands of North American workers have lost their jobs in the past two decades as the result of the global integration of this industry, exacerbated by the rise of illegal logging around the world. At the same time, particularly in Canada, the boreal forests have been devastated by the emergence of the global warming-related pine beetle infestation, which threatens the long-term future of the industry across western Canada.

However, the twin problems of global warming and global trade also have devastated the Indonesian forestry unions, whose country is home to the world’s third largest forests, after Brazil and Zaire. According to Kahutindo, the workforce in forest products has declined by more than 50 percent in the past decade, from 2 million workers to fewer than 1 million today. Kahutindo’s membership has declined from 400,000 two years ago to 150,000 today.

The job loss has been driven by two decades of unsustainable logging practices that have dramatically reduced available timber. This problem has been aggravated by the rise of illegal logging and “timber laundering,” the practice by which foreign investors purchase illegally logged timber in Indonesia and ship it to countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam and China, where it is recertified as having been logged in those countries.

In turn, global warming has been worsened by the unsustainable logging practices in Indonesia. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attributes roughly 20 percent of global warming emissions each year to changes in land use, principally deforestation of the world’s significant remaining rain forests such as exist in Indonesia.

Kahutindo’s principal strategy for rebuilding workers’ rights and job security for its members is its campaign for sustainable forestry. In Indonesia, tropical forests can regenerate harvestable timber within seven to eight years. The union now advocates protection of remaining tropical forests and reliance on reforestation of previously logged areas to provide a sustainable source of fiber. 

In addition, the Steelworkers union has made certification of Indonesian logs and wood products in the international market its primary tactic in convincing the Indonesian government and forest products’ companies to enforce Indonesian forestry laws and to practice sustainable forestry. The union also has fought for a place at the table in the international negotiations over this issue, which has resulted in successful agreements with the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Norway. Additional negotiations are under way with Japan and the European Union.

Recently, the USW and the Sierra Club filed a joint suit over alleged illegal logging in Indonesia. The U.S. Department of Commerce acknowledged the unfair economic advantage this illegal fiber source gave the Asia Pulp and Paper Co. (APP) in shipping high-end paper products to the U.S. market. The USW and Sierra Club demonstrated that more than 9,000 U.S. workers in American paper mills lost their jobs as a result.

At the same time that it allegedly engaged in illegal logging, APP also worked hard to prevent its 14,000 workers from organizing into Kahutindo. APP’s collaboration with the Indonesian government to conceal the extent of its illegal logging from the rest of the world was a poignant example of how the rules of globalization have worked to aggravate global warming while also driving down the conditions of workers in the forestry industry worldwide. 

When a paper worker in Cloquet, Minn., loses his or her job because APP violates Indonesia’s timber laws and gains a trade advantage, an Indonesian worker is similarly displaced as community after community is devastated by clear-cutting and the company’s failure to reforest.

The true value of Indonesia’s tropical forests to the rest of the world lies in their capacity to reabsorb the carbon dioxide from the industrialized world’s energy production. Many of the world’s leading scientists and economists have pointed out that one part of the solution to global warming is to invest in rainforest protection and reforestation programs built around the sustainable forestry advocated by the Indonesian union. 

While it is true that we can’t fix global warming without also fixing global trade, it is a more powerful truth that when we do fix the current model of globalization, we will not only solve the global warming crisis, we also will create a sustainable economy that provides stable jobs and communities for Indonesia’s endangered forest workers.

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