First US Fair Trade Town

On June 15, Media, PA, became the first “Fair Trade town” in the US, the result of a unanimous Media Borough Council vote mandating that the town meet several goals in support of Fair Trade.

Councilperson Monica Simpson noted that while Europe has several Fair Trade towns, the US now has only one.

Since there is no national Fair Trade town initiative in the US yet, Media used the goals established by the Fairtrade Foundation of Britain. The goals include: a promise from the Council to serve Fair Trade products at its meetings and functions, the mandate that a certain percentage of Media retailers and institutions sell and use Fair Trade products, a pledge to encourage widespread support and media coverage for Fair Trade, and the establishment of an ongoing Council steering committee to keep the Fair Trade issue vital.

The Fair Trade town idea came from Media resident Hal Taussig, director of The Idyll Development Foundation and owner, with his wife, Norma, of Co-op America's Green Business Network™ member Untours, an eco-travel business offering community-based vacations. A longtime supporter of Fair Trade, Hal read about the Fairtrade Foundation’s Fair Trade town initiative and decided that his hometown needed to jump on the bandwagon and become “the Fair Trade capital of the world.”

“Media, Pennsylvania, is proud to support Fair Trade’s simple and effective economic model. We hope in a few years to be the first of hundreds of Fair Trade towns in the US,” says Simpson.

CONTACT: Fairtrade Foundation

"Big-Box" Law Unravels in Chicago

An unprecedented effort by the City of Chicago to establish a law requiring “big box” stores to pay workers a living wage unraveled in September—in part due to intense lobbying by Wal-Mart.

The bill, which passed the Chicago City Council by a 35–14 margin last July, would have required retailers with over $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet to pay workers a living wage of at least $10 an hour plus $3 an hour in benefits by 2010. The current minimum wage in Illinois is $6.50 an hour, and the hourly federal minimum is $5.15.

Chicago’s mayor vetoed the bill in September, needing to win back two councilmember votes to prevent a veto override.

In the end, three councilmembers changed their votes, allowing the veto to stand, including one who told the Chicago Tribune that Wal-Mart had “expressed a strong interest” in building a store in her ward. Wal-Mart spokespeople deny promising any councilmembers a store in exchange for a vote.

Opponents of the living wage ordinance called setting a living wage for big box stores “devastating” to low-income neighborhoods, which they say need retail development to prosper. But bill backers counter that those areas need good jobs, not poverty-wage jobs. They point to the success of San Francisco, CA, and Santa Fe, NM, which have enacted similar laws, as evidence that the bill won’t destroy Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

Santa Fe’s law, for example, applies to all but the city’s smallest employers and sets a minimum wage of $9.50 an hour. The wage level will increase to $10.50 an hour in 2008. Since the new law took effect a year ago, Lowe’s erected a new store in Santa Fe, and Wal-Mart is trying to build a third Santa Fe store, Mayor David Coss told the Christian Science Monitor.

Construction of the first Wal-Mart in Chicago’s west side Austin neighborhood is already scheduled to begin later this year. The retailer promised the City Council to find minority subcontractors to help build its stores, and to “do its best” to fill 75–80 percent of the 500 jobs in those stores with local residents, according to MSNBC. The mayor also extracted a promise from Wal-Mart to build a green roof on the store, planting hardy, cactus-like plants on the roof to absorb heat and improve the efficiency
of the building.

Those promises aside, supporters of the living wage ordinance say they’re not giving up yet. Alderman Joe Moore, who led efforts to pass the ordinance, promised a revised proposal for it as early as at the Council’s next meeting. “This issue will not go away,” he said.”

Visit Co-op America's Responsible Shopper for more information on Wal-Mart.

Water Scarcity Increasingly Affects Developed Countries

Long considered a problem confined to the world’s poorest peoples, water shortages are increasingly becoming an issue in developed countries, according to a new study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The main causes for this shift include global warming and poor resource management.

“Economic riches don’t translate to plentiful water,” says Jamie Pittock, Director of WWF’s Global Freshwater Programme.“Water must be used more efficiently throughout the world. Scarcity and pollution are becoming more common, and responsibility for finding solutions rests with both rich and poor nations.”

“Large areas” of the US are using water faster than it can be replenished, the report notes. Japan’s water supply is threatened by contamination issues. And due to aging water mains, London, England’s leakage and loss is estimated at 300 Olympic-size swimming pools daily. The WWF notes that this increased water scarcity “will only be exacerbated as global warming brings lower rainfall, increased evaporation, and changed snowmelt patterns.”

A report by the International Water Management Institute, published the same day as the WWF study, said that a third of the world is facing water shortages. Water use has increased by six times in the last century, it says, and will double again by 2050, mostly from agricultural use.

To begin addressing the pressing water shortages around the world, the WWF says “governments must find solutions for both rich and poor, which include repairing aging infrastructure, reducing contaminants, and changing irrigation practices in the way we grow crops.”.

CONTACT: World Wildlife Fund Canada