Washington Fair Trade Coalition Education Fund

Mission

The Washington Fair Trade Coalition Education Fund works on behalf of people and the planet for a fair, balanced, and sustainable global trading system. Our goal is to build and strengthen a cross-sector coalition of working people, environmental activists, migrants and migrant advocacy organizations, and other civil society organizations to push for worker-friendly and climate-friendly trade policy.

Current Campaigns

This year, our campaigns include:

• Fair Trade, Not Trump Trade: We’re rejecting the false choice between Trump’s isolationist trade policies and the corporate-driven status quo. This year, we’ll strengthen our movement that demands a trade system rooted in fairness, justice, and inclusion.
• Disparate Impacts of Trade: Trade policies disproportionately harm marginalized communities while benefiting the 1%. Through education, advocacy, and coalition-building, we’re fighting for policies that are equitable and inclusive.
• NAFTA Review: Labor rights, environmental protections, and public health are on the line. We’re mobilizing communities to ensure renegotiations reflect fairness, justice, and sustainability.
• Digital Trade Campaign: Big Tech’s trade agenda undermines consumer privacy and data security. We’re working to stop corporate consolidation and protect vital regulations like AI accountability.
• Climate Action: Trade policies must support urgent climate action, not stand in the way. We’re pushing for a trade system that prioritizes the planet over profit.

Why Should You Donate?

Our coalition is unique as the voice of civil society, managing globalization in ways that challenge the neoliberal power structure and benefit public interests. WFTC was founded after the 1999 WTO protests. In recognition that trade battles would be on-going, founders knew we would need a sustained coalition of community organizations. Our member organizations work primarily on labor rights, environmental policies, public health, food security, human rights, digital privacy, and other issues. Our coalition unites these interests in our region and also coordinates at the national and international levels around these issues.

Our recent accomplishments include successfully organizing around trade negotiations that came to Seattle in 2023. With financial support from PDF, we organized large-scale teach-ins and demonstrations alongside labor unions, trade-displaced workers, diaspora communities, international solidarity activists, digital privacy activists, public health groups, and climate activists to halt a trade deal that would have had disastrous impacts on jobs, wages, labor rights, climate action, consumer privacy and monopoly power. In addition, we successfully advocated for the Biden administration to withdraw U.S. support for Trump-era giveaways to Big Tech on “digital trade” that undermine personal privacy, AI accountability, worker rights and anti-monopoly policy. 

We have also won improvements to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement that impacted drug prices for millions of people and helped facilitate unionization for Mexican workers. We ran an educational campaign about the intersections of environmental justice and trade with environmental partners. We worked on a campaign to expand equitable access to COVID medicine, helping pass a resolution at the Seattle City Council supporting COVID vaccine access. We have worked alongside elected officials, working people, environmentalists, students, diaspora communities, human rights activists, public health activists, farmworkers, racial justice organizations, immigrant rights groups, international solidarity organizations, and more that believe in putting people over corporate profits.