Canadian arms sales rose again in 2021

Since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadian global arms sales have risen every year

Owen Schalk / June 22, 2022 /

A LAV III participates in a NATO training mission. 

Photo courtesy the 32nd Canadian Brigade Group/Flickr.


Recently released data quantifying Canada’s 2021 exports of military goods mark the continuation of a disturbing trend in the Trudeau government: the consistent growth of arms sales, including to some of the most repressive states abroad.

Since Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, Canadian global arms sales have risen every year, with the sole exception of 2020, whose total was still “at least double that of almost all years between 1978 and 2017.” While 2020 was a low for the Trudeau government, it remains Canada’s third-highest year for military exports on record. The only two years in which Canada sold more arms abroad also occurred under the Trudeau government: 2018 (over $2 billion) and 2019 (almost $4 billion).

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Canada is the 17th largest exporter of military goods in the world, with most going to the United States and Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, Canada continues to cling to its false image as a global peacekeeper, even though Canadian peacekeeping contributions to the United Nations are less than one percent of the total—a contribution that is surpassed by both Russia and China, two countries with a threatening and militaristic presence in the mind of most Canadians.



UN statistics from January 2022 show that Canada ranks 70 out of 122 member states that contribute to UN peacekeeping operations. When paired with recent arms export figures, these disclosures show that Canada is in fact a leading global arms dealer whose contributions to UN peacekeeping operations are nominal at best.

In 2021, the largest non-US buyer of Canadian arms continued to be Saudi Arabia, which has used Canadian-made weapons in its brutal offensive against Yemen for years. This means that Saudi Arabia has been the second-largest buyer of Canadian military goods for ten years in a row, with sales spiking under Trudeau.

In 2020, the Trudeau government approved sales to the kingdom totalling $1.3 billion. In 2021, that total jumped to $1.7 billion, meaning that the Trudeau government chose to increase Canada’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia by $400 million while the kingdom continued its horrific bombing campaigns against Yemen, which have killed hundreds of thousands of people since 2014.

Almost all Canadian arms exports to Saudi Arabia were LAVs. Although Canada claims these weapons are not used in Yemen, photographic evidence contradicts this claim, and a pair of UN reports released in 2020 and 2021 directly blame Canada for fueling the war through its arms exports to Saudi Arabia. A 2021 report by Amnesty International and Project Ploughshares specifically notes that there is “persuasive evidence” that Canadian-made LAVs and sniper rifles “have been diverted for use in the war in Yemen.” Regardless of this international pressure, the Trudeau government decided to ramp up arms exports to Saudi Arabia by over 30 percent last year.



In 2020, Canada sold about $25 million in weapons to the United Arab Emirates, another belligerent in the war on Yemen. Those exports fell to $3 million in 2021, but that drop was more than counteracted by the $400 million increase in military sales to the Saudis.

Meanwhile, Canadian arms sales to apartheid Israel are currently at a 30-year high and climbing every year. Like Saudi Arabia, Canada’s military exports to Israel increased by over 30 percent in 2021. The Trudeau government made the decision to approve these sales during the apartheid state’s internationally condemned 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, which killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded thousands.

Over $6 million of the weaponry that Canada sold to Israel last year was classified as “explosives or related components.” About $10 million was related to Israel’s space program and “military aircraft,” while almost $7 million went to a category “which may include weapon sights, bombing computers, or target acquisition components.” The fact that Canada exported notable volumes of aircraft technology, bombs, and targeting equipment to Israel during the 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza has caused Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East to note that “Canadian-made weapons or components could have been used in Israel’s military offensives in Gaza, including airstrikes on residential targets which may amount to war crimes.”



Other states which saw significant increases in Canadian arms inflows courtesy of Trudeau include Indonesia ($8 million in 2020 to $10 million), Kazakhstan ($44,000 to $6 million), and Morocco, which is currently occupying Western Sahara, the last formal colony in Africa and a former hub of Canadian potash investment ($750,000 to $22 million). European states also shipped in tens of millions in Canadian weaponry, as did Japan, whose purchases rose from $42 million in value in 2020 to $280 million in 2021.

Not only do these arms sales far overshadow Canadian peacekeeping contributions and foreign development programs—they completely undermine the false image of benevolence that the Canadian government astutely crafted for itself in the Cold War context. Even though Canadian peacekeeping initiatives were always politicized in their goals and implementation, they served as the basis of an international marketing campaign that branded Canada as the peaceful and considerate antithesis to the aggressive and militarist US. Now, with peacekeeping contributions embarrassingly low and arms sales rising every year, even that flimsy justification no longer exists.

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

How I Found Myself Befriending a Wild Fox
A scientist went against the grain on her industry’s rule against anthropomorphising non-human animals—here’s what she discovered.

Catherine Raven
15 Jun 2022

Photo credit: Catherine Raven


Editor’s note: At 15, Catherine Raven left home and headed west to work as a national park ranger. She later earned a PhD in biology and built an off-the-grid house on an isolated plot of land in Montana, making a living by remote teaching and leading field classes in Yellowstone National Park. One day, she noticed that the wild fox who had been showing up on her property was now appearing every day at 4:15 p.m. One day she brought a camping chair outside and sat just feet away from him. And then she began to read to him from The Little Prince. Her memoir about the relationship that developed between them, Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, is the winner of the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

For 12 consecutive days, the fox had appeared at my cottage. At no more than one minute after the sun capped the western hill, he lay down in a spot of dirt among the powdery blue bunchgrasses. Tucking the tip of his tail under his chin and squinting his eyes, he pretended to sleep. I sat on a camp chair with stiff spikes of bunchgrass poking into the canvas. Opening a book, I pretended to read. Nothing but 2 meters and one spindly forget-me-not lay between us. Someone may have been watching us—a dusky shrew, a field mouse, a rubber boa—but it felt like we were alone with the world to ourselves.

On the 13th day, at around 3:30 and no later than 4 p.m., I bundled up in more clothing than necessary to stay comfortably warm and went outside. Pressing my hands together as if praying, I pushed them between my knees while I sat with my feet tapping the ground. I was waiting for the fox and hoping he wouldn’t show.

Two miles up a gravel road in an isolated mountain valley and 60 miles from the nearest city, the cottage was not an appropriate arrangement for a girl on her own. My street was unnamed, so I didn’t have an address. Living in this remote spot left me without access to reasonable employment. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place.

I had purchased this land three years earlier. Until then I had been living up valley, renting a cabin that the owner had “winterized,” in the sense that if I wore a down parka and mukluks to bed, I wouldn’t succumb to frostbite overnight. That was what I could afford with the money I’d earned guiding backcountry hikers and teaching field classes part-time. When a university offered me a one-year research position, you might think I would have jumped at the chance to leave. Not just because I was dodging icicles when entering the shower, but because riding the postdoc train was the next logical step for a biologist. But I didn’t jump. I made the university wait until after I had bought this land. Then I accepted and rented a speck of a dormitory room at the university, 130 miles away. Every weekend, through snowstorms and over icy roads, I drove back here to camp. Perching on a small boulder, listening to my propane stove hissing and the pinging sound of grasshoppers flying headfirst into my tent’s taut surface, I felt like I was part of my land. I had never felt part of anything before. When the university position ended, I camped full-time while arranging for contractors to develop the land and build the cottage.

Outside the cottage, from where I sat waiting for the fox, the view was beautiful. Few structures marred my valley; full rainbows were common. The ends of the rainbows touched down in the rolling fields below me, no place green enough to hide a leprechaun but a fair swap for living with rattlers. Still, I was torn. Even a full double rainbow couldn’t give me what a city could: a chance to interact with people, immerse myself in culture, and find a real job to keep me so busy doing responsible work that I wouldn’t have time for chasing a fox down a hole. I had sacrificed plenty to earn my PhD in biology: I had slept in abandoned buildings and mopped floors at the university. In exchange for which I had learned that the scientific method is the foundation for knowledge and that wild foxes do not have personalities.

When Fox padded toward me, a flute was playing a faint, hypnotic melody like the Pied Piper’s song in my favorite fairy tale. You remember: a colorfully dressed stranger appears in town, enticing children with his music to a land of alpine lakes and snowy peaks. When the fox curled up beside me and squinted, I opened my book. The music was still playing. No, it wasn’t the Pied Piper at all. It was just a bird—a faraway thrush.

…

The next day, while waiting for Fox’s 4:15 appearance, I thought about our upcoming milestone: 15 consecutive days spent reading together—six months in fox time. Many foxes had visited before him; some had been born a minute’s walk from my back door. All of them remained furtive. Against all odds, and over several months, Fox and I had created a relationship by carefully navigating a series of sundry and haphazard events. We had achieved something worth celebrating. But how to celebrate?

I decided to ditch him.

I poured coffee grounds from a red can into a pot of boiling water, waited to decant cowboy coffee, and thought about how to lose the fox. Maybe he wouldn’t come by anymore. I opened the door of the fridge. “Have I mistaken a coincidence for a commitment?”

The refrigerator had no answer and very little food. But it gave me an idea. I drew up a list of grocery items and enough chores to keep me busy until long after 4:15 p.m. and headed out. The supermarket was in a small town thirty miles down valley, and I had to drive with my blue southern sky behind me. Ahead, black-bottomed clouds with white faces chased each other into the eastern mountains. Below, in the revolving shade, Angus cattle, lambing ewes, and rough horses conspired to render each passing mile indistinguishable from the one before. Usually, I tracked my location counting bends in the snaky river, my time watching the clouds shift, and my fortune spotting golden eagles. (Seven was my record; four earned a journal entry.) Not today.

Now that I was free to be anywhere I wanted at 4:15 p.m., I returned to my mercurial habits and drove too fast to tally eagles. Imagine a straight open road with no potholes and not another rig in sight. Shifting into fifth gear, I straddled the centerline to correct the bevel toward the borrow pit and accelerated into triple digits. Never mind the adjective, I was mercury: quicksilver, Hg, hydrargyrum, ore of cinnabar, resistant to herding, incapable of assuming a fixed form. The steering wheel vibrated in agreement.

The privilege of consorting with a fox cost more than I had already paid. The previous week, while I was in town collecting my groceries, I got a wild hair to stop at the gym. The only person lifting weights was Bill, a scientist whom I had worked with in the park service. I mentioned that a fox “might” be visiting me. “As long as you’re not anthropomorphizing,” he responded. Six words and a wink left me mortified, and I slunk away. Anthropomorphism describes the unacceptable act of humanizing animals, imagining that they have qualities only people should have, and admitting foxes into your social circle. Anyone could get away with humanizing animals they owned—horses, hawks, or even leashed skunks. But for someone like me, teaching natural history, anthropomorphizing wild animals was corny and very uncool.

You don’t need much imagination to see that society has bulldozed a gorge between humans and wild, unboxed animals, and it’s far too wide and deep for anyone who isn’t foolhardy to risk the crossing. As for making yourself unpopular, you might as well show up to a university lecture wearing Christopher Robin shorts and white bobby socks as be accused of anthropomorphism. Only Winnie-the-Pooh would associate with you.

Why suffer such humiliation? Better to stay on your own side of the gorge. As for me, I was bushed from climbing in, crossing over, and climbing out so many times. Sometimes, I wasn’t climbing in and out so much as falling. Was I imagining Fox’s personality? My notion of anthropomorphism kept changing as I spent time with him. At this point, at the beginning of our relationship, I was mostly overcome with curiosity.

Catherine Raven is a former national park ranger at Glacier, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Voyageurs, and Yellowstone national parks. She earned a PhD in biology from Montana State University, holds degrees in zoology and botany from the University of Montana, and is a member of American Mensa and Sigma Xi. Her natural history essays have appeared in American Scientist, the Mensa Bulletin, and Montana Magazine.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This excerpt is from Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven. Copyright © 2021 by the author and reprinted with permission of Spiegel & Grau, LLC. It was adapted for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-to-tame-foxand-build-dog-amazing.html

Learning to Live Diversity in India

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali.

Wendy Doniger, Githa Hariharan
26 Jun 2022

Image courtesy: Speaking Tiger

Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger of Great Neck, Long Island, NY arrived in Calcutta in August 1963, on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country whose history and culture she was deeply interested in. Over the coming year—a lot of it spent in Tagore’s Shantiniketan—she would fall completely in love with the place she had till then known only through books.

In An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64 (Speaking Tiger, 2022), the country comes alive through her vivid prose, introspective yet playful, and her excitement is on full display whether she is writing of the paradoxes of Indian life, the picturesque countryside, the peculiarities of Indian languages, or simply the mechanics of a temple ritual that she doesn’t understand.

In this conversation with Githa Hariharan, Doniger talks about her letters and recollections as well as her journey, from the young girl who wrote those letters to the woman looking back and how in many ways, that journey has also been the journey of what India was and what it has become.

Wendy Doniger | UChicagoNews

Githa Hariharan (GH): Throughout the collection of letters and recollections in An American Girl in India, I had a sense of a ‘prequel’ – in terms of the work you have done, the first loves that have grown deeper, and the books; but also the kind of person you have become. In what ways did travel, specifically travel to a crazily diverse place like India, train you in crossing cultural borders? In being open-minded to ideas as well as experiences?

Wendy Doniger (WD): That first trip to India was indeed the most important educational experience in my life, so much more important than everything I ever learned in universities. The letters betray the constant tension between my passionate love of so many facets of Indian life – the ancient culture, the people I met, the architecture, the music, the food, even the extremes of the climate – and my disappointment in myself for not being able to love everything about India, the poverty, the begging; I never got used to being begged from, especially by women and children. I learned how to go on loving and appreciating all the facets of India – and by extension, eventually, all sorts of other things on the planet earth, and indeed other peoples – despite being painfully aware of many of their tragic shortcomings. In particular, I learned to appreciate all that I loved about Hinduism – its diversity, its great stories, its passions, its architecture, its music – without losing my awareness of its capacity for violence, in animal sacrifices as well as in human conflicts, perhaps, in some ways, always reflecting the violence of the climate.

Also read | An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64

GH: In the same vein, I think of the trope of travel to other places to understand where you come from, and meeting all kinds of ‘others’ to understand a little more of yourself. This is also underlined by the connections you make, whether it is through films, literature, songs, jokes and proverbs. Did you leave with a different sense of ‘identity’ than you came with? And now, when you read the letters, what are the selves that reveal themselves to you?

WD: I certainly learned, from living in India, how very privileged I had been growing up as I did in America. And I learned, from experiences such as passing out cold when they chopped off the head of the goat in the sacrifice, that any plans I might have had to become an anthropologist had to be abandoned for good. I learned that I really did love the Sanskrit stories best of all, better even than the Bengali stories, and that the reality of India – the fabulous temples and spectacular rivers and mountains, the way people dressed and danced and sang – was even more wonderful than the India that I thought I knew from the texts. When I read the letters now, I am embarrassed by the naivete and arrogance of my young self, particularly about politics, but I am proud of her courage and her determination and the way that she never lost her sense of humour, even in difficult situations.

GH: I was struck by your early discovery that humour is so essential to survive the cross-cultural experience. The element of play makes the weighty – whether matters of myth or language or inscrutable cultural practice – a fairly joyous process of discovery, rather than a series of obstacles to be overcome. The tenor is also brisk, almost racy. Is this optimism, or a case of writing cheerily to one’s parents, or a strategy you learnt early to grapple with ‘big’ ideas and experiences?

WD: I was raised never to lose my sense of humour even (or, in fact, especially) in difficult situations; this was my mother’s way of dealing with life, and it stood me in good stead in India. I still can’t resist the temptation to make a joke, even when I’m writing about fairly serious matters. And so the letters are inevitably light-hearted, as indeed was much of my later serious academic writing. But of course you are right about the need to stay cheerful in reassuring my parents that I was well and happy. And so I did not, for instance, tell them how ill I had become, with both amoebic and bacillary dysentery, or how frightened I was by the angry Hindu mobs attacking Muslims in Calcutta in the first skirmishes of what was to become the war between India and Pakistan in 1965, or, in another sphere, how I had, inadvertently, gotten quite stoned on bhang on the night of Durga Puja in Bengal. Often the best way I found to explain to myself, as much as to my parents, a particularly troubling or puzzling aspect of Indian life, was to find a parallel in a much-retold old family joke.

GH: This has been quite an exercise in looking back, reconstructing, but also judging and forgiving yourself. How self-conscious and deliberate were you in constructing the persona of the past, and the present older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder?

WD: My first reaction to the letters was that I would have to censor a great deal if I was going to publish them. I did, in fact, cut out a lot of boring paragraphs about asking my parents to send me stuff and telling them what I was sending them and so forth. But then I wanted to cut out the stupid things that I had said, the spoilt-brat assumptions as well as blatant errors about Indian history and contemporary Indian politics, and even mistakes in the plots of the myths I recounted. However, my Indian publisher, Ravi Singh, urged me to keep in those uncomfortable, often embarrassing bits, but to write a preface to the book as a whole, and individual prefaces to sections and sometimes to particular letters, noting that I now realize that these were, in fact, mistakes; and, in a way, to forgive my younger self for her ignorance and her naivete, but always to make it clear that I stopped holding those opinions long ago. And I returned again and again, in later years, to many of the myths that had fascinated me even then, now correcting my errors as I read the texts of the stories that I had often just heard people tell when I was in India, and I came to understand more and more of the history that had framed them. So those prefaces did in fact construct what you rightly call an ‘older persona looking over the girl’s shoulder,’ somehow forgiving her for at least being frank about her wrongheaded ideas. In a way, leaving those wrong ideas in the letters and apologizing for them is my answer to the excesses of the cancel culture: yes, we were wrong in the past, and we are not going to go on doing that now, but we need not condemn everything about the way we were then, nor deny it.

GH: You have a deep, almost poetic connection to the landscape – do you continue to have that, and revel in the sensory as you did during your early travels in India?

WD: Never again did I have the chance to immerse myself as deeply in the landscape as I did in those months when I lived in the countryside at Shantiniketan. But on later visits to India, I often spent weeks, if not months, in other parts of India, and always left the cities to travel to the countryside. I particularly recall getting to know the feel of the land when I stayed on the coast of Kerala some years ago, after watching some Koodiyattam performances, and again traveling in the desert outside of Jaipur after speaking at the Jaipur literary festival, and on another occasion traveling in a boat all around Sri Lanka, frequently going ashore for a day or two. And, of course, I never lost my pleasure in immersing myself in Indian music, and Indian art, and Indian stories most of all, even back in America.

Also read | Hindutva, Counter-Culture and Manusmriti

GH: There are so many worlds that co-exist in this slim volume, and you seem to straddle all of them. What is your description of a true cosmopolitan?

WD: I don’t think I was a true cosmopolitan when I arrived in India, though I was certainly open to new ideas and new places right from the start. I remained very much an American in my tastes and many of my habits, but I emerged from that year much more aware of the limits of the American world I had grown up in, and much more appreciative of the sensibilities of people who felt very differently from me about basic aspects of human life. Perhaps that is a working definition of a cosmopolitan.

GH: Inevitably, the India you saw up close then and the India that we are all struggling to understand now: are we in danger of eroding that gloriously multi-stranded, argumentative narrative so characteristic of Indian myth and tale as well as cultural practice?

WD: Certainly the intrusive presence of mass world culture, first in film and then in television and now in the Internet and YouTube and podcasts and all the rest, and particularly as these media are manipulated in the hands of rich, powerful people who know how to use the media to change the opinions and the lives of people at all levels of society – certainly all of this does threaten to erode the India that I saw and loved in the 1960s, a place where geographical variations and caste traditions and village traditions and just the whole polytheistic and polyphilosophical and polyritual nature of Hinduism was still alive and well and living in India, right alongside Islam as well as, to a lesser but still significant extent, Buddhism and Jainism and Christianity and even Judaism. So much of this is under serious attack in India today. But people in India are still telling their stories and publishing their poems and novels and showing their paintings and their sculptures and practicing their family rituals all over the great subcontinent, and that gives me hope.

GH: Finally, a word or two about your first love, Shiva. Did it last? Were there competitors?

WD: Ah, Shiva has always remained the god who seems to me best to express the way the universe really is, as well as being the god who is the subject of the best stories and much of the best sculpture in India. The Shiva of the Puranas, the Shiva of Kailasanatha at Ellora, Shiva with Parvati and Nandi – I still find him fascinating and, though enigmatic, the deity best able to explain to me the nature of reality.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

I FIRST CAME ACROSS WD WHEN I READ SOMA, BY WASSON, SHE WAS THE COLLABORATOR AND TRANSLATOR OF RG VEDA THE SANSKRIT REFERENCES TO THE MAGICK MUSHROOM SOMA. WE USED THIS TEXT IN MY SHAMANISM CLASS IN COMPARITIVE RELIGION AT THE UNIV OF ALBERTA

I ALSO READ HER WORK ON SHIVA, AS WELL SHE HAS WRITTEN A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF HINDUISM I CANNOT RECCOMEND ENOUGH

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality

by R. Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, by R. Gordon Wasson (New York, 1968), in 404 bookmarked and searchable pdf pages, with numerous color plates and illustrations.  A Wikipedia entry discusses the remarkable work of Wasson, and his identification of the Amanita muscaria (or, fly-agaric) mushroom as a psychoactive component in the mysterious Soma beverage mentioned in the Hindu Vedas. Sanskritist Wendy Doniger is the book's coauthor. Scanned by Robert Bedrosian. Internet Archive has a selection of works about ethnobotany.

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality,: Wasson, Robert …

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• Format: Paperback

• Author: Robert Gordon Wasson

Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Paperback – April 1 1972 by Robert Gordon Wasson (Author) 11 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle Edition $3.45 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $2,391.99 1 Used from $2,391.99 Paperback $152.65 5 Used from $124.00

https://www.amazon.ca/Soma-Immortality-Robert-Gordon-Wasson/dp/015683…

Revisiting Wasson's Soma: exploring the effects of …

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21305914

In 1968 R. Gordon Wasson first proposed his groundbreaking theory identifying Soma, the hallucinogenic sacrament of the Vedas, as the Amanita muscaria mushroom. While Wasson's theory has garnered acclaim, it is not without its faults. One omission in Wasson's theory is his failure to explain how pre …

• Author: Kevin Feeney

• Publish Year: 2010

The Continuing Damages From Corporate-Managed So-Called Free Trade

"There is a growing perception that the global 'free market' economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health, and freedom to industrial workers.


Demonstrators take part in a protest march towards Trafalgar Square in central London, on May 1, 2022, in support of trade union rights. 

(Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

RALPH NADER

June 25, 2022

The great progressive Harvard economist and prolific best-selling author, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote that, "Ideas may be superior to vested interest. They are also very often the children of vested interest." I wished he had written that assertion before I took Economic 101 at Princeton. One of the vested ideas taught as dogma then was the comparative advantage theory developed by the early 19th century British economist, David Ricardo. He gave the example of trading Portuguese wine for British textiles with both countries coming out winners due to their superior efficiencies in producing their native products.

A common theme in Berry's warnings is that monetized corporations, in their ferocious search for profits, destroy or undermine far more important non-monetized democratic values of societies.

Ricardo's theory drove policy and political power for two centuries fortifying the corporate and conservative proponents of alleged "free markets" (See: Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism) and "free trade." The theory's endurance was remarkably resistant to contrary obvious empirical evidence. Whether Ricardo envisioned or not, "free trade" became an instrument of colonialism entrenching poor nation's in extracting and exporting of natural resources while becoming almost totally dependent on western nations' value-added manufactured products. "Iron ore for iron weapons" as one observer summed it up. Tragically, too often, the weapons came with the invaders/oppressors.

Fast forward to today's supply chain crisis disrupting the flow of commerce. Why does the world's largest economy and technology leader have a supply chain problem forcing businesses and consumers to helplessly wait for simple and complex goods to arrive at our shores? Why did we find ourselves in March 2020 desperately waiting on an Italian factory to sell us simple protective equipment to safeguard patients, nurses, and physicians to address the pandemic's deadly arrival? Answer—the touted theory of comparative advantage embedded in so-called "free trade."

In reality there is no such thing. It is corporate managed trade under the guise of "free trade." As Public Citizen attorney Lori Wallach asked her audiences, while holding up heavy volumes of NAFTA and WTO trade agreements—"If its free trade why are there all these pages of rules?" Because they are corporate rules often having little to do with trade and everything to do with the subordination of labor, consumer and environmental rights and priorities.

These agreements, secretly arrived at, made sure that they pulled down higher U.S. standards in these areas instead of having them pull up serf labor, polluting factories and consumer abuses in authoritarian nations. Corporate managed trade leads to inherently dangerous dependencies, such as no antibiotics being produced in the U.S., which imports these and other critical drugs from unregulated Chinese and Indian laboratories. The supply chain enchains.

A remarkable take down appeared in a lengthy essay titled "The Idea of a Local Economy" twenty-one years ago by the agrarian wise man, Wendell Berry, who used a larger framework taking apart the so-called "free trade," under monetized corporate control over governments, a clueless media and academics still indentured to Ricardo theory. He didn't go after the obvious—that imported products from serf-labor countries are corporate opportunities to make even more profits by keeping prices high. Other than textiles, note the high prices of Asian-made computers, iPhones, electronic toys, Nike shoes and foreign motor vehicles sold to American consumers. This imbalance allows Apple's boss Tim Cook to pay himself $833 a minute or $50,000 an hour. The markups on these products are staggering, but not as staggering as the plight of Apple's one million serf laborers in China.

Berry opens up new horizons on the deception called "free trade" to wit, "Unsurprisingly, among people who wish to preserve things other than money—for instance, every region's native capacity to produce essential goods—there is a growing perception that the global "free market" economy is inherently an enemy to the natural world, to human health and freedom to industrial workers, and to farmers and others in the land-use economies, and furthermore that it is inherently an enemy to good work and good economic practice."

The farmer-thinker, Berry, listed numerous erroneous assumptions behind corporatist global trade. A few follow:"That there can be no conflict between economic advantage and economic justice."

"That there is no conflict between the "free market" and political freedom; and no connection between political democracy and economic democracy."

"That the loss of destruction of the capacity anywhere to produce necessary goods does not matter and involves no cost."

"That it is all right for a nation's or a region's subsistence to be foreign-based, dependent on long-distance transport and entirely controlled by corporations."

"That cultures and religions have no legitimate practical or economic concerns."
"That wars over commodities—our recent Gulf War, for example—are legitimate and permanent economic functions."

"That it is all right for poor people in poor countries to work at poor wages to produce goods for export to affluent people in rich countries."

"That there is no danger and no cost in the proliferation of exotic pests, weeds, and diseases that accompany international trade and that increase with the volume of trade."

A common theme in Berry's warnings is that monetized corporations, in their ferocious search for profits, destroy or undermine far more important non-monetized democratic values of societies. That, in turn, leads to suppression of impoverished societies on the ground where people live, work and raise their families.

That is why limitless greed, unbridled, whether formed from Empires or by domestic plutocrats, eventually produce convulsions which devour their mass victims and themselves.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.



Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of "The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" (2012). His new book is, "Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All" (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

The war in Ukraine has Canadian mining companies looking to Africa

With mineral prices high and Russian commodities sanctioned, Canadian firms ramp up lucrative mining projects on the continent

Owen Schalk / June 8, 2022 / 

Phosphate mining in Togo. 

Photo by Alexandra Pugachevsky/Wikimedia Commons.

The invasion of Ukraine and the resultant Western sanctions against Russia have wrought far-reaching consequences on global commodity flows. These impacts are evident in a number of global shortages, such as the lack of cooking oil in Indonesia and the paucity of fuel in Sri Lanka, the latter of which has been unable to pay for imports since global crude prices soared in early 2022. Food prices are up in the underdeveloped countries of Central Asia, while medical supplies (for which Russia was their largest provider before the onset of Western sanctions) have grown scarcer.

Africa, which imports 85 percent of its wheat (one-third of which comes from Russia and Ukraine), has also felt the strain of the highest food prices in decades. Egypt in particular is scrambling to replace Ukrainian wheat imports, which had previously comprised 80 percent of its stockpile. The Egyptian government had hoped to replace Ukrainian wheat with imports from India, but on May 14, India banned wheat exports, citing the risk of food shortages within its own borders. Thankfully, Cairo has stated that India will honour its previous contract to export 500,000 tonnes of wheat to Egypt, but the future integrity of this arrangement remains unclear, which has led Egypt to seek additional partners in France, Kazakhstan, and Australia.

The price of many important minerals also skyrocketed following the Russian attack. Russia’s economy holds seven percent of the world’s nickel supply, 10 percent of its platinum, 20 percent of its titanium, and 25 percent of its palladium. The price of these metals and others, including aluminum, cobalt, and copper, spiked in March 2022, only to stabilize in the ensuing months, albeit at above-normal prices in many cases.

Some of the most fluctuant minerals are central components of Canada’s $3.8 billion Critical Minerals Strategy, announced by the Trudeau government in 2021 as a way to “capitalize on rising global demand for critical minerals,” to secure inputs for “renewable energy and clean technology applications,” and to guarantee Canada’s economic primacy in the fields of “defence and security technologies, consumer electronics, agriculture, medical applications and critical infrastructure.”

While the Canadian government continues to support the extraction of these minerals domestically, Canada’s mining industry has assumed an increasingly global orientation over the past few decades, especially since the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) on countries across the Global South. Latin America has historically been the most profitable region for Canadian mining companies operating outside North America, but recently, both the Biden and Trudeau governments have spotlighted Africa as an increasingly key supplier for their respective critical minerals strategies.

Steven Fox, executive chairman of New York-based political risk consultancy Veracity Worldwide, has asserted that the Biden administration “wants to position itself as a strong supporter of battery metals projects in sub-Saharan Africa.” These battery metals are an essential component in the creation of electric vehicles and other less fossil fuel-reliant technologies, whose production is described by some as a way of weaning Europe off of Russian energy imports. Additionally, the lack of environmentally appropriate regulations in many African countries, often the result of SAPs and Western advisement on extractive policy, means that mining projects are likelier more efficient—and thus more profitable—to pursue on the continent.

“While Africa presents its challenges,” explained Fox, “those challenges are no more difficult than the corresponding set of challenges in Canada. It may be easier to actually bring a project to fruition in Africa, than in a place like Canada or the US.”

In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war and the increasingly profitable and strategic exploitation of battery metals, Canadian politicians have stressed the need to maintain and expand access to critical minerals on the African continent. In addition to securing a market for Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy, such access will have the effect of keeping Africa, which has largely sought to remain neutral in the conflict, as a crucial supplier of the minerals with which Canada and its allies hope to blunt the economic blowback of the invasion and of their sanctions programs against Russia.

Canadian capital finances or operates mining projects in over 100 countries, and extraction is growing every year. By 2025, the Mining Global Market Report of 2021 estimates that the global mining and minerals market will reach a value of $2.4 trillion—a compound annual growth rate of seven percent. This growth will be achieved, the report states, with wide-ranging governmental support. “Government policies to support the mining industry [are] expected to drive the mining market,” the report’s summary explains:
Governments are providing subsidies and encouraging foreign direct investments (FDI) in the mining industry. The amount of government support includes the support through governments’ public finance institutions such as bilateral development banks and export credit agencies investing in mining projects, fiscal support through budget allocations and tax exemptions, and investments through majority state-owned mining and utility companies.


Canada is no exception. The Canadian government regularly finances mining operations abroad through its publicly funded state development arms while aggressively lobbying for neoliberal reforms in the countries in which these mines are located. These countries, such as Guatemala, Colombia and Burkina Faso, tend to be underdeveloped states in which the US and its European allies have violently hacked their way into lucrative resource markets, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake.

Prior to the era of structural adjustment, the Canadian government cozied up to brutal right wing states throughout Africa, such as Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (between 1985 and 1989, Canada provided his regime with almost $140 million in assistance), apartheid South Africa (Canadian mining companies such as Falconbridge profited from cheap labour in illegally occupied Namibia and elsewhere), and Idi Amin’s Uganda (around one year after Amin announced the expulsion of Uganda’s South Asian population, the Canadian High Commissioner in Nairobi visited Uganda, not to criticize Amin’s policies but to implore him to reverse the nationalization of Toronto-based shoemaking giant Bata Shoes). These policies represented a conscious alignment on the part of the Canadian state with the forces opposed to the left wing pan-Africanist vision of leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, whose removals were supported by Canadian officials.

In the post-Cold War period, US-led international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were able to impose neoliberal reforms across much of the African continent, allowing Canadian capital to reap the rewards. Canada itself played a notable role in this process; in the case of Tanzania, the Canadian government threatened to withhold aid unless the state accepted an IMF structural adjustment plan, while in South Africa, Canadians were instrumental in pressuring the new ANC government against redistributing the country’s mineral wealth toward its less privileged (in other words, its Black) population.

In the following years, numerous Canadian governments prioritized the negotiation of Foreign Investment Protection Acts (FIPAs) in African countries, legal acts which give corporations the right to sue governments in private tribunals for the “crime” of interfering with their investments. The Harper government negotiated FIPAs with 15 African countries, some of which were signed or announced at mining conventions. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau announced negotiations for a FIPA with Ethiopia in 2020, and later signed an FIPA with Nigeria.

Former Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade Omar Alghabra stated that FIPAs such as these are meant to “encourage increased bilateral investments between our countries by helping to reduce risk and by increasing investor confidence in our respective markets.” His use of the term “bilateral investments” is misleading—these laws are designed to protect the interests of Canadian companies operating in Africa, not vice versa. After all, there are no Malian or Burkinabè mining giants investing billions in Canadian extraction, and Tanzanian companies do not own 50 percent of Canada’s GDP, as Canadian companies do in Zambia.

Over the past few decades, Canadian mining investment abroad has increased considerably, to the degree that foreign mining assets now comprise 70 percent of the total value of all Canadian-owned mining operations—in other words, $188 billion of $273.4 billion. In Africa, the total value of Canadian mining assets is $36.5 billion.

In 2020, 106 Canadian-owned mining companies operated in Africa. Their investments span the continent but are mainly concentrated in a handful of countries. The most treasured countries, each containing Canadian mining assets valued at over $1 billion, are Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Zambia, and South Africa. Some other less lucrative but nonetheless important countries, with Canadian assets valued between $100 million and $1 billion, are Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Namibia, and Botswana. Out of all these countries, Zambia is the most valuable for Canada-based companies, with Canadian-owned assets valued at around $10 billion—approximately half of Zambia’s total GDP, as stated above.

In the most recent edition of Canadian Mining Journal, Bill Kellaway, Colin Rawbone, and John Paul Hunt write that “Global economic recovery and the focus on battery minerals is seeing greater interest in mineral exploration, not least in areas of central and southern Africa.” In this context, Canadian prospectors and geologists are working across Africa, using “the digital revolution” to their advantage by bringing global positioning system (GPS) technology and “powerful modelling software” to regions like the Central African Copperbelt, “allow[ing] historical exploration data to be revisited and more intensively analysed.”

With mineral prices high and Russian commodities largely excised from the investment map, it is no wonder that Canadian companies are seeking profit on a continent that they know will generate significant returns—at the expense of ordinary people in the relevant countries, as always. At the recent Mining Indaba, an annual South Africa-hosted gathering of continental and international figures aimed at promoting the mining sector, Canada’s First Quantum Minerals announced $1.25 billion in new investment in Zambia, whose president Hakainde Hichilema has promised foreign investors that there would be “no mining nationalism” in his country. Barrick Gold has revealed its intention to expand investment talks with Zambia as well.

At the Indaba (which is sponsored by some of the largest mining companies in the world), investments such as these were celebrated under the banner of “energy transition” and “ESG [environmental, social, and governance]” considerations, but it was impossible to ignore the geopolitical context of the event as well. The volatility of global commodity markets in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the need to find less uncertain supply sources for critical minerals, was evident not only in the speeches of government and private officials, but also in the fact that the US sent a high-level delegate to the event for the first time in its history.

That delegate was Jose Fernandez, the US Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, who identified 40 critical minerals on the US shopping list and the Biden administration’s intention to secure them from Africa. Tony Carroll, executive advisor on the conference, stated that Fernandez was “the first truly high-ranking US government official we’ve had at the Mining Indaba in the 28 years [of its existence].”

Canadian officials, however, are a staple at the Indaba. Last year saw the attendance of Mary Ng, the Trudeau government’s Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion and International Trade, who used her public position to promote the role of the Canadian mining sector in Africa. This year, Ng’s parliamentary secretary Arif Virani travelled to the Indaba (as well as to Zambia) to bolster “Canada’s role as a trusted partner of African companies, industry associations and governments” and to promote, in his words, “responsible business conduct, sustainable mining and inclusive trade.”

The Indaba also featured speeches from Clive Johnson, CEO of B2Gold (one of the largest Canadian miners in West Africa, which drew $630 million from the Fekola gold mine in Mali in 2021), Tristan Pascal of First Quantum (which was recently hit with $8 billion in unpaid import taxes on its Zambian operations), Mark Bristow, CEO of Barrick Gold (one of the most significant gold mining companies in the world), Robert Friedland, billionaire founder of Ivanhoe Mines, and representatives from many of the world’s other leading mining companies.

Putin and the war in Ukraine were referenced overtly in some speeches. When discussing his interest in securing access to South African platinum, Friedland stated “We’re not going to buy it from the Russian Tsar. He’s killing people with his cash flow. Until he stops that kind of behaviour, we will not buy his platinum.” He also made reference to the green transition and stated the need to “develop a lot more mines” on the way to creating sustainable enterprise. In this case and others, the push to expand mineral investments in Africa is dressed up in green, “pro-democratic” language, designed to give the impression that moral rather than material factors are motivating Canadian investment in the continent. The truth, though, is less virtuous: due to the burden of neocolonialism and the imperialistic refashioning of African economies toward an export orientation, Africa is simply the most lucrative place in which to obtain these resource flows.

As the world continues to readjust to uncertain commodity prices and geopolitical rupture resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Canadian mining industry has chosen to double-down on its exploitation of African resources. Canadian companies and their backers in the state would not prioritize this investment unless it continued to serve the essentially neocolonial agenda of the Canadian elite, whose commitment to this global project of unequal development has remained unwavering for decades. While some may believe that increased investment in African minerals will increase standards of living on the continent, it seems more likely that Walter Rodney’s 1972 assertion will prove true once more: while Western industry adapts and develops, the mining that goes on in Africa will leave “[nothing but] holes in the ground.”

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com

https://canadiandimension.com

Biden Says He’s “Proud” of Apple Workers Who Formed Company’s First Union

Workers at the Towson Town Center Apple hold their new union T-shirts on June 18, 2022, after their store employees decided to join the International Association of Machinists Union

BARBARA HADDOCK TAYLOR / BALTIMORE SUN / TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES

BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout

PUBLISHED June 21, 2022

President Joe Biden praised Apple Store workers who voted to form the company’s first union over the weekend.

“I’m proud of them,” Biden told reporters. “Workers have a right to determine under what conditions they’re going to work or not. I think the thing that everybody misunderstands about unions — they tend to be, especially in the trades, the best workers in the world.”

He added that “everybody’s better off, including a final product,” when workers are unionized. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which now represents the workers, thanked the president for his words.

Apple workers in Towson, Maryland, voted by a nearly 2-to-1 margin to unionize on Saturday, despite what workers say was a ferocious anti-union campaign waged by the company. Union busting moves came “every day, all day,” Towson workers said. Workers unionizing with the Communications Workers of America in separate Apple Store locations have also faced union busting, according to complaints by the union.

The win for the Apple employees adds to a growing number of unionizing campaigns at major nationwide companies like Amazon, Target, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks — and, in many cases, winning. Starbucks workers have voted to unionize roughly 160 stores so far.

Apple Store workers may be following that model soon. The company has over 270 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., and employees at over two dozen stores have already reached out to organizers about forming unions at their own stores in recent days.

The success of these campaigns over the past year or so is especially remarkable considering that unions and unionizing workers still have few protections against anti-union companies. Federal labor laws are notoriously lax, with few punishments for union busting companies even when they break the law.

Labor leaders like Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) Christian Smalls have called on lawmakers to pass legislation like the Biden-endorsed Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which would vastly expand labor protections. But it has stalled in Congress, with conservative lawmakers on both sides of the aisle blocking its passage.

With the PRO Act in legislative limbo and conservative Democrats blocking Biden’s pro-labor Department of Labor nominee David Weil, members of Congress have not handed Biden many wins on the labor front.

But traditional labor leaders say that Biden’s stances on the labor movement — like his meeting with Smalls and Starbucks organizers and his new pro-union guidelines for federal agencies — have done more to garner support and momentum for unions than any previous administration.

After silence from previous Democratic administrations on the labor movement, “Biden has kicked the door down,” former American Federation for Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) political director Steve Rosenthal told Politico.

Still, more critical voices say there’s more that Biden could be doing to support unions. In April, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called on the president to cancel federal contracts with anti-union companies like Amazon. “To his credit, Biden has talked more about unions than any other president in my lifetime,” Sanders told the crowd 

Mexican GM Workers Win an 8.5 Percent Wage Hike in First Union Contract

In a historic victory, the workers voted last year to be represented by an independent union. Now they have a contract.

SINTTIA

BY Alejandra Quintero, Labor Notes

PUBLISHED June 22, 2022

An independent union at General Motors in Silao, Mexico, has ratified its first contract, with an 8.5 percent wage hike and benefit improvements — outstripping recent wage increases at other Mexican auto plants.

The contract comes after workers voted last year by more than 3 to 1 to be represented by the National Independent Union for Workers in the Automotive Industry (SINTTIA) workers, ousting an employer-friendly union affiliated with the Confederation of Mexican Workers. The CTM has long dominated the Mexican labor movement and signed bad contracts behind workers’ backs.

“We obtained good results for our first negotiations,” said SINTTIA President Alejandra Morales.

Silao workers in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato build the highly profitable Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups. Yet their wages and benefits have lagged far behind those achieved by independent unions at the Volkswagen and Nissan plants in Mexico — and even those signed by CTM affiliates at GM’s two other Mexican assembly plants. Before the new contract was signed, the Silao workers earned about $2 an hour on average.

Morales said the new contract brings them close to the level of GM’s San Luis Potosí plant, although wages still lag behind the GM factory in Ramos Arizpe.

“It’s a big step forward, although of course the workers had hoped for more, because the conditions in that plant have been terrible,” said Héctor de la Cueva, coordinator of the Center for Labor Research and Union Advice (CILAS), which has been advising SINTTIA. SINTTIA had initially demanded increases of 19.2 percent, with the company countering with 3.5 percent.

Wages for Mexican auto workers are still just a fraction of those made by their counterparts in the U.S. and Canada. Workers at GM’s Fort Wayne Assembly in Indiana, for example, earn $18 to $32 hourly building the same vehicles as the Silao workers.

“The unions led by charros [the term for corrupt, politically connected, and often violent Mexican union leaders],” said Morales, “always negotiated low salaries and low benefits — some even against the law — so this influences all of the country.”
Christmas Eve Off

Nearly 87 percent of the plant’s 6,500 workers voted on the new two-year contract, with 85 percent voting in favor. As with other contracts in Mexico, salaries will be reviewed yearly.

In addition to boosting wages, workers won a 14 percent increase in pantry vouchers. They also got Christmas Eve off and a much-improved quarterly production bonus, which rose from $25 to $80. The union said that these and other benefits, on top of the 8.5 percent wage increase, add up to a 13.8 percent overall gain.

Negotiations also focused on improving working conditions. The new contract requires that the company and union negotiate work schedules and establishes protocols for dealing with sexual harassment.

Working conditions were awful, according to Israel Cervantes, a GM auto worker fired in 2019 for organizing. Workers put in shifts of 12 hours a day, four days a week, and are allowed just one half-hour break where they must use the restroom, eat their lunch, and drink water. Cervantes said many workers are out of their home for 14 or 15 hours a day given their long commutes.

Work at the plant is physically taxing and leads to many injuries, Morales said. With the previous union, injuries would not be investigated. Workers were often denied restroom breaks.

When workers spoke up about harassment or the grueling working conditions, they would be fired and put on a blacklist, according to Morales. “No worker has seen the list, but any worker knows that if you speak up, exercise your rights, and are fired for that reason, it is very difficult to obtain employment or be hired from the same company or another similar auto plant,” she said.
Permanent Direct Access

SINTTIA is forging a new union culture at the plant. “As opposed to the employer-protection contract that the workers suffered under for many years with the CTM, now, not only do they have a real union, but they also have a real union contract,” said de la Cueva. “Now the company can’t act arbitrarily — they can’t act unilaterally on labor issues.”

To establish a shop floor presence, the union has set up offices in each of the plant’s five complexes. “This is a big change from before,” said de la Cueva. Many workers covered under CTM contracts and others signed by “employer-protection” unions do not even know that they have a union. Now, “it’s permanent direct access to union representatives for all workers,” he said.

SINTTIA is hoping to expand the independent union movement to other auto plants throughout the country. “Our independent union is a national union, which means that workers from different auto plants can affiliate with us,” said Cervantes, who said he’s received calls from workers in Tlaxcala, Queretaro, San Luis Potosí, and Guanajuato.

“International solidarity is going to continue to be important so that SINTTIA can grow and represent more workers in different companies and different plants,” said de la Cueva.

This article was first published at Labor Notes.

Maine Chipotle Workers File to Form Company’s First-Ever Union

The exterior of a Chipotle Mexican Grill store is shown on June 9, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

BRANDON BELL / GETTY IMAGES

BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout

PUBLISHED June 23, 2022

Workers at a Chipotle in Augusta, Maine, filed to form a union on Wednesday, hoping to become the first unionized workers at the food chain’s nearly 3,000 locations in the country.

The workers, who have formed an independent union known as Workers United, turned in their union petition with union cards signed by a majority of the roughly 20 workers in the store, according to union organizers.

Workers say that they face long hours and understaffing, leading to safety concerns. The union staged a two-day walkout last week to protest against unsafe working conditions after repeatedly being forced to open the store without proper staffing, putting the employees and the customers at risk, they said.

When the store is understaffed — often with half of the amount of people that are required to meet demand — workers say that they’re unable to do things like food temperature checks or cleaning tables in the restaurant.

“I care about these people more than anybody else,” employee Laramie Rohr told the Kennebec Journal. “I hope to improve working conditions, not have to have five people working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, to have the ability to close when you need to for safety reasons. Because we don’t want to serve bad food. We’re proud of our food, we’re proud of our workplace, we’re proud of our coworkers.”

Chipotle management says the fact that they responded with hiring initiatives after the walkout shows that the company is already capable of meeting employees’ concerns, but workers say that upper management has a pattern of not addressing workers’ needs, according to the Kennebec Journal.

The workers delivered a letter to management on Wednesday informing them of their intent to unionize. “We’re hoping that by forming this union we can work with Chipotle to achieve the goals we have in common, such as safe and healthy food, and good atmosphere, and safe and happy crew members, and all of the other things that make Chipotle different,” workers said in a statement.

“We are here to make things better by ensuring we have the tools and the support to meet Chipotle’s high standards while caring for ourselves, the crew that will come after us, and other food service workers who may see our efforts and feel empowered to stand up against the industry’s toxic culture,” they said.

The independent nature of Chipotle United echoes the union campaign waged by Amazon workers, who have been organizing under the independent Amazon Labor Union. Although Chipotle workers have sought help from established unions like Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Maine American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), they are forming a union independently.

Chipotle workers in New York City have also been organizing a union effort, though they haven’t filed for a union petition yet. New York workers, organizing with SEIU Local 32 BJ, filed a labor complaint against the company earlier this year alleging that the company illegally retaliated against Brenda Garcia for her role as a union leader. The union also filed a complaint that the company has been surveilling and intimidating employees over the union.

If Chipotle workers successfully unionize, their victory could spark a wave of unionizations in stores across the country — much like Starbucks workers, who have unionized over 160 locations just in the past roughly eight months.