Workers in Indonesia Rise Up Against Freeport

Here’s what we know:

Copper
Copper Mine in Indonesia by pjriccio2006 on Flickr

Freeport MacMoRan is the world’s lowest-cost copper producer and the largest gold producer in the world. Producer is a funny term, they pull it from the earth. I suppose the production label comes from everything they do to the stuff they take from the earth.. the processing.

The company is almost 100 years old with its headquarters in Arizona, but of course its operations are located all over the world.  Freeport operates the largest copper mine in the world, the Grasberg Mining Complex in West Papua, a province of Indonesia.

West Papua has long been the stage for conflict, where the Indonesian government uses whatever means at its disposal to keep the independence movement down. For many Papuan people the mine is a major part of that conflict, due to the massive environmental damage it causes on their territory, the lack of financial benefit or return to the region, and the use of notorious elements of the Indonesian Military to handle security. Since 2002 there have been several incidents involving the shooting deaths of workers at the plant.

For the past two months workers at the mine have been on strike, demanding better wages. According to Reuters, their current payrate is $1.5 to $3 an hour. They are now demanding that it be raised to $12.50 to $37 an hour.  Recent demonstrations by the workers have attracted crowds numbering around 8,000. According to the Jakarta Post, during one of those demonstrations police fired into the crowd and killed 2 workers.  The paper also reports that Freeport had been trying to fire all the workers and have them replaced, a tactic an Indonesian Minister said would be a violation of their labor laws.

Freeport is number 136 on the Forbes Fortune 500 list, with over $4 billion in profit for 2010. They have been heavily criticized by human rights organizations and corruption watchdogs for their payments to the Indonesian Government and the Military in an effort to maintain the status quo and quell labor disputes at their mine. The millions of dollars in lost revenue are often mentioned in the media for every day their mine is shut.  What does their copper go into? The list is massive and touches on many aspects of our everyday lives in the western world.

First Ever User Survey

Dubai
Dubai 2011

In an effort to keep up with what you the site visitors, readers, listeners, and viewers are thinking and feeling, I present to you the citizenreporter.org user survey. 12 questions. 5 minutes. The info you provide will be taken very seriously, read carefully, and helps me in all my future work on this site.  Won’t you please fill it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGl6YXVSSG9OUEtXYkhHYXJMdWpqaXc6MQ

Education, Portugal, and the World

JHWJohn Howard Wolf doesn’t know how to fix the global economy, but he can teach us a thing or two about education. Its been his business and passion for most of his adult life.  Having immigrated from the US to Portugal in the late 1970’s, even back then he was a swimming against the current, setting up a primary school in a country still getting over its post-fascist hangover.  As a Americano-Luso (American-Portuguese) he has a unique perspective based on the kind of experiences most of us only wish we could have. John Howard Wolf knows literature and he knows history, but what he knows that the world would be lucky to hear about, is another way to approach life and human relations on this planet.  For one great hour on the last days of summer in Lisbon, we sat together watching the world go by during a financial crisis, and talking about how this all happened and what is to come.

Read John’s piece in the Portuguese-American Journal

His article on Rural Development and Portugal from January 1992 (note – academic journal paywall)

The Opium War Syndrome Continues

Writer and historian Amitav Ghosh writes about the Opium Wars of the later part of the 1800’s, a time where not unlike today, the western world had wracked up a great trade deficit with China.  And also just like today, the dominant discourse that was proselytized like the answer to all ills, was what they called free trade.  The benefactors of this trade were some of the largest corporations of that era, the British East India Company and names like that.  They all claimed that free trade was their goal and insisted that empires in the east adopt this practice for the good of the world.  But with this good came a long list of problems, as western traders pushed Opium on Chinese traders, and eventually triggered the Opium Wars.

Opium War MuseumIn the US education system, both primary and higher education, the Opium Wars are hardly mentioned. Children are taught that it was a British problem, a disagreement with the Chinese, and has nothing to do with the United States or these modern times we live in.  But in fact, the opposite is true.  The US played a major role, with relatives of presidents Thomas Jefferson, Calvin Coolidge, and even the Delano (Roosevelt) family being major investors in the Opium trade. And once we again we find ourselves in an era where nations claim free trade will solve the problems of the world, while at the same time pushing, secretly or overtly, monopolies and other “unfree” business tactics.

As people around the United States and throughout the western world occupy and retake public spaces and confront centers of business and trade, I wonder if they know how far back the practices they are raging against go.  The lives we know, for well over a century have been built on top of deep traditions connected to corruption and greed at the expense of massive groups of people. How do you halt or change a system so deeply ingrained in how things function? I think its a good time to revisit the Opium Wars, especially for those of us who don’t know the lessons that were never learned.

Re-inventing Ourselves and Our Homes

VTHouse
The Vermont Home / photo by Erik

Erik Nelson moved from house to house as an urban dweller, never living in a space that he felt connected to. Until he found forest land that appealed to him and built his own home there.  Or as he explains it:  “While most people find a job and then live near that job, we picked the place where we really want to live and then made it work with jobs we could get.”

But approach to work isn’t the only thing interesting about how Erik and his family live. In this podcast we talk about the reasons for making your own home on the side of a hill in Vermont, how the experience was building it and how it is now living there. In his experience we find yet another example of those who have left the conventional path and made their own home in a unique place/way.

Recommended: Erik’s Vlog, Wreck & Salvage and the entire collection of house photos on flickr.

Something more than selling fruit

The navigation system is scolding me with its female voice in Portuguese, I missed yet another turn as I cruise passed yet another apple orchard. It’s the end of September and I’m in what feels like the middle of nowhere Portugal, late for my appointment to visit the Frubaça Fruit Company. As a fruit producer and juice maker their products have caught my attention over the last few years when I am in Portugal. Besides their fruit, their fresh juices have this great combination of simple ingredients (just the fruit) and what seemed to be this ethical business philosophy that I wanted to examine first-hand.   So there I am, sort of lost but hoping that just beyond this next beautiful hill I will find what I’m looking for. Suddenly as I’m giving up hope, there it is, with stacks and stacks of fruit crates lining the outside, I’ve arrived at the Coppa (Cooperative that grows the fruit) facility.

CrateThings are extra busy inside Frubaça, it feels like the high season for apples as they roll passed me on the conveyer belt. At one stage they go under a large machine that shines a light on them, “Infrared Scanning,” Jorge Periquito, president of Frubaça, explains as we walk passed extremely long assembly lines. I can barely hear him over the sound of so many devices and machines as he explains the details of this state-of-the-art infrared scanner that detects any damage or defects to the apples.  We go on to see several other fruits being sorted and packaged for sending out to supermarkets and other places throughout the country. Some of the labels are even printed in Spanish and I learn later that beyond Spain the company sends their products to France as well.  Hard to believe this modest facility is serving up fruit even beyond the borders of Portugal, but the more I learned about Frubaça, the more I understood, this is no ordinary operation.

First there’s the technology: GPS, RFID, Infrared, High Pressure Processing  (HPP) Machines, are just some of the tools that play a critical role in how this natural fruit company functions.  In the case of the HPP machine, we’re talking about a device with few equals anywhere in the world, a piece of technology based on an old idea (pressure), that isn’t even known by most other companies out there.  It simulates the pressure equal to 60 kilometers under the sea, a pressure at which microrganisms are destroyed but the integrity of the juice remains in tact.

PlantJorge and I walk up the stairs to the giant metal tube where  small bottles of mango juice are being loaded in. This new room we’re in has a fantastic scent of fruit that hits you like the freshest mountain breeze imaginable.  As the process begins as we watch the digital display of the pressure meter rise. Nearby another version of the same machine is being loaded up with little packs of apple sauce.  Again, all around us, conveyer belts carry bottles of juice to their next destination.  Near the juicing machines I’m asked not to take any pictures as the machine manufacturers are very protective of their technology, I leave the camera off and focus my eyes on the apple foam flowing into a nearby drain. I’m temped to cup my two hands together and drink some delicious looking foam.

During my two hours at the plant Jorge explains the company, cooperative actually, from the beginning. He is one of 5 people that, since 1992, oversee the cooperative, all of which are from this rural community. They invested heavily in technology and go regularly to trade fairs and conferences all over the world, in an effort to know all the latest methods for handling the growing of fruit and production process. They’re not trying to be organic, their intention is to only use pesticides when it is absolutely necessary, a system of evaluation known as “integrated pest management.

At some point I asked Jorge about business, his approach to the global demand that says – a company must grow and make more profit year after year.  His response was that the company is not interested in growth for the sake of growth. They won’t try to fight price wars to sell the cheapest fruit, choosing instead to offer the best quality, in hopes that customers recognize the value. They won’t move or expand, this is their community and their intention is to keep it healthy and working. Then, a conversation topic I never expected to arise – arose: “The socioeconomic model of the urban setting is finished.” Technology from the city applied back in the countryside can help create a healthy and sustainable life in a way that is increasingly hard to achieve in the urban setting.

For a moment I though Jorge must have been listening to my latest podcasts or reading my tweets. But then I realized the connection- sustainable business. Quality food with real ingredients produced by a proud community that has been there for generations.  Using the latest in technology and applying it to old fashion ideas. It all connects back to the theme of doing things differently then the conventional way. Taking steps to build lives that are about something other than making money and consuming as much as possible.  Once again I had stumbled upon the kind of ideas and practices that have the power to change our world.