Opening ceremonies in Seattle! Bay Area activists redecorate Old Navy,
kicking off a week of non-violent direct action.

Reuters
November 22, 1999

SEATTLE -- Police in Seattle on Monday arrested three anti-WTO activists, two of whom climbed down the outside of six-story building to unfurl a protest banner in the city where the World Trade Organization starts a summit at the end of the month.

The 500-square-foot banner, displayed over the front of an Old Navy clothing store, read: "Sweatshops: Free Trade or Corporate Slavery". About three dozen people chanted anti-WTO slogans in the street, witnesses said.

Police said they charged two men with reckless endangerment after they rappelled down from the roof to unfurl the banner. A woman on the roof was charged with criminal attempted reckless endangerment.

A police spokeswoman could not identify the three until they had been arraigned.

But Jia Ching Chen, WTO action coordinator for the San Francisco human rights group Global Exchange, said the men were Mike Dwyer, 24, and Seth Quackenbush, 23. He knew only the first name of the 22-year-old woman, Crystal.

All three came down without a struggle after the police gave them 45 minutes notice, police spokeswoman Pam McCammon said.

Quackenbush and Dwyer trained for their climb at a camp for activists in rural Washington state hosted in the summer by the Ruckus Society, a Berkeley, Calif., protest group that has promised to disrupt the WTO ministerial meetings from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3.

Global Exchange has long protested the labor policies of Gap Inc., which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well as its namesake Gap stores.

The group accuses Gap of employing "sweatshop" labor overseas, paying pennies per hour to work under what it considers unfair conditions.

A Gap spokeswoman said the company supported the right to free expression but said the company went to great lengths to ensure fair treatment of workers at factories that provide its clothing.

"We have a global network of 80 employees whose only job is monitoring the factories we do business with. If they find problems and they are not fixed we stop doing business with them," said spokeswoman Maria Moyer-Angus.