Joe Szwaja for city council! The Green Party organizer and well-respected local human rights activist (and teacher at NOVA High School) announced his candidacy last week for Jean Godden's barely occupied city council seat, giving progressives a credible, well-funded campaign to back for a council seat for the first time in years.

Szwaja (pronounced SWIE-UH) spent seven years on the Madison (WI) city council before moving to Seattle in the '90s, and ran an effective campaign against Rep. Jim McDermott in 2000; he comes from the adult (a.k.a. non-dysfunctional) wing of the local Greens. He'll do a great job. That's a sharp contrast to Godden, a celebrity gossip columnist who rode her widespread local name recognition to victory four years ago despite being utterly clueless on almost all civic issues. That hasn't changed; it's not that Godden has been bad for four years, exactly, but that she hasn't done anything at all one way or another. She seems to be treating the gig as a retirement prize for a lifetime of attending all the right parties. She needs to be retired, for real, and Szwaja is just the guy to do it. --Geov Parrish

While one progressive, Greenie type jumps in, another bows out: Brita Butler-Wall has announced that she won't be seeking a second term for Seattle School Board, citing a desire to spend more time with her family. In an open letter announcing her decision, Butler-Wall raises an issue that applies equally to the Port of Seattle commissioners and to the state legislature: Why do we continue to pretend that full-time elected jobs in this state can be filled in a citizen legislator's spare time?

In the case of the school board, Butler-Wall and the others only get about $4,000 a year for what's supposed to be a part-time job, overseeing a district with tens of thousands of students and hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The Port commissioners don't make much more than that. Ditto the legislators. These jobs were set up a century or more ago, when government really was small; like it or not, it no longer is, and paying a pittance for high-profile, full-time work ensures that only the independently wealthy can run for these seats.

Or, like Butler-Wall, good public servants decide that four years of barely compensated work is enough. --G.P.

Students from the University of Washington and Seattle University held a demonstration in downtown Seattle on June 2 to bring attention to union-busting and sweatshop labor in Guatemala.

More than 40 members of the UW's Student Labor Action Project (SLAP), Seattle University's Coalition for Global Concern (CGC) and the UW Guatemala Project (UWGP), along with community supporters, marched from Westlake Park to the Talbots clothing store in Westlake Center, then to the nearby Macy's. SLAP, CGC and UWGP organized the event to publicize the current crisis of unionized workers at Guatemala's Cimatextiles garment factory, from which Talbots and Macy's both source apparel. Workers at Cimatextiles are presently facing union-busting tactics and the imminent closure of the factory. The Choi Shin Corporation, which owns Cimatextiles, recently opened another factory in Guatemala and moved their production to this new, non-union factory, thereby threatening the survival of SITRACIMA, the union at Cimatextiles. Guatemala is well-known among anti-sweatshop activists for its highly exploitative maquiladora industry, where forced overtime, mandatory pregnancy tests, and the denial of minimum health and safety provisions (including bathroom breaks) are common. SITRACIMA is currently one of precious few garment worker unions that are currently challenging the maquiladora system in Guatemala.

The student-organized protest began with a march to Talbots, where a mock trial proclaimed Talbots guilty of disrespecting human and worker rights. The march continued to Macy's, where a group of 15 students staged a "sleep-in" on the ground in the Liz Claiborne and Charter Club sections to bring public attention to the Guatemalan women who have been staying overnight in the Cimatextiles factory continuously since May 14 to prevent its overnight closure by Choi Shin. Liz Claiborne and Charter Club are the two specific apparel brands sold at Macy's which have sourced from Cimatextiles, and Liz Claiborne recently announced it would no longer source from the factory.

Several of the students involved in the protest had personally met with the women workers of Cimatextiles over the past two summers in Guatemala.

"The women workers face constant hardships, including often working over ten hours per day, and receiving physical, verbal and sexual abuse from factory management," said UW senior Rod Palmquist. "One pregnant worker asked her supervisor to get a drink of water because she felt dizzy, was refused, fainted, and as a result lost her child on the way to the hospital, but after the union formed, flagrant cases of abuse and infringement of the workers basic human rights declined."

SLAP, CGC, and UWGP are demanding that Macy's, Liz Claiborne and Talbots act immediately to keep Cimatextiles open, send new business orders to the factory, and participate in a High Level Commission investigating labor abuses that has been called for by SITRACIMA.

"We want Macy's and Liz Claiborne to stand up for the human rights of workers in one of the few unionized garment factories in Guatemala and the world, and not source their apparel from cheaper sweatshops," said UW senior Travis Thomas.

Photos from the June 2 protest, as well as further information on the current garment worker crisis in Guatemala, can be viewed at maquilaemergency.blogspot.com. --Jeff Stevens

A little birdie within the Seattle Police Department tells ETS! that Greg Neubert and Mike Tietjen, the two beat cops who have attracted unwanted publicity for SPD by being videotaped allegedly roughing up a wheelchair-bound suspect, as well as allegedly planting drugs on him and falsifying their reports, have been quietly transferred out of their Belltown patrol in order to minimize their public visibility.

Where are they now? Officer Neubert has been sent to the Harbor Unit, and Tietjen to the Traffic Unit. As our correspondent notes, "Some punishment--spending the summer on a boat with a new, great schedule and going to the traffic, the unit that offers the most overtime to officers. Typical SPD, the more you screw the pooch, the more they reward you!"

Incidentally, even though the woefully inadequate OPA signed off on the internal investigation that cleared Neubert and Tietjen of wrongdoing, other agencies--perhaps responding to a lot of agitation by the NAACP and other community groups, which have called for both officers and Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to be fired--are now taking an interest in the case. The FBI is looking into possible civil rights violations, and the OPA's civilian review board has reopened the case, citing a statement by the OPA's auditor that the officers were "dishonest and uncooperative" with the original investigation.

Neubert is of particular interest in this incident, since, as we detailed in ETS! Vol. 11, No. 16 ("The Baddest Apple," 4-12-07), this is the fourth time in six years he's been in the public eye for controversial and/or violent behavior. Our SPD correspondent has a reassuring word on this score: "I'll tell you honestly--not many people in SPD would shed a tear if [Neubert] just went away."--G.P.