Fair Development Conference 2011

From Brazil to Detroit, hundreds will converge in Baltimore from October 28-30, 2011 to connect local struggles to a growing global movement for economic human rights and justice. Participants will engage in workshops, discussions, and actions to build solidarity across issues of social, economic and environmental justice issues ranging from universal healthcare to anti-war organizing under the mantra of “fair development for everyone.”  

Hosted by the United Workers, this large gathering will bring together social movement activists and community organizers from across the country and the world to Baltimore to talk about the right to fair development amidst the deepening economic crisis. With mounting frustration demonstrated by the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Together movements, the Fair Development Conference will provide a space for grassroots activists to share strategies and solutions for building power to put forward alternative visions of economic development based on fair development principles of respecting human rights, maximizing public benefits, and sustainability.

Baltimore serves as the site of the Fair Development Conference, because Baltimore is a great example of how development affects ordinary people’s lives. The conference will center on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, a retail and tourist center that was declared to be a “Human Rights Zone” on October 25, 2008 by hundreds of low-wage workers. Workers demanded that workers’ human rights to work with dignity, education, and health care be respected. Specific demands were later announced, including that the developers mandate, through leases with their vendors, that every worker at the Inner Harbor be paid at least the state living wage, and that developers agree to fund education and health care programs for workers and their families.  The United Workers has formally requested face-to-face meetings with Cordish and GGP.

Recently, the Cordish Co. and the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) held a closed-door meeting to discuss a 3 million dollar rent break that Cordish is requesting to make surface improvements to the harbor. The United Workers is requesting full transparency from the BDC and worker and community input to ensure public money results in public benefits.

The United Workers is a human rights organization led by low-wage workers and was founded by homeless day laborers in 2002 at the Eutaw street shelter, an abandoned firehouse turned homeless shelter.