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Reviewed by:
  • Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities
  • Jonathan London
Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities By Brian Mayer ILR Press. 2008. 256 pages. $57.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In struggles to "resist global toxics" — to borrow David Pellow's phrase — activists face the need to organize across the boundaries of geographic scale and of social movement formations. Blue-Green coalitions that develop a common cause between organized labor and environmental organizations are one promising means [End Page 330] to this end. In his compelling account of three such blue-green coalitions, Brian Mayer maps a territory of "toxic circles" that spans the domains of workplace, fence-line communities and the broader environment. His central thesis, that a discourse of health can serve as a potent "bridging frame" or a "common ground for a shared discourse" for building labor-environmental coalitions is compelling. So is his identification of the discursive power of "sick bodies," both as a source of legitimacy for complaints about toxic trespass by industry and as a locus of solidarity between workers and environmentalists. As Mayer describes it, "Workers suffer from the same illnesses and ailments caused by toxic exposures as do community members living outside a plant's gates."(194)

Drawing on in-depth and comparative case studies of the Work Environment Council in New Jersey, Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow in Massachusetts and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in California, Mayer develops a nuanced analysis of the developmental process for blue-green coalitions that extends from formation, maturation, and in the case of the SVTC, the dissolution, of social movement alliances.

Mayer's analysis is particularly astute in his depiction of the "social movement spill-over effect," first coined by Meyer and Whittier, not only by external political opportunity structures, but also ideological and material interests of potential coalition partners. His engagement with the social movement literature, particularly Tarrow, Benford, Snow and McAdam, is well executed and provides a service to social movement scholarship. His detailed account of the delicate dance of alliance-building between labor and environmental organizations, their on-going negotiation of tensions and contradictions, and their combined engagement with opponents from industry, state legislatures and sometimes, their own movements, provides great value to the literature on social movement formation and change.

Where Mayer's analysis is uneven is in his approach to "identity" and his attempt to integrate this into his analysis of social movement frames. While there is a strong case to be made about the ways in which identity can promote — and problematize — what Rick Fantasia calls "cultures of solidarity" Mayer does not succeed in making the case for several reasons. First is the ambiguity of how he defines identity. At different points in the text, identity is referred to as the "stereotypes" ascribed to potential coalition partners and therefore as a barrier to be overcome, a common identity that breaks down the barrier between worker and environmentalist, and a collective movement identity in which multiple coalition partners can see themselves reflected. In some cases, identity is described in purely instrumental terms, as in the ways that coalitions intentionally frame their agendas to appeal to a broad set of constituents. In others, identity is presented as more of an organic quality based on class position, ideology, gender and other factors that pre-exist and affect the dynamics of a coalition.

While all three are arguably at play, Mayer does not provide a clear enough framework to define how each of them relate to one another with the result that the discussion of identity masks more than it reveals. More importantly than even [End Page 331] these conceptual problems, Mayer does not provide sufficient empirical data to allow for a satisfying analysis of the salience and role identity in the formation and development of blue-green coalitions. Very few of his interview or document quotations explicitly refer to identity (the one partial exception is on the matter of stereotypes) and as a result, the discussion of identity does not arise from the data and instead comes across as more of a theoretical add-on.

One missed opportunity for an empirical approach to...

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