Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities

3. Fighting for the Right to Know

3 Fighting for the Right to Know The lack of information on potential toxic exposures limits the ability of labor and environmental organizations to campaign for stricter management of hazardous substances and better regulatory enforcement. Many activists, both workers and environmentalists alike, distrust official government and industry accounts of potential health risks. Because they lack specific information, regulators often claim an inability to govern. Industries, almost as a default reaction, dispute claims of occupational exposures and community claims of toxic poisoning. It was not until 1984, in the aftermath of the tragic accident in Bhopal, India, in which an accidental release of methyl isocyanate is estimated to have killed between three thousand and twenty thousand residents and left many thousands more injured, that environmental and community activists in the United States pressured the federal government to pass the Emergency Planning andCommunityRight-to-KnowAct(EPCRA)—requiringindustrialfirms to estimate and report their release of roughly three hundred potentially hazardous substances. EPCRA does not limit releases and only requires that releases be estimated (i.e., no actual monitoring or testing of releases from production processes is required), and release data are verified in only about 1.5–3 percent of cases (Environmental Protection Agency 2001). Since the passage of EPCRA, the number of communities experiencing ill-health effects of toxic releases continues to be alarming. Fighting for the Right to Know 99 The fight for information on the use, storage, and release of toxic substances in and from workplaces is often referred to as the struggle for the right to know.The right to know was a product of growing frustration with the seemingly constant discovery of toxic substances hidden throughout the United States. The shocking 1978 discovery of 21,000 tons of buried chemical waste underneath the suburban working-class neighborhood of Love Canal, New York, and the stunning realization that such a situation could occur anywhere mobilized community and environmental activists to begin questioning the safety of their own neighborhoods (Brown 2007; Gottlieb 1993; Levine 1982). Community residents were not alone in this struggle to learn more about what hazards they could be exposed to, however.Workers often faced similar perils, though in a more insidious form. Often forced to work with chemicals with trade names or simple designations, workers had an uphill battle against industry to learn what substances they were actually being exposed to and what the health risks associated with those exposures might be (Leopold 2007). The frustration of occupational safety-and-health activists in trying to obtain information on product names and potential risks closely mirrored that faced by environmental activists. Given the similarities between the two situations, collaboration on the right to know produced a formidable alliance between the two movements—especially in New Jersey, where the dense population and the close proximity of industry to that population produced a powerful blend of anti-toxics and pro-union activism that redefined the relationship between blues and greens. New Jersey’s statewide blue-green alliance, the Work Environment Council (WEC), has accomplished perhaps more than any other partnership between blues and greens. The WEC was formed in 1986 to fight for and defend the right to know about toxic substances that workers and community members might be exposed to. The right to access information regarding what substances a worker on the job might be exposed to and community members might later come into contact with has proved to be a powerful motivation for collaboration between blues and greens in New Jersey. In this chapter, I examine how the Work Environment Council grew from a small alliance of community activists, workers, and environmentalists to a statewide coalition consisting of members from a wide array of interest groups in New Jersey. I trace the growth of the right-toknow campaign to a much more sophisticated discourse on the right to a safe and healthy environment that does not distinguish between workers and environmentalists. 100 Blue-Green Coalitions Building the Foundation of the Coalition on the Right to Know The history of the Work Environment Council (WEC) began not in New Jersey but across the Delaware River in Philadelphia. During the late 1970s, labor activists were joined by community activists in a struggle to promote citywide reforms to address the fears of residents that they were being poisoned by the area’s chemical and refining industries. The Philadelphia Project for Occupational Safety...