Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (review)

In 1965, Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union, addressed a conference of over one thousand union members from the United States and Canada, sportsmen, environmental groups civic associations about the future of the environment. In his address, he invoked President Johnson's vision of the Great Society by linking a "a great society" with a clean and healthful environment. Not only was material wealth needed to create it but also a new set of values aimed at preserving the world around us was essential as well. "If we go on as we have been going on, we will destroy the kind of living environment in which the free human spirit can flourish." A "grand crusade" was necessary that united labor with environmentalists and consumer activists to challenge government and irresponsible industries to do what is right. Like Tony Mazzocchi at the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, who also saw the need for an alliance between labor and the environmental movement, Reuther hoped to unite workers and consumers in a powerful counterweight to industrialists' power.

A decade later, following Reuther's death, the UAW once again sought join labor unions and environmentalists to work for "environmental and economic justice and jobs." Of the 300 participants at the Blake Lake conference, however, only 57 were union members and most of those were dragooned from the ranks of the UAW alone. Soon the alliance that Reuther sought to forge between labor and environmentalists was dead "plagued by division and neglect" (pp. 111-2).

This concise volume is an attempt to explore the ambivalent relationship that industrial workers have had to the environment and to environmentalism over the course of the past two centuries. Here, Chad Montrie brings together a series of vignettes from labor history to explore how women, African Americans, industrial workers, miners, and agricultural workers have reconciled their relationship with nature and their dependence on industrialized forms of production. Drawing on the theoretical framework labor and social historians such as David Montgomery and Liz Cohen to political philosophers such as Bertell Ollman and Karl Marx, Montrie outlines the uneven and difficult ways that the lives of workers were shaped by their experiences on the job, their dependence on industrial and agricultural employment, and their desire to create—or return to—a world they could control and enjoy.

The book is composed of five chapters. The first is the familiar story of the women of the Lowell textile mills as they moved from the farms of New England towns and farms and the alienation they experienced as wage slaves. For readers of Tom Dublin's early work, this chapter will seem familiar but Montire brings the reader's attention to the way these women recast their experience, at times romanticizing the worlds that they had left and the relationships they had forged. The second chapter focuses on African Americans in the south in the decades immediately before and after emancipation. Here we learn of the ways that the countryside and rural life could at the same times be seen in very different ways by the enslaved and the free and how outdoor activities from fishing and hunting to sharecropping could have contrasting and sometimes contradictory meanings under very different social and political conditions. The following chapters provide a scan of women in the plains of Kansas and Nebraska; Appalachian peoples as they experienced the mechanization of coal mining; auto workers who escaped the harsh and exploitative industrial mining only to find themselves on Ford or General Motors assembly lines; Mexican American farm and migrant workers who organized the fields of Southern California where mechanized farming and exploitative conditions where toxic fertilizers and pesticides threatened them in ways that were new and terrifying.

Through the use of these cases, Montrie moves us through the past two centuries exploring the complex relationship of industrial worker and the environment. This is not a linear...