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

1. A Forgotten History of Collaboration

1 A Forgotten History of Collaboration There is an important history of collaboration between the labor and environmental movements in the United States. This forgotten history of cooperation is often obscured by more prominent periods of conflict and failed attempts at alliance building. By ignoring these significant examples of alliances and coalitions between the two movements, we fail to recognize the potential for creating a more permanent arrangement between unions and environmental groups. If each time they do come together a new “age of cooperation” is heralded by media pundits and political observers , the lessons learned from the past and the hard work of the coalition brokers are lost. Those reporting on the Turtles and Teamsters alliance that was formed in the streets of Seattle outside the 1999 WTO meetings projected that the alliance would lead a new movement against globalization (Gould, Lewis, and Roberts 2005; Obach 2004a). But this so-called alliance quickly dissolved when the Teamsters supported a plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—a proposal vociferously opposed by the environmental movement. The abandonment of the Teamsters’ environmental allies was also widely covered by the press, which declared an end to the future of labor-environmental alliance building (Greenhouse 1999). By focusing solely on the short-lived Seattle alliance, we misunderstand the solidarity of labor and environmental interests at the WTO protest. The Steelworkers, not the Teamsters, were predominately responsible for 24 Blue-Green Coalitions the organizing work necessary to bring the two movements together to protest in unison in the streets of Seattle. The Steelworkers did not plan this event just for the 1999 Seattle summit but rather built on an existing blue-green alliance that had been formed in the 1980s to address the question of job loss due to forest protection (Gordon 2004). Yet these events leading up to the Turtles and Teamsters alliance are largely ignored; what the public tends to remember is that labor and environmental movements are “natural enemies.” In order to understand the origins of the three coalitions analyzed in this book, it is important to examine the historic relationships between the two movements. There are important points of convergence that have come about largely through the work of grassroots activists to create a melding of interests between the movements. These social movement actors have been able to shift the discourse of occupational and environmental problems to address the root causes of human exposure to toxic substances. These fragmentary examples of collaboration between the two movements can generate a repertoire of possible coalitional forms for the future. In this brief history of cooperation between the labor and environmental movements I highlight the important points of convergence with specific attention to the role health plays in bringing the two movements together. A common thread is the importance of working-class environmentalism , which represents a deeper understanding of environmental problems that situates the practice of protecting the environment in everyday work and life (Schwab 1994). Rather than defining the environment and nature as a place free of human influence, this working-class environmentalism sees a place for mankind in the natural world and emphasizes the need to find solutions that protect both nonhuman nature and human well being. When labor-environmental coalitions are built on this kind of understanding, it becomes much more difficult to ignore the fundamental connection between workplace safety and environmental health. How do coalitions between labor and environmental organizations form? If the connection between the workplace and the environment is so fundamental, why are there so few examples to examine? The simple answer is that the work of forging a blue-green coalition is challenging. Successful coalition formation requires time, organizational resources, favorable political environments, and—most of all—a collective identity that facilitates collaboration and makes collaboration an ideal strategy for activists to choose. History has shown that coalition and cooperation have been ideal strategies at key times. A Forgotten History of Collaboration 25 The Rise of Public Health and Urban Environmental Reform The sudden acceleration of industrial production and the subsequent environmental degradation and transformation of the urban environment near the turn of the twentieth century created an interesting period for collaboration between the growing labor and urban reform movements. During this time, public health activists such as Alice Hamilton and Jane Addams worked to clean up dirty urban centers in the Northeast and...