The approach of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22
provides us an opportunity to reflect on the "long, strange trip" shared
by the environmental movement and the labor movement over four decades
here on Spaceship Earth.
A billion people participate in Earth Day events, making it the
largest secular civic event in the world. But when it was founded in
1970, according to Earth Day's first national coordinator Denis Hayes,
"Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped!"
Less than a week after he first announced the idea for Earth Day,
Senator Gaylord Nelson presented his proposal to the Industrial Union
Department of the AFL-CIO. Walter Ruther, President of the UAW,
enthusiastically donated $2000 to help kick the effort off -- to be
followed by much more. Hayes recalls:
"The UAW was by far the largest contributor to the first Earth Day,
and its support went beyond the merely financial. It printed and
mailed all our materials at its expense -- even those critical of
pollution-belching cars. Its organizers turned out workers in every
city where it has a presence. And, of course, Walter then endorsed the
Clear Air Act that the Big Four were doing their damnedest to kill or
gut."
Some people may be surprised to learn that a labor union played
such a significant role in the emergence of the modern environmental
movement. When they think of organized labor, they think of things like
support for coal and nuclear power plants and opposition to auto
emissions standards.
When it comes to the environment, organized labor has two hearts
beating within a single breast. On the one hand, the millions of union
members are people and citizens like everybody else, threatened by air
and water pollution, dependent of fossil fuels, and threatened by the
devastating consequences of climate change. On the other hand, unions
are responsible for protecting the jobs of their members, and efforts to
protect the environment sometimes may threaten workers' jobs. First as
a working class kid and then as a labor official, I've been dealing
with the two sides of this question my whole life.
I was raised in Cleveland. It was a union town, and both my
parents were trade unionists. We were going to the union hall all the
time; that's where the picnics and social functions and concerts
happened.
At the same time, we kids were swimming in Lake Erie, and I watched them
post the signs saying, "don't swim in the lake." We were catching
fifty to a hundred perch every weekend and eating them until they posted
the signs, "Don't eat the perch."
So we experienced this switch from where the smoke coming out of
the steel mill chimneys meant bread on the table to a realization that
we were messing up the lake that we loved and enjoyed.
I was
there when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, and that was an alarming
wakeup call. The burning river and the dying lake led the first Earth
Day in Cleveland to be a monumental event. According to the
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, an estimated 500,000 elementary,
junior high, high school and college students took part in campus
teach-ins, litter cleanups, and tree plantings. More than 1,000
CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY students and faculty staged a "death march"
from the campus to the banks of the Cuyahoga River. The
headline in the Cleveland Press read, "Hippies and Housewives Unite
to Protest What Man is Doing to Earth."
After high school I went to work in central Pennsylvania in an
aluminum mill and when the mill was flooded out by hurricane Agnes I got
a job doing flood cleanup at Three Mile Island, which was under
construction at the time, and joined the laborers union. That really
got me involved in the labor movement. At 19 or 20 I became a full-time
shop steward on safety and health issues.
The environmental movement was protesting the construction of the
power plant.
My local union had a bumper sticker that said, "Hungry and Out
of Work? Eat an environmentalist!" I objected, and I went to the local
and said, really, you know, they're not really our enemies. They're
protesting the construction of this power plant because it wasn't built
to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. And the airport's right
there. So it kind of makes sense, doesn't it?"
I've been making the same kind of argument ever since.
That
long, strange trip
In the 1980s, the same Industrial Union
Department that had helped start Earth Day initiated perhaps the first
labor-environmental coalition, called the OSHA Environmental Network. I
was appointed its field director. We had active coalitions in 22
states with the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and IUD member
unions. At first, labor's "job-protection heart" came to the fore: The
United Mineworkers Union was afraid that the alliance might encourage
limits on the high sulfur coal that caused acid rain, thereby
threatening some miners' jobs; it insisted that our environmental
network be shut down. Later, encouraged by labor's other "heart" in the
form of unions that supported sulfur reduction, the Mineworkers
negotiated an acid rain compromise agreement with Senator George
Mitchell of Maine.
When the UN Commission on Global Warming formed, I served as a
representative of the IUD. Before every meeting that I went to I would
be lobbied strongly by the Mineworkers and the IBEW on the one side to
say kill what would become the Kyoto Treaty and then the Steelworkers
who wanted to see the treaty enacted. In 1997 the AFL-CIO blasted the
treaty and sent a high level representative to Kyoto to oppose it. So I
resigned from the commission.
I took on the assignment to organize labor's role in the 1999
protests against the WTO in Seattle. As we were organizing, AFL-CIO
president John Sweeney came out to address the Washington State AFL-CIO
convention. I had been planning 15,000 people as a goal for labor's
piece. John made his speech and he said 50,000 people. As he came off
the podium, I said, John, it's 15,000, 15,000 is our goal. And he
turned to me and he said Joe, it's 50,000 now.
We had more than sixty thousand people on the streets, perhaps
forty thousand of them from labor. It was "Teamsters and turtles,
together at last." Stopping the WTO, and building the coalitions we
built, was a culmination of all the things I believed in and all the
things I had been working for. To me it represented the power we have
when labor's two hearts beat together -- when we recognize that the real
self-interest of workers and the labor movement is the same as the rest
of the world's: to fight for a sustainable future.
Yesterday . . . and today
Looking over the decades
since the first Earth Day, what do we see about the relation between
environmentalism and labor?
Some things this Earth Day are
radically different from the first Earth Day forty years ago.
The devastating threats resulting from climate change affect us not
just as "citizens and consumers" but as workers. The impact of global
warming on American workers and workplaces is laid out in a study by the
Union of Concerned Scientists, "Climate Change in the United States:
The Prohibitive Costs of Inaction." After reviewing effects on
flooding, hurricane intensity, tourism, public health, water scarcity,
shipping, agriculture, energy and infrastructure stress, and wildfires,
the study concludes,
"If global warming emissions continue unabated, every region in the
country will confront large costs from climate change in the form of
damages to infrastructure, diminished public health, and threats to
vital industries employing millions of Americans."
A study by the University of Maryland adds that
"The costs
of climate change rapidly exceed benefits and place major strains on
public sector budgets, personal income and job security."
We
are already seeing such costs in extreme weather events, drought-caused
water crises, intensified forest fires, floods, and other costly
catastrophes. Today American workers have a direct, personal, job-based
reason to fight for climate protection.
At the same time, the necessity for transforming our entire economy
to a low-carbon basis provides the opportunity to create tens of
millions of new "green jobs." Such a reconstruction effort could rival
World War II as a means for creating full employment and conditions
favorable to worker power and organization.
Both of labor's "two hearts within a single breast" can be seen in
its response to the danger and opportunity of the climate crisis. On
the one hand, organized labor has been enthusiastic about the prospect
for "green jobs" and has supported climate legislation that might help
expand them. On the other hand, much of organized labor, including the
AFL-CIO, has opposed implementing the binding targets for greenhouse gas
reduction that climate scientists say are necessary to reduce the
effects of global warming.
Such targets are crucial not only for climate protection, but
because the millions of potential green jobs are unlikely to be created
unless all decision-makers know that a major transformation of our
economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is in fact going to happen.
Meanwhile, "environmentalism" is broadening into a movement that
calls for social and economic as well as environmental sustainability.
The Earth Day Network, which coordinates Earth Day worldwide, includes
among its goals to "broaden the meaning of 'environment.'" It is
committed to "expanding the definition of "environment" to include all
issues that affect our health, our communities and our environment, such
as air and water pollution, climate change, green schools and
environmental curriculum, access to green jobs, renewable energy, and a
new green economy." Such a sustainability movement is a natural ally
for organized labor in its efforts to challenge an economy currently
driven by corporate greed.
Some thing this Earth Day are the same as they were forty years
ago.
Workers are still human beings who face the same
consequences of environmental destruction as everyone else. As Olga
Madar, the first head of the UAW Conservation and Resource Development
Department, put it back then, union members were "first and foremost
American citizens and consumers" who "breathe the same air and drink and
bathe in the same water" as their neighbors in other occupations.
UAW president Walter Reuther, who wrote that first check supporting
the first Earth Day, spelled out what that should mean for organized
labor:
The labor movement is about that problem we face tomorrow
morning. Damn right! But to make that the sole purpose of the labor
movement is to miss the main target. I mean, what good is a dollar an
hour more in wages if your neighborhood is burning down? What good is
another week's vacation if the lake you used to go to is polluted and
you can't swim in it and the kids can't play in it? What good is another
$100 in pension if the world goes up in atomic smoke?