by Joe Uehlein
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, Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin
presented his proposal to the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. Walter Reuther, president of the UAW,
enthusiastically donated $2,000 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 pollution and water pollution and 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 50 to 100 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, “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 Sen. George Mitchell
of Maine.
When the U.N. 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 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on the one side to kill
what would become the Kyoto Treaty, and then on the other side by 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 said, “Joe, it’s
50,000 now.”
We had more than 60,000 people on the streets, perhaps
40,000 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 40 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, infrastructure, 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 [PDF] adds, “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, 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 things this Earth Day are the same as they were 40
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?”
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