[ A salute to Earth Day and labor, a look back and a look forward.
Written originally last year for the 40th Earth Day, its vision holds
even more true today -- Good Clean Jobs for a Living Viable and Clean
Earth.] [[link removed]]

EARTH DAY, LABOR, AND ME  
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Joe Uehlein
April 15, 2020
Labor Network for Sustainability
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_ A salute to Earth Day and labor, a look back and a look forward.
Written originally last year for the 40th Earth Day, it's vision holds
even more true today -- Good Clean Jobs for a Living Viable and Clean
Earth. _

Climate, Jobs and Justice - Labor Network for Sustainability,

 

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?”

_[Joe Uehlein is the Founding President of the Labor Network for
Sustainability, [link removed]
[[link removed]] and Voices for a Sustainable
Future. He is the former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s
Industrial Union Department and former director of the AFL-CIO Center
for Strategic Campaigns. Joe spent over 30 years doing organizing,
bargaining, and strategic campaign work in the labor movement. He also
served as the Secretary to the North American Coordinating Committee
of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, and Mine Workers
unions (ICEM), and served on the United Nations commission on global
warming from its inception in 1988 through the Kyoto Accords in 1997
until 2003. A founding board member of Ceres (Coalition for
Environmentally responsible Economies), he served on the Ceres board
for 23 years.]_

Labor Network for Sustainability
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P.O. Box #5780
Takoma Park, MD 20913

CONTACT VIA EMAIL AT [email protected].

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