Bridging the Blue-Green Gap

A vote for exploration of Alaska's National Wildlife Reserve is a vote for environmental responsibility, Jerry Hood, Local Alaska Teamsters leader, said on July 31, 2001.

When the Teamsters announced support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to create jobs, many commentators claimed that the nadir of the relationship between environmentalists and the labor movement was reached. Halting drilling in ANWR is the No. 1 defensive priority of the largest environmental organizations in the country, and creating new jobs is the top priority for many labor unions.

This public rift was exactly what the Bush administration sought.

Republicans understand the importance of finding wedge issues between labor and the environment, given the roughly 16 million union members in the United States and the 11 million or so members of environmental organizations. If these two groups joined together to support an agenda for working families that included ecological protection, the president is well aware he could find himself out of a job.

The right has historically and famously exploited obvious cultural differences between the movements to undermine a unified progressive agenda: Environmental organizations are largely inhabited by upper-class whites with post-graduate education, while labor appeals to more diverse blue-collar interests. And this divisive tactic resonates most effectively during bad economic times -- which, not surprisingly, this Republican agenda creates.

Yet, an alliance should be a natural outcropping of these two groups. Not only are their memberships consistently more liberal than the rest of the public on social issues and support a strong role for federal involvement in restraining corporate greed, but recent research by renowned economist Ray Perryman demonstrates that protecting the environment has a positive impact on jobs and job creation.

Mending the break

Although labor and environmental groups have partnered in the past to enact critical legislation -- support by the Steelworkers was crucial to passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, for instance -- a portion of the blame for Republicans' success nonetheless falls on the movements themselves.

"Trade unionists get so concerned with protecting jobs that are right there that they don't look at how many jobs get created by cleaning up and preventing polluting activity," says Al Zack, veteran leader of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Bracken Hendricks, executive director of the Apollo Alliance, a labor-environment partnership calling for a $300 billion investment in clean-energy jobs, says environmental leaders, too, have done a lousy job explaining how solid environmental policies have long-term benefits to everyone -- including those outside the movement. "I think the environmental movement has made the assumption that people understand their goals and issues and will therefore be willing to sacrifice for them," Hendricks says. "I don't think the environmental community has done a good enough job of making it clear how environmental issues really are issues of social justice, unfair burdens and real costs to real people."

The result, says Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy -- an institute that supports initiatives that are good for workers and the environment -- is that "workers are treated like road kill and the environment is treated like a sewer."

Recent events, however, demonstrate that such rifts are getting more difficult to create -- even during bad economic times.

A majority of labor unions didn't join with the Teamsters in backing the president's energy initiative that included drilling in ANWR. Leadership against the measure was particularly strong from Leo Gerard, president of the Steelworkers, and Andy Stern, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU). And environmentalists and unionists have joined together in battling issues of globalization -- most spectacularly during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle where members of both groups were attacked equally by an out-of-control police force. The empathy that moment created came to bear last year during FTAA protests in Miami, in which police efforts to divide the groups again were unsuccessful.