InsideCounsel » April 2008
Strange Bedfellows
Unions, environmentalists put aside differences to promote renewable energy.
Labor unions and environmental organizations are unlikely allies in the quest for a greener America. Historically, the two viewed each other with skepticism, if not downright hostility. Unions feared the environmentalists’ clean-up measures would close plants and eliminate jobs. Environmentalists berated unions for backing job-creating but Earth-destroying proposals, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
But in the past few years, the two sides have found common ground. In 2006, the 1.2-million-member United Steelworkers Union (USW) joined forces with the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest grassroots environmental organization, to form the Blue-Green Alliance.
A broader coalition called the Apollo Alliance was launched in 2004 and now counts among its endorsers a long list of unions and environmental organizations. Apollo also is endorsed by dozens of businesses engaged in alternative energy and other “green” projects.
While they have differences in specific objectives and approaches, both alliances focus their efforts on promoting alternative energy with the goal of creating new jobs and a stronger economy while improving the environment.
“The impetus in recent years for greater cooperation between unions and environmental groups is the recognition by many workers that environmental protection and environment-related industry offer great potential for job creation and economic growth,” says Brian Obach, author of “Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground.”
“That has made unions like the steelworkers realize that environmentalists are actually their allies in promoting the new green economy,” he says.
Policy Priorities
That realization hit home in 2006 for David Foster, then a USW district director, as he was rewriting the union’s 1990 environmental policy statement.
“I came to believe that solving environmental issues was not just a way to avert an ecological disaster but also an opportunity to create the greatest economic development program of this century,” Foster says. “I started looking at the clean energy economy not as something to worry about, but as a tool to rebuild manufacturing.”
Foster now heads the Blue-Green Alliance, uniting blue-collar USW members with the “greens” of the Sierra Club in public education and lobbying initiatives. Its prime legislative objective is federal and state renewable energy standards that assign a price to carbon emissions and use the revenue to reinvest in clean energy projects and technologies.
The Alliance also advocates major changes in trade policy to discourage the flight of industrial jobs to countries like China, where products including steel can be manufactured more cheaply in part because of lax environmental laws. Foster points out that illegal deforestation in Indonesia, which provides pulp to paper companies, contributes to global warming and also makes U.S. paper mills uncompetitive.
