When Blue Meets Green

EMAGAZINE.COM, 4 Nov.2009 – Read a fascinating story about how the “Teamsters and Turtles” alliance was started to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization. How USW and the Sierra Club in the U.S. founded the National Blue Green Alliance to develop fair trade, healthy workplaces and global warming as key issues.

Perhaps it began in Seattle in 1999, with the epic “Teamsters and Turtles” alliance to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Unions and environmentalists, at the time seen as an unlikely pairing, united against a version of globalization that, they argued, spurs a “race to the bottom,” encouraging corporations to undercut both worker rights and environmental standards. The Seattle protest itself came out of earlier opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and to illegal logging in Indonesia. “All were clearly understood as global, both bad for the environment and bad for workers,” says Leo Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers. The Steelworkers and the nonprofit conservation group the Sierra Club are the founding partners of the national Blue Green Alliance. Gerard points to fair trade, healthy workplaces and global warming as key shared issues.

Well before globalization, labor and environmentalists had reasons to work together. Concerns about environmental toxins harming workers and communities have been around for centuries, from miners suffering coal dust exposure, to communities and workers breathing lead- and arsenic-laced air from metal smelters, to children developing leukemia after drinking water that was contaminated by toxic tanneries.

Now the alliance between labor and environmentalists is at the political forefront. This past February, the Blue Green Alliance held the Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference that announced its power and scope on a national basis. Some 2,600 participants converged on Washington, D.C., to hear speeches by Senators Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown and other members of Congress, as well as Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, plus an array of governors and national union and environmental leaders. Speakers called for a global green New Deal that would rebuild the middle class based on wind, solar, a smart new electrical grid, environmental retrofitting and other innovations. But forging a coalition for real and lasting change remains a challenge.

Mistrust is part of the labor-environmental relationship, too, in part because of modern environmentalism’s roots in the 1960s and ‘70s. Teamsters and other union members often clashed with Vietnam protesters and, at that time, saw members of the budding environmental movement as radical and upper class, out of touch with working Americans. More practical concerns increased the tension, notably the belief that environmentalism would lead to job loss. Unions worried, for instance, that clean-air standards would cost companies too much and spur layoffs.

Read the Article in EMAGAZINE.com