Steelworkers Environmental Policy

In 1987, a United Nations report was released that marks a watershed in the movement for environmental change. Like many other reports before it, "Our Common Future" highlighted the growing number of specific crises threatening the environment in countries around the world.

The report was prepared by an international committee chaired by Gro-Harlem Brundtland, the Prime Minister of Norway and the leader of that country's Labour Party.

It is a significant departure in two respects.

First it draws together information on the full scope of the threats posed to our environment from every corner of the globe and focuses attention on the need for aggressive, coordinated action to deal with those threats. It underlines the very critical point that the sum of seemingly isolated environmental incidents like chlorinated flurocarbon pollution from aerosol cans in North America or clear cutting in Brazilian rain forest threatens to destroy the environmental basis for life on this planet.

Second, it opens the door to working people to play a role in the environmental revolution by debunking the often-posed dilemma of the conflict between growth or development or jobs on one hand and environmental quality on the other. It changes the focus of the debate by introducing the idea of sustainable growth. It stands in sharp contrast with earlier reports that effectively blamed industrial workers for environmental problems and proposed dramatic solutions that would have impoverished working people around the world, thereby creating a false hostility between working people and the unions that represent them and activists concerned about environmental quality.

Unions around the world have taken up the challenge posed to working people by the Brundtland Report. Svenska Metall and the Social Democratic Party in Sweden have made enhancing environmental quality the movement's top priority. The International Metalworkers Federation, of which our union in Canada is a member, has also identified metalworkers clearly with the fight for sustainable growth.

STEELWORKERS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL REVOLUTION

Steelworkers clearly have an role to play in the environmental revolution.

To begin with, our members are by no means strangers to the fight for a cleaner environment. The struggle for better health and safety regulation in the work place and for legislation to control work place hazards puts industrial workers on the front lines of that broader fight.

Nor are our members isolated in any way from the dramatic upswing in public concern about environmental issues. If anything, working people are more concerned about environmental issues than the public at large because they experience the impact of environmental degradation more directly.

Working class cities, towns and communities bear the brunt of locally-generated air and water pollution. And it is working class families who can't afford to "get away" who suffer when public recreational facilities are closed or restricted because of pollution. They don't have the options open to the rich.

And our members, by their own actions, have put the lie to the claim that working people are not prepared to deal with the employment impacts of environmental quality improvements. To give an example from Canada's most notorious acid rain source, INCO, our members at Local 6500 in Sudbury have consistently supported the construction of a new smelter as a means of reducing environmental pollution in full knowledge of the fact that a modernized operation will reduce employment.

As Canada's major "smokestack union as the people who have the most to gain from improved environmental quality and the most to lose from insensitive changes that offer up their jobs as sacrifices to the cause of a cleaner environment our union is well placed to play a key role in the movement for environmental reform and sustainable growth.

The recommendations in this paper will address three principal themes: union participation in the political movements for environmental change in Canada and around the world; the so-called jobs and environment trade-off and proposals for a mechanism to deal with the issues for workers that flow from specific environmental issues; and the role that working people can play as a first line of defence against companies that pollute the environment.

THE POLITICAL MOVEMENT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

It is important for our union to participate actively in organizations concerned about the environment, for a number of reasons. Our members, like the general public in Canada, believe that environmental quality should be this country's number one public policy concern. We have an obligation, on their behalf, to do what we can to contribute to political change.

Given the close links between environmental and health and safety issues, environmental organizations can be valuable allies in the fight for stronger health and safety legislation. In the "lean and mean" world of free trade, pressure will inevitably build to force Canadian standards to the North American lowest common denominator. Health and safety standards will be one of the business community's targets.

And given the stake our member have in strong environmental policies that don't ignore the impact of environmental change on their job security, it makes sense to participate as a way of getting our point of view across. The Steelworkers' political strategy will include:

1. Participation in and working with organizations fighting for public policy action for environmental change at the District, National and Local levels.
2. Working actively with environmental and community groups established to deal with pollution problems associated with plants in which our members work.
3. Establishing environment committees at the national, district, area council and, where appropriate, local levels to coordinate the union's involvement in environmental issues at all levels.

JOBS AND ENVIRONMENT: BREAKING THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

Despite the obvious common ground between labour issues and environmental issues, the relationship between trade unionists and environmentalists has traditionally been more hostile than cooperative. In the early days of the environmental movement and at their most insensitive, environmentalists refused to take jobs into account at all and bad mouthed as reactionary anyone who raised concerns about employment impacts. Perhaps the most extreme example was the limits to growth" fad. The pet project of Italy's most wealthy and influential industrialist, Giovanni Agnelli, and his "Club of Rome' limits to growth preached against the evils of economic growth without addressing any of the equity or distribution issues that it raised. It was clear that industrial workers were going to bear the brunt of the transformation contemplated by Club of Rome" theorists, yet the jobs and distributional issues were not addressed.

Some talked blandly about some jobs having to be sacrificed in the interests of a cleaner environment, without addressing in any way the interests of the people affected. Workers who deal with such "trade-offs" every day wondered what they had to learn from what they could characterize as a "bunch of middle-class academics".

Things are different today. The environmental movement is increasingly conscious of the need to address employment issues as it presses for tougher regulations and forced clean-up. While this is a positive development, it has fallen short of convincing working people at the grass roots that they should be on the front lines in the fight to clean up the environment and sacrificing their jobs in the fight.

Attempts to convince working people that an environmentally sound economy would be more, not less, labour intensive than the economy is today because they don't address the fundamental questions that the man or woman whose pay cheque stops will always ask. Where are these jobs? How do I know they'll really be there? Will I be able to get one of them? Will they pay a decent wage? And what specifically is going to be done to make sure that I still have a livelihood when I've finished sacrificing my job tot the broader interests of society?

At the root of the so-called jobs-environment problem is that it is the worker, not the state or even the corporate owner, who has the greatest stake in the continued operation of his or her work place.

LOSS OF JOBS

It may very well be that society as a whole will benefit substantially from an environmental restriction that results in a loss of jobs. It may even be that the overall economic impact is positive, so that in the language of the economic technocrats the winners could compensate the losers. But that doesn't address the problem faced by the individual worker who isn't going to get the new job that is created as a result of the change. Because if the winners don't actually compensate the losers, the fact that they could doesn't mean very much.

A model that expects Canadian working people to absorb the costs for environmental changes that benefit society as whole is neither fair nor politically workable.

It is not fair because individual working people alone are being asked to make these sacrifices. And it is not politically workable because it inevitably creates political opposition to environmental reform.

We propose the following:

1. That the principle that workers whose jobs are affected by environmental reforms should be fully compensated be recognized in all government grant and regulatory programs dealing with environmental questions;
2. That a special workers' environmental defence fund be established to compensate workers for adjustment costs resulting from environmental enhancement;
3. That all government grants for environmental protection include an allocation for workers' adjustment costs; and
4. That environmental protection regulations require explicitly that workers whose jobs are adversely affected be fully compensated by the employer as part of the compliance requirement.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES ON THE SHOP FLOOR

The common interest between Steelworkers and Canadians who are concerned about environmental issues goes beyond simple agreement on the political principles involved. The conditions under which people work are both a first warning of environmental problems ant a first line of defense against those problems. Our union's ongoing concern about health ant safety at the shop floor level extends naturally to a concern about the impact of the plant on the environment.

And because our members jobs can make them both the agents of employers who violate environmental regulations and witnesses to actions which violate those regulations, our members have the potential to be of valuable assistance to the Canadian public in the fight to stop illegal acts of pollution.

Our involvement with health and safety issues in the plant affects the environment in two ways. On one hand, improving in-plant standards generally limits the impact of the plant on the outside environment as well. Better control of hazardous products, for example, usually reduces the amount of hazardous waste generated by an industrial operation.

On the other hand, an employer's cheapest solution to an in-plant health and safety problem may be to pump or blow the problem from inside the plant into the outside environment, solving the health and safety problem by making an environmental problem worse. For example, a ventilation system with an ineffective air cleaning system poses an environmental hazard to the surrounding neighbourhood.

Because of these inter relationships, environmental impacts must be fully integrated into the Steelworkers' health and safety work.

In particular:

1. The mandate of in-plant health and safety committees and representatives should be broadened to include outside the plant environmental impacts.
2. Health and safety committees at the local level should work with environmental groups in addressing such common concerns as hazardous products control and waste management to assist them in putting pressure on employers to clean up.
3. Health and safety committees should include the impact on the outside environment in the criteria used to assess employer proposals for in-plant health and safety improvements.
4. Course segments dealing with environmental issues should be added to all USWA health and safety courses.

ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

It is a general principle of Canadian labour law that an employee awes a duty of loyalty to his or her employer. This means that an employee who acts against the interests of his or her employer may be dismissed for violating that duty. As a result, employees who inform environmental regulators of suspected violations of regulations risk dismissal for acting in the public interest.

Because employees are on sib at all times, they are often best placed to monitor the environmental actions of their employers. To strengthen this potentially valuable role for industrial workers, employees who report suspected environmental infractions to authorities should be protected from any reprisals from their employers.

1. So-called "whistle-blower protection should be introduced in all labour and environmental statutes in Canada to protect employees who report suspected environmental infractions to government authorities from discipline, dismissal or other reprisals.
2. Until such legislation is in place, Steelworker collective agreements should be amended to include a "whistle blower clause as follows: A worker who has reason to believe that:

One or more aspects, in whole or in part, of his/her employer's work, undertaking or business constitutes an immediate or longer term environmental threat and who consistent with that reasonable belief communicates with persons inside or outside the employ of his/her employer:

1. for the purpose of advising of the existence of the environmental threat; or
2. for the purpose of providing information as to the nature, scale, scope, level, type of, or otherwise clarifying the environmental threat; shall not be subject to any recriminatory, discriminatory or any other action in the nature of a reprisal, by the employer or by any person acting on behalf of the employer.