Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement
Edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir
New Press, $17.99 (paper)
If any two movements should work closely together, it should be the labor and environmental movements. They tackle both sides of the problem with contemporary capitalism—the degradation of people and the degradation of nature—and both want healthier and better lives for everyone. Alas, perhaps no two progressive social movements have been more at each other’s throats over the last several decades.
The most spectacular example may be the confrontation over saving the northern spotted owl and the last old growth forests in the Northwest in the 1980s and early 1990s. The fight provided fodder for mainstream media, which was far more interested in portraying people screaming at each other than understanding the political and economic conditions that had led to a crisis of both jobs and environment.
The highest-pitched conflicts may have taken place a long time ago, but friction between the movements has persisted. Given this legacy, the amazing reconstruction of important labor-environmental alliances in recent years hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. The drafting of the Green New Deal, the creation of union jobs to build clean energy infrastructure, and the increased willingness of each movement to work together at the state level all mark the beginnings of a new age of cross-movement solidarity. A new volume of essays, Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement, is an excellent primer in how far this nascent alliance has advanced.
The seventeen pieces collected by editors Jeff Ordower (a veteran organizer) and Lindsay Zafir (former editor of The Forge) demonstrate the fecundity of the ideas circulating among advocates today. Organizing between movements, the book shows, can make a huge difference in overcoming both major challenges and the seeming hopelessness of modern politics. Not every essay points the way forward; some are touched with too much romance of the small scale and individual action instead of the gigantic development program needs to fight climate change. But taken as a whole, Power Lines provides a superb window into victories we so desperately need today.
The backdrop to these developments stretches back decades; the long view helps to put Power Lines’s case studies in context.
Historians have chronicled how unions and their members have acted for environmental goals since the early twentieth century. Urban workers in 1920s Oregon, for example, used their cars to travel to the forest as soon as they got them, leading to important working-class support for conservation. In the 1940s, United Auto Workers (UAW) members fought hard to preserve the best areas for duck hunting near Detroit from development. In fact, the UAW would take a leadership role on working-class environmentalism for decades, including supporting the early antinuclear movement in the late 1950s and hosting some of the first environmental justice conferences in the 1970s. The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW) and its legislative director (later, vice president), Tony Mazzocchi, achieved the most in these alliances, including getting the Sierra Club and other leading environmental groups to ask their members to tear up their Shell credit cards when the OCAW went on strike against that company in 1973.
Even loggers were on board. The International Woodworkers of America (IWA), a left-leaning but generally non-communist union that originated in the early days of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the mid-1930s, had a serious environmental agenda to preserve the forests before the environmental movement ever got off the ground. By 1938 the IWA lambasted the timber industry for clearcutting the forests, called for selective cutting, and educated its members on the impact of logging on erosion, and it urged sustainability for both the forests and its members’ jobs. In the 1960s the union supported the passage of the Wilderness Act, even though it could take timber out of production, on the grounds that its members deserved to enjoy the forests too. In the following years this continued to lead to fruitful alliances that brought the two movements together for a more sustainable environment that also sustained the working class.
But by the 1970s, everything began to unravel. The newly untrammeled capital mobility of neoliberal globalization set off rounds of factory closures. Employers blamed environmentalists for job losses, whether it was true or not; some employers openly lied about this. Working-class environmentalism had risen amid a growing economy, where workers could have both good jobs and a clean environment. When the jobs became scarce, workers feared that cleaning up a filthy steel factory that might give them cancer, for instance, would also cost them their livelihoods.
More often than not, the more immediate fear won out. When workers at a BF Goodrich factory in Louisville, Kentucky, developed high rates of liver cancer between 1972 and 1974, the company—along with other petrochemical companies that made PVC—claimed that new environmental regulations would lead to plant closures. Workers came out for their jobs. (As it turned out, they didn’t need to choose: when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did issue new standards regarding PVC production, not a single plant closed.)
In this new era, the environmental movement, increasingly unmoored from workers, lost its way. Some environmentalists responded to the new power of corporate America by raising money to file lawsuits, forcing the government to enforce the environmental legislation that had been passed beginning in the 1960s. Big green organizations such as the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society found it easier to attract wealthy donors through messaging about endangered animals and the Amazon rain forest than the poor suffering in polluted industrial communities. In a nutshell, mainstream environmentalism morphed from a mass movement to an elite one. By the new movement’s own metrics, the strategy worked. The spotted owl campaign in the Northwest effectively ended when courts responded to environmentalists’ lawsuits by forcing the government to follow the Endangered Species Act.
Meanwhile, the radical wing of environmentalism became impatient with the tepidness of their mainstream counterparts. Organizations such as Earth First! emerged in the 1970s, adopting rhetoric from Black Power that downplayed the work of alliance building. Their new, disruptive tactics such as tree spiking—hammering a metal rod into a tree trunk to prevent logging—made them no friends in labor. In 1987, for example, a spiked tree severely injured a worker in northern California when his saw exploded. (Earth First! leader Dave Foreman expressed little remorse over the worker’s fate. “I think it’s unfortunate that somebody got hurt,” he said, “but you know I quite honestly am more concerned about old-growth forests, spotted owls and wolverines and salmon—and nobody is forcing people to cut those trees.”) The environmental movement had split into two paths, both of which disregarded workers almost completely.
Toward the end of the century, the tensions settled somewhat—there was a brief moment of collaboration again in the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999—but the damage had been done, and the post–9/11 world turned attention to different issues.
Even the close coordination of unions and environmentalists in defeating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2016 concealed enduring animus. Around that time, after listening to a panel with leaders of both movements on this nascent alliance, I asked something along the lines of, “So, what did we learn here so we can work together moving forward?” The answer was that labor could speak to labor and greens could speak to greens, and that’s why the TPP campaign worked. Not exactly a recipe for long-term solidarity. And indeed, the fragility of the alliance was on full display in debates about Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline construction. For the building trades, pipeline construction meant jobs, while environmentalists allied with indigenous groups in opposition. These episodes made it seem as if nothing had changed—and that labor and environmentalism would remain at loggerheads.
So how is it, then, that things have really changed in recent years, as Power Lines’s essays detail? The Trump administration’s attack on both movements seems to have lit a fire—or at least a small light bulb—under them.
In particular, plans for a Green New Deal, which gained momentum following progressive wins in the November 2018 midterm elections, began to create language for common ground—at least between environmentalists and more progressive unions, which were always going to support creating good, green jobs. Meanwhile, environmentalists began reaching out to labor unions to work together to promote these jobs. Rolled into the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal does not receive the kind of public intellectual attention it did five years ago, and Congress is nowhere near passing the more ambitious agenda of its original planners. But the mainstreaming of its ideas has spurred more meaningful conversations between the labor and environmental movements.
The book’s examples of the alliance’s contemporary success are numerous. In July 2020 the American Federation of Teachers became the first AFL-CIO–affiliated union to endorse the Green New Deal. In 2022 California Labor for Climate Jobs got the state legislature to create a $40 million fund for fossil fuel workers who lost their jobs. The Seattle Education Association has worked closely with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to pressure the city’s school board to upgrade schools with green standards that use project labor agreements ensuring the building trades get the jobs, an effort that won an additional $19 million in upgrades for the schools. SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis led janitorial workers on the likely first-ever strike specifically around climate change in February 2020, fighting to reduce carbon emissions at the workplace.
In one piece in the book, Ordower interviews Edgar Franks, a leader of Familias Unidas de la Justicia in Washington, where farmworkers have come together to both fight for justice on the job and to create a modern-day ejido in the fields of eastern Washington to create food security. Sara Cullinane and Wynnie-Fred Hines describe the union-green alliance to stop an Amazon air hub in New Jersey, while Miya Yoshitani interviews the leaders of Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which is doing excellent work organizing working-class people of color around climate resilience and opening the eyes of union leaders of the work they need to do in these communities.
The biggest and most important change has taken place at the local level. Forward-thinking unions began moving beyond traditional bargaining over wages and hours. “Bargaining for the Common Good” became the mantra among successful union movements in the 2010s, beginning with the Chicago Teachers Union strike against mayor Rahm Emanuel’s austerity policies in 2012 and intensified with successful teacher unionism around the country in 2018 and 2019. That “common good” increasingly spoke of climate-based issues such as regulating temperatures in overheated classrooms.
That’s not to say that all has been smooth sailing, of course. But there’s a difference between tension that’s poisonous and tension that’s productive—precisely the point made by many essays in Power Lines, which emphasize the need to embrace and work through the inevitable frictions that arise between the two movements. As the book’s editors write in the introduction, “Successful labor-climate coalitions are grounded in real relationships, deep listening, and a willingness to lean into conflict.”
This idea is especially important when it comes to the idea of a “just transition,” which the book’s editors define as “a transformation of the extractive fossil fuel economy to a healthy, regenerative, equitable, and democratic economy.” Patrick Crowley, secretary-treasurer of Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO, has an essay in the book on this subject. In 2020, shortly after the presidential election, both labor and greens sat down to strategize, creating a group called Climate Jobs Rhode Island. But as it turns out, the two groups had very different ideas about what exactly a just transition around “climate jobs” would look like.
For the environmental organizations, a just transition meant environmental justice—pushing for goals like climate resiliency and carbon neutrality. For unions, a just transition meant the continuation (and expansion) of union jobs. These two goals can converge, of course, but they are not the same thing. Unions are concerned with working-class communities but serve their own members first, wherever they live. Environmentalists generally do want good jobs for people, but just moving dirty industry out of poor communities of color does not lead to the kind of jobs that will provide economic emancipation for them (nor are those jobs necessarily union jobs). This is the fundamental tension.
What it takes to bridge these differences is an old answer to many questions but one that we often forget to do: organizing. And organizing means listening—precisely what environmentalists and labor didn’t do in the decades they mostly operated independently.
Veronica Coptis’s superb essay, “Organizing Coal Country,” is a case study in the value of dialogue. Coptis, who worked at the Center for Coalfield Justice (CCJ) in Pennsylvania, notes that even if the coal workers disagree with you, by opening lines of communication, you can keep talking and help them build their own organizing capacity. The media has spilled an endless amount of ink speculating about coal workers’ political commitments: Are they worried that Democrats will destroy the coal industry? Why did Donald Trump appeal to them? Was it racism, “economic anxiety,” or sheer ignorance?
Coptis, who’s on the ground with these workers trying to build a climate-labor movement, seems to have an answer: start building power with them and find out for yourself. She denies that the working class don’t care about climate change, even as they want coal jobs. Some workers will disagree with the CCJ’s mission, she acknowledges. But so what? Listening, having conversations, building lines of communication, building trust instead of suspicion: all of this can lead to major benefits down the road, if not on every campaign or issue. She urges us to talk to unions and unorganized workers, focus on political education, and know that it is OK to disagree.
While the grassroots actions chronicled in Power Lines are nothing short of amazing, only so much can happen at the state and local levels. Combatting climate change and engaging in wide-scale jobs programs requires federal investment. The Inflation Reduction Act was an important first step in integrating green energy infrastructure to the nation’s admittedly lacking industrial policy, but it was not anywhere close to sufficient. Many of the contributors to Power Lines argue for this view in one form or another. Norman Rogers strongly argues for federal support for extractive workers, though he does not go into detail about what this should mean as the nation transitions away from dirty energy. Whether that support means jobs creation, jobs retraining, or direct payments, we need this kind of support, and in general the government must do much more for workers losing their jobs through these transitions.
The rest of the book stops short of exploring tougher questions of strategy in depth. The most critical of those is the matter of scale: How can the gains won at the local level translate into massive structural change? Many movements today, suspicious of bigness, don’t quite have an answer, and the book’s essays don’t exactly put pressure on them to give one. The high modernist era of the mid-twentieth century brought us the likes of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had a conservation agenda, but it also ran roughshod over both local residents and the region’s ecology. This attitude has led to a strong mistrust of institutions and formal organizations that goes back to the 1960s. As a result, the emphasis in organizing today is often on local and narrowly drawn communities rather than on big, universal solutions. But climate change requires nothing less than coordination at a national, and even international, scale. Absent a plan for getting there, Power Lines can sometimes feel like a series of celebrations of victories in small battles in a losing war.
Take Todd Vachon’s generally excellent contribution on education unions and the Green New Deal. It makes the case for community-owned solar and battery power, but it does not really make the case for how such a decentralized energy system could work or whether it would provide greener or more efficient energy to the nation’s working class than big energy companies. Ditto for the volume’s final essay, which details California farmworker unions’ direct actions against unsafe working conditions and extractive harvesting practices but doesn’t clearly trace out the steps between that and the wholesale transformation of the agricultural industry it calls for. Our food systems are certainly responsible for many environmental issues, and organizing the exploited workers in our food system needs to be a strong priority for the labor movement. But community food co-ops like Franks’s ejido simply cannot be scaled up to play a major role in fighting climate change, and we must face that fact head on. Ski industry workers fighting for the snow could be locally important, but again, a hyperlocal focus can sometimes lead us away from the scaling necessary to fight—in this case, the decline of the snowpack.
Sometimes the focus on small-scale politics can even hamper larger efforts. Winona LaDuke and Ashley Fairbanks’s contribution, “Killing the Wiindigo,” argues that it’s long past time to reject the “idea of endless growth and consumption that has dominated the last few centuries” and to instead “champion the global economy shrinking, not growing”—a vision, they write, that comes from Anishinaabe ways of knowing. They are certainly right that engagement with indigenous knowledge and communities is important for the left, but there is no way around engaging with labor, either. As it stands, there is zero chance of any union ever supporting degrowth of the sort that LaDuke and Fairbanks argue for—one that entails “burn[ing] down the extraction economy like a prairie.” There may be a moral case for this view, but the political case is nonexistent.
It is precisely this kind of language that has so alienated labor leaders such as Laborers International president Terry O’Sullivan. Angry about Biden rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, O’Sullivan stated, “If we’re transitioning into a new energy economy, as we do are those going to be as good as the jobs that my members are losing? And if it’s not, well there’s going to be hell to pay for it. We lost almost 1,000 laborers on Keystone, where’d they go?” We must have a response to O’Sullivan and his members—and pushing a version of degrowth that’s flatly unpalatable to groups that will surely be the central political actors in any transition away from fossil fuels is not it.
Far more palatable—and far more impactful as a result—are environmental proposals with concrete plans for labor. The projects that will make a difference are those of the gigantic, New Deal variety. The power of the Green New Deal is in the return of the big—big agencies, big plans, big funding, big labor. Yes, we absolutely have to watch for and avoid the mistakes of the original New Deal, including entrenching racism through legislative compromises, running roughshod over local knowledge, and an over-reliance on experts. But the only way we are going to solve our climate crisis while also putting Americans to work is through New Deal–esque centralized planning.
Power Lines does a great job demonstrating much of the work that has made progress toward this goal. One can see from some essays where we might need a clearer vision of how to win change. But one can also see the book’s most important takeaway: there is a lot of action happening right now, it is making a big difference, and these campaigns are models for taking these alliances to bigger places.
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