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-- Vol. 36 No. 10 | May 24, 2004
Feature Article
Printable Version
In Search of Solidarity
by Laura Paskus
Will hard times renew historic alliances between
environmentalists and labor unions?
For almost a century, workers at Kennecott Utah Copper have scraped
away at the earth, turning a mountain west of Salt
Lake City first into a canyon, then into a crater. The open-pit copper mine is so big — almost
three miles across and three-quarters of a mile deep — that it can be seen from space.
Each day, about 250,000 tons of rock are pulled out of the mine. That raw ore is then "cooked" at the Kennecott
Smelter, whose smokestack has become a Utah
icon, standing next to Interstate 80, not far from the shore of the Great
Salt Lake.
Steelworker Rob Hurst, who looks like he could crack the smokestack
in half on his own, likes to compare the smelting process to "baking a
cake." But this cake is baked by steelworkers
encased in aluminized suits, gloves, helmets and shields.
For anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours at a time, they face
2,200-degree heat, pumping steam into the copper "cake" and
melting it down into 750-pound plates or "anodes" that are 98
percent pure copper. These are
then sent to the refinery, where the last of the impurities,
including gold and silver, are removed.
The work is dangerous, and quite honestly, scary.
But for the steelworkers at Kennecott, there’s something more
frightening: the thought of losing these well-paying jobs with their
benefits, pensions and security.
Now, their fight to keep those jobs, along with a serendipitous
series of events, has drawn steelworkers into an alliance with local
environmentalists — the last people you’d expect to find
cooperating with the employees of one of the largest mines in the world.
In 1989, a multinational mining company, Rio Tinto,
bought Kennecott. The company brought with it from
Australia an aggressively anti-union reputation, say members of the United
Steelworkers of America, and it has since lived up to that reputation in
Utah.
Most recently, in June 2003, the company signed a hard-fought
contract with the Kennecott Coordinated Bargaining Committee, which
represents five unions and 1,300 workers. Just two
days later, the company broke the contract and laid off 120 workers at the
smelter, ordering security guards to escort them from the premises. Union leaders called the move an act of retaliation
for the workers’ involvement with the union.
Many of those workers either retired, or were later recalled to
work as copper prices rebounded. But the
steelworkers union has continued to wrestle with the company over the violated
contract.
A few months after the layoffs, on the morning of Sept. 2, 2003, Sierra Club member
Ivan Weber spotted a tiny public notice in the Salt Lake Tribune. According to the
notice, the final settlement of a dispute between Kennecott and the state
over a 50-square-mile plume of contaminated groundwater would
be discussed at a public hearing in eight days.
Weber, who had been involved with the groundwater case since the
1990s, had been paranoid about the settlement since mid-August, he says,
when The New York Times
quoted then-Utah governor Mike Leavitt as claiming credit for the
"completed effort" to clean up contaminated groundwater. As far as Weber knew, there were still plenty of kinks
to work out.
To make things worse, he says, it was a lousy "solution." After years of study and legal wrangling, the
company had proposed pumping and treating the groundwater, then sending it
to four local cities as drinking water. Much to
the dismay of environmentalists, hunters and fishermen, the leftover sludge
would be dumped into the already-polluted Great
Salt Lake (HCN, 4/29/02: The Great Salt Lake Mystery). Kennecott and the state were trying to
"fast-track" the settlement, says Weber, and he needed help
— fast.
"By 10 a.m.,
I had the alert out nationally," he says, "and the steelworkers
were among the first to respond."
"We were already in the midst of the dispute over the
contract, and we were going to use whatever ammunition we could find,"
says Terry Bonds, District 12 director of the United Steelworkers of
America and head of the bargaining committee.
The steelworkers packed the public hearing, making up almost half
the crowd, and Weber credits them with getting the public comment period
extended. Since then, the Jordan Valley Water
Conservancy District has withdrawn its permit for the project, and the
company is revising its plan.
"Though I guess we have different agendas, we learned that
when we get together — green-collar workers and blue-collar workers
— we’re stronger," says Bonds.
Today, the coalition is looking into Rio Tinto’s
labor and environmental practices in Utah
and around the world. "We want to force them
to behave responsibly and to be responsible corporate citizens," says
Kelly Hansen, a representative with the United Steelworkers of America.
"It’s almost always the case that companies that have a
bad environmental record also have bad labor records," says David
Foster, District 11 director of the United Steelworkers of America. Foster, who is nothing short of a hero among
rank-and-file steelworkers, has reached out a steady hand to
environmentalists over the past few years. "Our
interests are portrayed as colliding with one another, but there’s
nothing further from the truth," he says. "On
a practical level, there is such extremism in the corporate world that the
opportunities for us to work together are virtually limitless."
Although the opportunities might be limitless, finding the right
people at the right time — and the money they need to work with
— can be challenging. But the recent rise in
corporate power, combined with a presidential administration often seen as
hostile to both labor and the environment, is spurring more people to reach
out to each other across old battle lines.
Today, the term "environmentalist" may conjure up images
of forest defender Julia Butterfly Hill, resplendent atop her redwood tree,
or wilderness warrior Dave Foreman, howling before a crowd of wolf-lovers. But in the 1960s and 1970s, environmental activism was
played out on the ground where humans, nature and toxic chemicals collided,
not in the treetops and the clouds.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent
Spring, warned of the dangers of the pesticide DDT. The 1969 Santa
Barbara oil spill showed that petroleum products
could be dangerous and expensive to clean up. When
the residents of Love Canal,
a suburban neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y.,
discovered in 1976 that their houses had been built atop a toxic dump,
millions of other Americans began wondering what was underneath their homes
and in their drinking water. And the partial
meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power
plant in 1979 warned people that nuclear threats could originate far from a
Soviet missile silo, on soil that was red, white and blue.
It’s only natural, then, that some of the people who led the
fight for safe communities were those who worked every day with everything
from pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizer and oil, to asbestos, benzene
and plutonium.
One of the leaders in that fight was the late Tony Mazzocchi from Brooklyn,
who was a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic
Workers Union (OCAW) for 52 years. Mazzocchi’s
fingerprints are visible on almost all of the labor successes of the past
50 years: He negotiated contracts dealing with issues from dental insurance
to equal pay for women; he lobbied for passage of the 1970 Occupational
Safety and Health Administration Act; and in 1974, he worked with Karen Silkwood, who was exposing safety violations at a Kerr-McGee
nuclear fuel-rod plant in Oklahoma. In 1996, he
founded the national Labor Party.
For Mazzocchi, a healthy environment was
just as important as a safe workplace. In the
1950s, he helped document the effects of fallout from nuclear bomb testing
by collecting baby teeth from mothers working at a cosmetics factory, and
giving them to doctors to examine for traces of radioactivity. In 1970, he co-chaired the nation’s first Earth
Day celebration.
"His whole idea was to invigorate and activate people against
the evils of the world," says Joe Anderson, an OCAW
member and the current project director of the Denver-based Labor Institute
West, a branch of the Public Health Institute, a New York-based nonprofit
that helps people build coalitions. "He knew
how to attract young activists, even if they didn’t know they were
activists at that point."
There were others who bridged the divide between labor and the
environment, including Pat Williams, who represented western Montana
in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1979 until 1997.
As a member of both the House Labor Committee and the Interior
Committee (now the Resources Committee), Williams worked closely with both
groups. "(They) came together to lobby
Congress for each of their causes," says Williams, now a senior fellow
with the University of Montana’s
Center for the Rocky Mountain West. "I saw
environmental organizations doing minimum wage lobbying, and some labor
(groups) supported wilderness legislation."
"Those were exciting times," says Jim Murry,
the head of the Montana
state AFL-CIO from 1968 until 1991, and a close friend of Williams. Montana’s
progressive alliance, which included environmentalists and labor
organizations along with farmers, ranchers and low-income groups, helped
pass a new state Constitution that listed "the right to a clean and
healthful environment" as an "inalienable right" held by all
residents. Between 1971 and 1976, Montanans made a
bipartisan effort to create what may be the most impressive run of
environmental protections any state has passed in such a brief period (HCN, 12/17/01: Bad moon rising).
"Because of that coalition, all disadvantaged people had
considerable political influence in the state," says Murry. "We weren’t
always in complete agreement, but it meant that the little people had a lot
better of a chance of having their voices heard."
But the 1980s ushered in hard times for labor. New
technologies meant fewer workers were needed to get the same jobs done,
while American companies began outsourcing more jobs to foreign countries
with cheap workforces and less stringent — or nonexistent —
environmental laws. And as labor’s fortunes
unraveled, so did its alliances with environmentalists.
"The tradition started to cool off when globalization really
hit," says Les Leopold, director of the Public Health Institute. "With the shutdown of manufacturing firms and
investment in other nations, most unions dropped the issue (of
environmental protections) because they were so worried about jobs."
Industry only hastened the destruction of these coalitions by
blaming environmental laws — and environmentalists — for lost
jobs. In Montana,
progressive alliances broke down in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when
industry drove a wedge between groups that had once worked well together,
says Jim Murry.
"Industry was very successful in saying the environmental
movement stopped development and mining and timbering in Montana,"
says Gene Fenderson, executive secretary of the
three-year-old Montana Progressive Labor Caucus. "That’s
really not true. That job loss was due to
technology. U.S. Steel, National Steel, all those
big companies are producing as much steel as they ever did. It’s just being done with fewer and fewer
workers."
The same is true with coal, aluminum and other metals; in Colorado,
for example, coal production has increased dramatically in the past few
years — in 2003, the state produced a record 35.9 million tons of
coal, a 16.9 percent increase over 2002 — while the workforce has
stayed the same, or shrunk.
Environmentalists didn’t help matters by focusing on court
battles and national politics, and drifting away from local people and
economics. By the 1990s, politics in many Western
states had degenerated to divisive squabbles over "jobs vs. the
environment." Nowadays in Montana,
says Murry, "industry does whatever they
want to do."
Even the state’s labor community is split, and nowhere is
that more clear than in the once heavily unionized mining industry. The Montana Mining Association has introduced a November
ballot initiative that would repeal a 1998 ban on cyanide heap-leaching. The ban, passed by 52 percent of the state’s
voters, prohibits mining companies from using cyanide to extract
microscopic pieces of gold and silver from tons of ore.
The state AFL-CIO is supporting the initiative, saying that cyanide
heap-leaching will create jobs. The Montana
Progressive Labor Caucus disagrees. Repealing the
ban won’t bring more jobs into the state, and the environmental risks
of the process are too great, says executive secretary Fenderson;
cyanide spills can destroy rivers and riparian habitat (HCN,
9/29/03:
Reweaving the river). "I want to be clear
about this," says Fenderson. "We’re not necessarily opposed to gold
mining. We’re opposed to the cyanide
heap-leaching process."
Regardless, the mining industry is doing its best to convince
voters that environmentalists sabotaged Montana’s
economy by funding the 1998 initiative. Now, the
Montana Mining Association wants to "give the industry back the tools
to work with that were taken away by environmental groups in 1998."
In recent years, however, economic globalization has brought some
workers and environmentalists together again. Witness
the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle,
where some 50,000 protesters took to the streets for five days.
Created in 1995, and currently including members from 147
countries, the WTO sets the rules for
international commerce and negotiates trade disputes. It
has cited labor and environmental laws as illegal barriers to free trade,
and critics say it pits countries against each other in a "race to the
bottom," where the most
lax environmental and labor regulations reign.
The "Battle
in Seattle" was one of the
most dramatic protest rallies the U.S.
had seen since the 1960s. And there, alongside
members of the AFL-CIO, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, United
Steelworkers of America, the Paper, Allied-Industrial Chemical and Energy
Workers International Union, International Longshore
and Warehouse Union and hundreds of local unions, were college students,
anarchists, and environmentalists in turtle suits. One
sign held by marchers summed up the protests, and their hope for the
future: "Sea Turtles and Teamsters: Together at Last."
"Coalition building was happening on every street
corner," says Bill Carey, labor co-chair of the Olympia, Wash.-based Alliance
for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, which was founded in 1999 and
co-chaired at its start by environmentalist David Brower and steelworker
David Foster. "Trade issues are something
both camps were concerned with — NAFTA (the North American Free Trade
Agreement), WTO, FTAA
(the Free Trade Area of the Americas),
those are all bad for labor and bad for the environment."
After the protests, there were some victories: President Clinton
— partly in order to win labor’s support for Al Gore’s
presidential bid in 2000 — came out in favor of levying sanctions
against countries that violate workers’ rights. But
then George W. Bush became president.
Plainly stated: Bush has been hell on organized labor. In the spring of 2001, Bush blocked strikes by
mechanics at Northwest Airlines and United Airlines, invoking executive
privilege. The next year, in response to the
events of September 11, Congress passed the president’s Homeland
Security Act, and gave Bush the authority to block federal employees from
forming or joining unions if their jobs are directly involved in the
"war on terrorism."
In 2002, when 10,500 dockworkers at 29 Pacific ports with the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
threatened to walk out over an unsatisfactory contract, Tom
Ridge, head of the new Homeland Security Department, warned union leaders
that a strike would be considered a "threat to national
security."
Bush is also overhauling the Fair Labor Standards Act, which
establishes a number of worker protections, including minimum wage, child
labor regulations and overtime pay for workers. At
the end of April, the administration announced new rules that will allow
businesses to "reclassify" certain workers, making them
ineligible for overtime pay, even if they work more than 40 hours per week.
The loss of American jobs to foreign countries is another problem
for labor unions and workers. By no means did the
outsourcing of jobs originate with Bush: That trend began under President
Reagan, and President Clinton accelerated it by signing NAFTA.
But Bush is the most
outspoken proponent of outsourcing yet: He supports the Central American
Free Trade Area (CAFTA), which would extend NAFTA
to Central and South America and the Caribbean,
and the FTAA, a trade agreement that would do the
same among 34 countries.
Since January 2001, 3.2 million manufacturing jobs in the United
States have disappeared, and the number
of unemployed and "under-employed" (people who have to work two
or more jobs to make ends meet) has risen. If the
trend continues, a 2003 study by the University
of California at Berkeley
estimates that 14 million engineering, professional and technical jobs are
at risk of being sent to foreign countries within
the next few years.
The Bush administration has proposed reclassifying service jobs,
such as those at fast-food restaurants, as "manufacturing jobs"
— an apparent effort to disguise the slide in the manufacturing
sector. And it steadfastly defends its policy:
"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," N.
Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council
of Economic Advisors, told the press in February. "More
things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And
that’s a good thing."
Not necessarily for American workers, however. And
as jobs disappear, so do the unions: Over the last 20 years, unions have
suffered consistently declining membership. In
2003, only 12.9 percent of all workers belonged to a union, compared with 20.1
percent in 1983, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking
those numbers. The reasons are varied: Some blame
the unions for becoming corrupt and complacent, while others accuse
corporations — and now the federal government — of making it
harder for workers to organize. Still others say
the workers are responsible, because they took the unions — and the
rights they gained — for granted.
Whatever the reasons, job losses, the decline in union membership
and Bush’s hostility to organized labor have meant that more unions
are focusing on "bread and butter" issues, such as individual
jobs, wages and benefits. That has sometimes meant
bad news for the environmental movement, says Les Leopold of the Public
Health Institute. "When they’re scared
away, unions can be formidable anti-environmental fighters."
Indeed, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters currently
supports drilling in Alaska’s
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, saying it will boost jobs, and in 2001,
the United Auto Workers lobbied Democrats to vote against vehicle
fuel-efficiency standards.
But other unions are looking for new allies — and many
environmentalists are eager to respond. The
"blue-green" alliances, as they are sometimes called, offer a
chance for the environmental movement to find new members and partners, and
to become more inclusive. "It represents a
maturity or an epiphany for the environmental movement," says Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned
Scientists, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit which has recently joined
forces with environmentalists and labor organizers over the issue of global
warming. "They’ve come to realize how
important it is to care about workers and support policies that preserve
and create jobs."
It also means a big step for unions and workers. "One
of the problems the union has always had is it isolates itself from
people," says Anderson. That’s starting to change, however: "The
union started as a social movement" and it needs to get back to that.
But, Anderson
says, "That’s a long and brave step for people to take."
Ironically, it’s in the Northwest, where relationships
between environmentalists and loggers can be notoriously tense (remember
the old bumper stickers that read "Hungry? Out
of work? Eat a spotted owl"?) that new alliances are taking root.
In 1998, when steelworkers called a strike at Kaiser Aluminum to
protest the outsourcing of 700 jobs to non-union contractors, the company,
owned by Maxxam Corporation, responded by locking out 3,100 steelworkers at
five plants in Washington, Ohio
and Louisiana. Maxxam already had a bad name among environmentalists:
Forest activists in Northern California
had been fighting another Maxxam subsidiary, Pacific Lumber, for about 10
years.
Once the steelworkers and forest activists found one another, they
realized that their interests were more closely aligned than they had
thought. Steelworkers came to Northern
California to talk to non-union workers at the lumber company
about the benefits of union representation. When
environmentalists filed a lawsuit against Pacific Lumber, challenging the
company’s logging plan as "unsustainable," the steelworkers
filed a similar suit, saying that the company’s economic practices
were unsustainable.
Since then, environmentalists have had a few victories over Pacific
Lumber, including some in court, and the National Labor Relations Board
sided with strikers who accused Kaiser of illegally locking them out of
their jobs. But both steelworkers and
environmentalists have their work cut out for them: Pacific Lumber is still
clear-cutting forests and logging redwoods, and the steelworkers have yet
to unionize timber industry workers.
Still, the Maxxam campaign gave both groups a chance to get to know
one another, says Karen Pickett, director of the Bay Area Coalition for the
Headwaters. "When we sat down, and looked
across the table from each other, we were struck," she says. "(Maxxam) was just one example of how
corporations operate in this country these days. That’s
when we started to talk about a larger alliance."
Pickett is one of the founders of the resulting Alliance
for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. She now
sits on the board of directors with 11 other leaders within the labor and
environmental movements, pursuing an agenda outlined after a protest in Houston
at Maxxam’s 1999 shareholder meeting. Signed
by more than 200 people, "The Houston Principles" outline a
common vision for the environmental and labor movements (see story at
left).
That alliance has, in turn, spawned others: Two of the leaders
within it, forester Tracy Katelman and
steelworker Don Kegley, went on to create the
North Coast Restoration Jobs Initiative, a coalition of environmentalists,
carpenters, engineers, state and local workers and food workers. In the past three years, members have worked together
to defeat an effort by Maxxam Corporation and Pacific Lumber to recall
Humboldt County’s district attorney, Paul Gallegos, after he accused
the company of fraud. They’re also working
on issues such as establishing a living wage, creating year-round jobs for
seasonal workers, and coming up with a sustainable economic model for
Humboldt County, a rural area traditionally dependent on the boom-and-bust
timber industry.
"We’re learning to not waste time going into places (in the
discussion) where it’s not going to work," says Katelman, "and to instead look at what we can do,
to find a positive alternative."
There are also signs of progress on the ground in Northern
California. According to a report by
the nonprofit Forest Community Research, between 1995 and 2002, restoration
work brought $65 million and 300 jobs to Humboldt
County. That
money came into the region because of federal and state environmental
regulations: Endangered salmon needed better habitat, riparian habitat needed
to be restored and exotic plant and animal species replaced with native
species. The report estimates that there is still
at least $150 million worth of work to be completed
in Northern California alone.
"The idea is to create high-skill, high-wage jobs in a
sustainable industry," says Andrea Davis, restoration jobs organizer
with the Alliance
for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. For
workers, that means permanent, year-round jobs that pay well and provide
health insurance, she says. For communities, it
means cleaner water, healthier forests, sustainable fisheries and a viable
economy.
In Montana,
an environmental success story may turn into a win for labor, too. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency called
for the removal of the Milltown Dam, part of a Superfund complex along the Clark
Fork River in
western Montana. The project, which will cost $100 million and last 10
years, will bring jobs to the state — and environmentalists say those
should be union jobs. Tracy Stone-Manning, executive
director of the Missoula-based Clark Fork Coalition, has been meeting with
leaders within the state AFL-CIO, and she says, "what we’ve said
is ‘if and when you need us, we’ll be there.’
"
That’s only the beginning. According
to the EPA, there are 2,189 active Superfund sites in the Western
United States. From abandoned mine dumps to dammed and abused rivers, the
West offers thousands of projects that could rehabilitate the landscape and
create jobs.
"There are, in the West, old scars on the land, from the days
of all-out resource extraction," says Pat Williams. "These
old insults offer us an opportunity … to put people to work with
their hands and equipment, restoring and repairing the landscape. If the leadership is done correctly, (those projects)
can heal the rift between environmentalists and workers, and can once again
give them cause to work together."
But truth be told, the reality of a grassroots and unionized labor
force spreading across the region, replanting unused forest roads,
restoring salmon habitat and safely reclaiming Superfund sites, is still a
long way off. Without some support from Washington,
most of these projects will never get off the ground. At
the same time that environmental laws are being weakened, the agencies that
enforce those laws, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the
Environmental Protection Agency, have had their budgets slashed (HCN, 5/10/04). When the
Superfund budget bottomed out in 2003,
Congress refused to reinstate the tax on polluting corporations, which
funds the cleanup of the nation’s dirtiest sites.
Faced with the lack of cooperation from Washington,
many environmental and labor leaders now say that their most urgent task is
to elect a new president, one willing to pledge support to their causes. It’s a goal they believe is attainable: By
working together, activists say, the two movements can become a force to
reckon with.
Despite its declining membership, labor still represents about a
fifth of the electorate. Those who live in union
households are more likely to discuss politics, more likely to be
registered to vote — and more likely to say they "always"
vote in elections, according to the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Even though the war in Iraq
and the economy are at the forefront of people’s minds, the
environment remains "an integral part of all the issues people say
they care about," says Margie Klein, founder and director of Project
Democracy, an initiative of the League of Conservation Voters. "We just need to educate people that economic
development and the environment are not mutually exclusive."
In fact, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has
latched onto that idea, saying in recent speeches that "jobs are the
environment." Kerry has made promises to both
communities, saying he’ll overturn recent rollbacks of environmental
laws, pursue renewable energy research and technology, and increase vehicle
fuel-efficiency standards. Kerry has also promised
job creation, a halt to the exportation of jobs, a refusal to go forward
with the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and a 120-day review of all
current trade agreements.
For progressives, President Bush’s goals are equally clear. "If Bush is re-elected, we’ll go all the
way back to the 1890s, a time of no regulation whatsoever," says David
Foster. "I simply can’t understand how
any American with a conscience is not making this their life’s work
for the next six months."
Laura Paskus is High
Country News assistant editor.
The United Steelworkers of
America www.uswa.org,
415-562-2400
Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and
the Environment www.asje.org,
360-709-9324
Public Health Institute
www.greenlabor.org, 917-606-0511
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