Working for the Environment

Abstract

This was a lengthy, 113-page draft I prepared before distilling the material into a journal article of 30 pages or less, Working for the Environment, which was published in January 1998 in Environmental History. The purpose of this draft was to arrange the material chronologically and select all the most interesting pro- (or in some cases, anti-) environmental statements from union leaders and members that I encountered in federal hearings or elsewhere from the 1940s through the 1970s. In addition to helping to prepare for the article, I had hoped to write my second academic history book about the relationship between organized labor and the environmental movement. Instead, I was repaid for all my efforts by getting driven out of the academic history profession. But I always found my research on the history of labor-environmentalist cooperation to be perhaps the most interesting and useful research I ever undertook as a historian, it helped to expose the lies of the Reaganite spin-doctors regarding the topic (that labor unions and workers inevitably were and must be hostile to environmentalists), and it remains my favorite project from that period. The draft includes statements from the AFL-CIO's Anthony Biemiller, George Riley, Joseph Doherty, and John Curran from the 1950s-60s; from the UAW's Walter Reuther, Victor Reuther, Olga Madar, Leonard Woodcock, and Kenneth Worley from the 1960s-70s; from the UFW's Cesar Chavez and Jerome Cohen; from the USWA's Joseph Germano; from the OCAW's Anthony Mazzocchi, and from various other union officials or members. Many of these statements were stridently pro-environmental for their time (for instance, in the late 1950s or early 1960s); some of them are stridently pro-environmental for any time. The union statements on environmental issues cover air pollution, water pollution, wilderness preservation, atomic radiation, and various other topics. The draft also includes examples of anti-environmental statements from union officials or members, including Anthony Boyle of the UMW, who feared restrictions on coal-mining and further erosion of the coal mining industry, and Pacific Northwestern lumberjacks who disfavored preservation of Redwoods National Park and other old-growth forest preserves. At any rate, overall, the record of union statements and actions shows a clear pattern of cooperation between labor unions and pro-environmental reformers (who only later would come to be called environmentalists) through the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a pattern of union leaders rejecting the anti-environmental arguments of representatives and lobbyists from industrial trade organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce.