The Sierra Club and United Steelworkers - Together we stand for Green Labour!

The Sierra Club and United Steelworkers - Together we stand for Green Labour!

9th August 2006

The union of the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers may be pushing the environmental movement out of the middle class ghetto and into the world of the blue-collar worker

Blair Coursey, CSR Wire July 29 2006

There was a fair amount of media buzz in June when the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers formally announced the formation of the Blue-Green Alliance.

The partnership aims to create new, safer jobs for union workers and will use its budget for legislative lobbying on both labour and environmental issues.

The media attention may have been warranted; it’s not often that a trade union and a grassroots environmental organisation team up with the motto: “Good jobs, a clean environment, and a safer world.”

AdvertisementThat’s quite a to-do list for two groups often traditionally at odds with each other.

In the past, Unions have accused environmentalists of trying to stymie job creation, while green groups complain union self interest is far too narrow and self serving.

The initiative, in its beginnings, is concentrated in four US states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington.

In these locations, renewable energy standards will be promoted among other topics of concern. The Alliance is hoping the states involved will commit to clean car laws, for example.

The Sierra Club, being an environmental organisation, obviously favours such an agenda.

While USW’s investment in environmental cause may be a tad less publicly apparent, it lies in conjunction with the Sierra Club’s interests.

According to Dave Foster, the first executive director of the Blue/Green Alliance, USW and the Sierra Club have had an ongoing relationship for quite some time, but strengthened their bond after the 2004 US elections and through a common interest in trade issues such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Foster said that globalisation has forced organisations like USW to reassess they way they view the world.

Big manufacturing companies are now realising they are no longer contending in a US-limited labour market - and that they must adapt and be flexible to environmental laws abroad.

While the impact of globalisation is putting pressure on companies to pay closer attention to environmental issues in order to maintain their ‘licence to operate’, Foster insists that a trade union’s environmental agenda isn’t necessarily an attempt to increase unionised company profits abroad.

The most successful companies nowadays, Foster says, are the companies that take environmental expectations seriously.

“The companies that resist environmental clean-up are the first companies to relocate out of the US, or they simply fail on all counts and go out of business,” he claims.

An especially important issue within the labour industry is employee safety, and according to Foster, good safety practices hand in hand with clean environmental practice.

While some organisations are still fighting to drill for oil in northeastern Alaska, USW opposes the plan. It asserts that the environmental movement is creating, not eliminating, jobs in the labour industry.

Andrew Winston, director of the corporate environmental strategy project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, says that some estimates place future clean technology jobs in the trillions.

According to Winston, relationships like that between the Sierra Club and USW are becoming increasingly common because environmentally sound business practice is a growing competitive advantage point for companies.

Contrary to popular belief, Americans are beginning to purchase more eco-friendly products, notes Winson.

But he adds that the buying trend may have something to do with the increase in availability of green products, and is not necessarily a sign that Americans have become especially eco-savvy.

Home jobs count more

But research presented at the National Marketing Institute’s LOHAS 10 Conference states that while 49% of US adults say that they care about environmentally responsible business, 68% of US adults say that they would like to learn more about what companies are doing to keep jobs in the US.

Keeping jobs in the US means less outsourcing to countries where people and the environment can be taken advantage of in order to turn a large profit, but it also seems to be a more simple concern about the average worker.

David Willett of the Sierra Club says that the ironic truth of blue-collar environmentalism is that a worker who is living paycheck to paycheck probably doesn’t have the means to fret about the state of the environment, but has highest chance of being impacted by it negatively.

“In the US, it is becoming clear that the people who are most likely to be exposed to environmental health risks also happen to be in the lower income earning bracket,” he told Ethical Corporation.

The Blue-Green Alliance has been called “historic” – assumingly because the bond between USW and the Sierra Club appears relatively solid at the moment.

In exchange for USW’s support of cleaner labour practices – which helps USW represented workers in the long run anyway, according to the union – the Sierra Club has agreed to back better worker’s rights agendas.

It’s impossible to know how deeply a single USW-represented worker cares about renewable energy, or how much the average Sierra Club member really considers trade unions.

But the Blue-Green Alliance, created by two big players , may well over time broaden the notion of what defines an environmentalist - and a unionist.

Write to Blair Coursey, North America writer at blaireileen@gmail.com, or write to the Editor at editor@ethicalcorp.com.