By Steven Greenhouse, June 8, 2006
The nation’s largest manufacturing union, the United Steelworkers of America, and the nation’s largest environmental group, the Sierra Club, yesterday announced the formation of an alliance that will do something that labor and environmentalists rarely do: cooperate.
After decades of fighting between blue-collar unions and green activists, the steelworkers and the Sierra Club say they will use the alliance to battle for energy independence and against global warming and toxic pollutants.
A central goal of the partnership, called the Blue/Green Alliance, will be to reassure workers that measures to improve the environment need not jeopardize jobs.
"We’re going to work together to try to blow up the myth that you can’t have a clean environment and good green jobs," said Leo Gerard, the president of the steelworkers union, which has 850,000 members.
With unions and environmentalists often fighting Republican initiatives, the steelworkers and the Sierra Club say the alliance should help increase their impact on Capitol Hill and in many communities, although the alliance will not be directly involved in electoral politics.
The two groups also hope that in November’s elections the alliance will help to highlight their issues, including global warming and the loss of manufacturing jobs to countries with lower environmental and labor standards.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, which has 750,000 members, said, "Our new alliance allows us to address the great challenge of the global economy in the 21st century – how to provide good jobs, a clean environment and a safer world."
At a news conference yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, the two groups said they would push for stronger environmental and worker protections in trade agreements and for ratification of the Kyoto Treaty to limit greenhouse gases that scientists say contribute to global warming.
The Blue/Green Alliance will also push for higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, saying the higher standards would help the environment as well as American automobile manufacturers. Another powerful union, the United Automobile Workers, has often fought tougher standards.
"The companies that embrace the soundest environmental principles, that move to alternative and renewable forms of energy, those will be the companies that survive," said David Foster, the executive director of the alliance and the steelworkers’ regional director for the Northwest. "We’re seeing a lot of that played out in the auto industry today."
Within the labor movement, the steelworkers union has long been a leader in cooperating with environmentalists. It pushed hard for the Clean Air Act of 1970 and for stricter air pollution standards for the coke ovens used at steel mills.
But unions and environmentalists have often been at loggerheads. The Teamsters union has vigorously backed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an idea that environmentalists oppose. Environmentalists strongly back the Kyoto climate treaty, but some unions, particularly the mine workers and utility workers, dislike that accord.
Mr. Gerard and Mr. Pope plan a national tour to talk at town hall meetings and colleges about two main concerns: economic equity and environmental sustainability. They say they will work closely with 200 mayors who have vowed to take action supporting the Kyoto treaty.
Mr. Foster said they hope to reach new audiences. For instance, college students who might not be interested in listening to a steelworkers’ official might be willing to do so if that official appears alongside an environmentalist leader.
"Unions have become so isolated in the country today and have become so narrowly typecast by many Americans that we don’t have the outreach to talk to a lot of people," Mr. Foster said. "Environmentalists are often seen as too elitist to have an audience with working-class Americans. By creating this new vehicle, we hope to be able to talk to a lot of people who wouldn’t usually talk to environmental advocates or labor unions."
The two groups want to help build a new progressive coalition that will capitalize on the Sierra Club’s intellectual base and geographic reach and on the steelworkers’ base in blue-collar America and the Midwest, including several swing states.
The Sierra Club and the steelworkers support a proposal, known as the Apollo Project, that aims to spur the economy and create jobs by investing $300 billion to create more energy-efficient office buildings, manufacturing techniques and modes of transportation.
"Secure 21st-century jobs are those that will help solve the problem of global warming with energy efficiency and renewable energy," Mr. Gerard said.
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