The Blue-Green Alliance

Environmentalists have been stereotyped as overeducated upper middle class white people. When it comes to the bigger enviro organizations, the stereotype has not been far off the mark. But the brutal fact is that working people, people of color and poor people suffer disproportionately from pollution, chemical contamination in the workplace and the neighborhood, and toxic waste. We may hear nothing but casino casino, but the favorite dump sites for toxics are Indian reservations. Locate a Wal-Mart, and there is likely to be a toxic site nearby. This is apart from the general effect of pollution and the Climate Crisis on all of us.

Big Business, especially in extractive industries like timber and mining, have successfully turned blue collar workers against environmentalists, even though they have more common cause than reasons for emnity. Big Labor, otherwise casting a jaudiced eye on anything Big Business is for, have often cooperated in this illusory and counterproductive stance.

That's been changing slowly for some time, and today marks a watershed event in that change: the announcement of common cause made by the United Steelworkers of America and the Sierra Club, the biggest organizations (symbolically and actually) in their respective fields.

The New York Times says: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 jobs," said Leo Gerard, the president of the steelworkers union, which has 850,000 members.

In terms of the Climate Crisis, both organizations support the Apollo Alliance, which itself has brought together labor, industry and environmentalists, to promote new energy technologies and other technologies that will simultaenously respond to the Climate Crisis and other environmental challenges, while seeding the equivalent of a new industrial revolution in the U.S.

"Secure 21st-century jobs are those that will help solve the problem of global warming with energy efficiency and renewable energy," Mr. Gerard said.