Labor Union Environmentalism in the United States, 1948-1970

What is it about?

Since the 1980s of Ronald Reagan, it has been widely assumed that working people and labor union members must necessarily be enemies of environmentalists. This assumption was wrong. Labor union members and officials frequently went out of their way to support environmental causes throughout the 1950s and 1960s, long before there was anything called the environmental movement or environmentalism (terms that only started to gain their modern meanings during the mid- to late 1960s). Unions supported both traditional wilderness and wildlife preservation and newer activism against environmental pollution that threatened human health; the latter of these would be the main driving force behind the new environmental movement that emerged so visibly by the first Earth Day in 1970. The union-environmental alliance persisted into the 1970s, when weakening economic conditions in the United States, along with a drumbeat of corporate-industrial anti-environmental rhetoric, drove a wedge between the former allies.

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Why is it important?

The myth that workers and environmentalists must be enemies is a dangerous and unfortunate myth that has been cultivated and used, systematically and deliberately, to help support the faux-humanism of post-1970s neoliberalism with its corporate oligarchy and plutocracy: the good, kind, wise, democratic and human-interested neoliberal oligarchs will help protect the working people against the wicked environmentalists who wish to take away jobs and economic opportunity. This transparently silly but well-entrenched myth has been used successfully to help delay meaningful action on global climate change for more than thirty years by now (2016), among other obfuscations and delays designed to serve corporate interests. This toxic myth should have been laid to rest long ago. The example of sustained early labor-environmentalist cooperation helps to do so by challenging the myth's aura of inevitability.