The Blue and Green: Steelworkers, Sierra Club Team Up for Good Jobs, Clean Environment

by James Parks, Jun 8, 2006

The United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club have formed a “blue-green alliance” to work for good jobs and a clean environment.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, told a Washington, D.C., press conference Wednesday that blue-green alliances—partnerships of blue-collar labor unions and environmentalists—are among the most important initiatives undertaken by the environmental movement in decades:

We have reached a point in the development of a global economy where we can either use our planet’s resources for long-term sustainability or to create an ever more dangerous polarization of wealth and poverty.  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.

USW President Leo Gerard said the alliance is a natural fit:

Good jobs and a clean environment are important to American workers. We cannot have one without the other. In fact, secure 21st century jobs are those that will help solve the problem of global warming with energy efficiency and renewable energy. 

Gerard and Pope said the alliance will launch a “New Vision for America” tour to highlight the economic benefits of dealing with global warming. The tour will feature events in cities whose mayors have embraced the Climate Protection Agreement, a movement of more than 200 U.S. mayors to support the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty on global warming that the Bush administration has rejected.

The new alliance initially will focus on three issues: global warming and clean energy, fair trade and reducing toxics.  The work will begin in four states—Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio and Washington—with plans to expand into at least 10 more states in the next two years.

The alliance, which has its headquarters in Minneapolis, will be directed by David Foster, a former USW district director.

The AFL-CIO and USW, along with several affiliated unions, are members of the Apollo Alliance, a jobs-and-energy project backed by union, environmental, business and political leaders.  The alliance seeks to create approximately 3.3 million skilled jobs with a $300 billion, 10-year public investment in sustainable energy such as hydrogen fuel systems and related transportation, construction and manufacturing.

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