Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground(Urban and Industrial Environments)

Relations between organised labor and environmental groups are typically characterised as adversarial, most often because of the spectre of job loss invoked by industries facing environmental regulation. But, as Brian Obach shows, the two largest and most powerful social movements in the United States actually share a great deal of common ground. Unions and environmentalists have worked together on a number of issues, including workplace health and safety, environmental restoration and globalisation (as in the surprising solidarity of "Teamsters and Turtles" in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle). Labor and the Environmental Movement examines why, when, and how labor unions and environmental organisations either co-operate or come into conflict. By exploring the interorganisational dynamics that are crucial to co-operative efforts and presenting detailed studies of labor-environmental group coalition building from around the country (examining in detail examples from Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin), it provides insight into how these movements can be brought together to promote a just and sustainable society. Obach gives a brief history of relations between organised labor and environmental groups in the United States, explores how organisational learning can increase organisations' ability to work with others and examines the crucial role played by "coalition brokers" who maintain links to both movements. He challenges research that attempts to explain inter-movement conflict on the basis of cultural distinctions between blue-collar workers and middle-class environmentalists, providing evidence of legal and structural constraints that better explain the organisational differences class-culture and new-social-movement theorists identify. The final chapter includes a model of the crucial determinants of co-operation and conflict that can serve as the basis for further study of inter-movement relations.

About the Author :
Brian K. Obach is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and the author of Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground (MIT Press).

Review :
"An original and insightful examination of the ways in which government structures and the imperatives of organizational maintenance combine to shape the political behavior of social movement organizations. Obach has provided an important contribution to the social movement literature."--Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Graduate Center, City University of New York "Brian Obach has given us a well-written, insightful, and balanced examination of the complex relationship between the labor and environmental movements in the United States. It should be required reading for all those who believe that forging a bridge between these two groups would create a potent force for progressive social and political change." John J. Sweeney, President, AFL-CIO