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What do unions and environmental groups have to gain by working together and how do they overcome their differences? In Blue-Green Coalitions, Brian Mayer answers these questions by focusing on the role that health-related issues have played in creating a common ground between the two groups. By recognizing that the same toxics that cause workplace hazards escape into surrounding communities and the environment, workers and environmentalists are able to collaborate for the protection of all.

Mayer examines three contemporary cases of successful labor-environmental alliances to demonstrate how health and safety issues are used to create durable and politically influential social movement coalitions:

o Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, a coalition of environmental, labor, community, and public health organizations in Massachusetts that has developed a successful prevention-based approach to safe workplaces and a clean environment.

o The Work Environment Council in New Jersey, which succeeded in passing the first statewide right-to-know law and concentrates on protecting citizens from the dangerous toxics generated by the state's chemical industries.

o The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an organization that began in the 1980s fighting hazardous high-tech practices that were affecting the Valley residents and the high-tech industry's largely immigrant workforce.

In Mayer's ethnographic accounts of the challenging work of bringing these blue-green coalitions together, it becomes clear that stereotypes about environmentalists and workers are largely irrelevant when thinking about who is at risk of exposure to dangerous toxic substances. Both movements share a common concern for protecting their members' health from toxic hazards that are by-products of the modern industrial economy.

Reviews

"Thoughtful environmentalists and community activists have long expressed concern about the lack of meaningful collaboration between the labor and environmental movements. Brian Mayer has produced a noteworthy book focusing on this important connection in three successful coalitions of labor unions, environmentalists, and community activists. . . . Based on an extensive literature review and a large number of interviews with coalition participants, Mayer concludes that the use of 'bridge-brokers,' people who have legitimacy in several parts of the coalition, is critical to success. . . . One question calling for more research is whether issues other than health can bring environmentalists and labor unions together. . . . Blue-Green Coalitions gives important data and analysis to help answer this and other questions. It is worth a careful read."—Alan H. McGowan, Environment, May-June 2009

"Brian Mayer has written a thoughtful, important book about the problems and possibilities for a broad-based public health movement, although that is not quite how he characterizes his work. Blue-Green Coalitions builds on the growing literature about links between trade unions and other worker organizations with the environmental movement. Through three case studies of grassroots coalitions, Professor Mayer develops an argument that “health” is an effective cross-movement framing strategy. The political lessons he derives are important for
progressive organizers, for those concerned with environmental justice, and for those hoping for a rejuvenated labor movement. This is an intelligent and complex book, well worth careful reading."—Charles Levenstein, New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy (Vol. 19, No. 1, 2009)
"Chemical adulteration of our air, food, and water begins in somebody's workplace.  As an ecologist who grew up in a union town, I have longed for exactly this book:  a clear-headed account of the complex relationship between labor and environmentalism that is also a roadmap toward a grand, transformative collaboration."—Sandra Steingraber, author, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, written with the assistance of UAW workers.

"Brian Mayer has written a thoughtful, important book about the problems and possibilities of building a broad-based public health movement. Blue-Green Coalitions builds on the growing literature about links between trade unions and other worker organizations with the environmental movement. Through three case studies of grassroots coalitions, Mayer develops an argument that health is an effective cross-movement framing strategy. The political lessons he derives are important for progressive organizers, for those concerned with environmental justice, and for those hoping for a rejuvenated labor movement. This is an intelligent and complex book, well worth careful reading."—Charles Levenstein, University of Massachusetts Lowell

“Blue-Green Coalitions provides important insights that a wide variety of environmental coalitions and labor groups across the country can learn from. Brian Mayer provides a sophisticated analysis of labor/environmental coalitions and the reasons they succeed or fail, adapt to new political and social and economic conditions or not, and grow or stagnate. Throughout, Mayer shows that concerns about health can be the nexus around which cooperation can be encouraged and achieved. This is an important book for activists and scholars alike.”—Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor of History, John Jay College, CUNY

About the Author

Brian Mayer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Florida.

Table of Contents (.pdf)

Sociology
Natural History & Environmental Studies
Sociology of Work