Going Green? Historicizing UAW's Labor Environmentalism in the US Energy Transition

Carrie Hamilton, University of California, Santa Cruz

The birth of the modern US environmental movement in the mid-20th century benefited enormously from the support of organized labor. At the time, mounting efforts to quell pollution plaguing urban communities met parallel efforts to address environmental ills in mines, fields, and factories. The United Auto Workers (UAW) was an early leader in labor environmentalism and by the 1970s boasted a decades-long track of combatting pollution. However, historical accounts pinpoint 1977 as a regressive turning point for the union’s environmental politics. After backing stringent air emissions standards in 1970 and fuel economy standards in 1975, UAW changed course and sided with industry to support emissions standard delays in 1977. How and why did UAW seemingly abandon its decades-long labor environmentalism? This backtracking is often attributed to changing union leadership (away from Walter Reuther’s environmentalism) that left it more vulnerable to environmental blackmail. Historians have more broadly documented the increasingly defensive stances adopted by environmental and labor organizations alike amid the 1970s turbulence of oil embargo and recession. As I will argue, the socio-spatial restructuring that accompanied energy and economic crises shifted auto’s environmental-labor organizing terrain, but UAW actively contested the fracturing of environmental-labor relations throughout the decade. Using a joint computational-interpretive analysis of congressional speeches and union archival materials, I situate the environmental moves of UAW within political economic and geopolitical context; trace their concrete policy, industry, and organizing outcomes; and assess the implications for later environmental-labor configurations. I will show that UAW–in coalition with labor and environmental groups–pursued alternative legislative and organizing strategies that, had they been successful, might have yielded different environmental-labor outcomes in 1977 and beyond. I will connect these earlier environmental-labor reconfigurations to the contemporary environmental visions and strategies of UAW and consider the historical lessons lent to just transition organizing today.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 115. Labor and Environment