When do labor-environmental coalitions emerge and endure? In a period when headlines are dominated by economic recession, unemployment, and oil spills, the focus of Brian Mayer's book takes on practical urgency. The question is theoretically intriguing as well. Labor unions are often characterized as archetypical interest-based organizations, representing industrial workers' concerns for their own material well-being. Environmental mobilization, in contrast, is seen as a quality-of-life movement most commonly associated with members of the postindustrial middle class who possess leisure time and resources sufficient to enable their activism. When the question of how to regulate industries that employ toxic chemicals arises, these two groups can become locked in an acrimonious jobs versus the environment debate, making them more likely antagonists than allies. This sense of latent opposition is captured by one worker's assertion that greens want to “save the whales and kill the workers” (p. 2). How can these divisions be overcome? In his clearly written and compelling book, Blue–Green Coalitions, Mayer argues that concern over the effects of hazardous materials on human health offers one avenue for generating powerful and enduring coalitions.
Mayer offers the reader rich, engrossing case studies of three blue–green coalitions—the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow (AHT) in Massachusetts, the Work Environmental Council (WEC) of New Jersey, and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) of northern California—examining how they evolved and chronicling their successes and failures. The case studies are preceded and contextualized by a chapter on the “forgotten history of collaboration” between the movements from the Progressive Era of the early-twentieth century to the present. The cases are followed by an explicitly comparative chapter that brings together the empirical material on the coalitions and current hypotheses in social movement theory. A concluding chapter focuses on U.S. Steelworkers' attention to environmental issues as a possible model for the future.
Mayer differentiates his book from past work on blue–green alliances by drawing our attention to frame bridging and collective identity building as the key factors behind successful coalitions, factors that he convincingly contends too often have been used as residual categories in past scholarship. The three blue–green coalitions he examines were formed at different times, possess somewhat different goals, and experienced different levels of success. What they share, he argues, is a process of identity construction in which the issue of health is made central and “used to overcome ideological differences and past stereotypes” (p. 164). Successful frame bridging between the movements requires key activists, or “bridge brokers,” to make the connection between occupational and environmental health. Coalition members find solidarity in their shared risk, recognizing that workers are the first to be exposed to toxic substances that then negatively affect local communities.
In my opinion, the case that Mayer uses most effectively to illuminate the development of blue–green coalitions is the New Jersey WEC, which grew out of a successful campaign in the 1980s to pass “right-to-know” legislation forcing manufacturers to reveal their use of toxics. The author illustrates the importance of framing and identity building by recounting evidence of more and less successful initiatives, such as the contrast between the right-to-know and right-to-act campaigns, and by showing the limits of frame bridging under certain conditions, such as the WEC's nonparticipation in an environmental justice fight due in part to the ambivalence of labor.
Although the WEC exemplifies the successful adaptation of a blue–green coalition, I found the ambiguous outcomes of the SVTC case most thought provoking in demonstrating how declining levels of unionization and the globalization of production might affect future coalitions. Challenging polluters in the high-tech industry, the SVTC attempted to mobilize workers who were predominantly nonunionized, female, and often recent immigrants. Adopting slogans such as “ban toxics, not workers,” the SVTC achieved some success, but the blue–green alliance foundered as the group adapted to the outsourcing of high-tech manufacturing and global dispersal of polluting sites. The SVTC has become a leader in the global environmental justice movement, but its local coalition has lapsed due to “a significant mission shift that broadened the scope of the organization but limited the potential rewards for labor” (p. 136). As Mayer recognizes, the SVTC's dissolution is not a failure per se; rather, it is an example of strategic adaptation that seems to presage limits to coalition building given changing conditions in production.
The detailed case studies meticulously assembled by the author raise a number of interesting questions related to the book's theoretical framework, in particular the use of collective identity, framing, and political opportunity structure. Collective identity is a contested concept in the social movement literature, and Mayer's work has great potential to contribute to it, but it could have been more fully specified. Are the blue–green identities adopted by coalitions based on self-interest or shared values or both? Is the coalition identity held primarily at the leadership level, or does the rank and file equally adopt this new self-definition? The difficulty of transcending familiar identities, such as “worker” and “environmentalist,” is illustrated by the lack of a clear name—concerned community member? health advocate?—for the new identity.
In addition, frames and identity seem to overlap frequently in the analysis. For example, Mayer writes of the WEC's shift from the right-to-know to the right-to-act campaign: “Coalition members eagerly supported the expansion of their earlier success, and the new frame became the new rallying point. Despite the relative ease in building the new identity atop the right-to-know frame, coalition actors did realize that selling the right to act to state representatives would be a greater challenge” (p. 109). Disentangling identity and framing would clarify their mutually constitutive relationship. The quotation also suggests that there is a distinction between internal and external framing, or the slogans and tactics that can be effective in building and maintaining a coalition and rhetoric used to sway external audiences, a topic not developed in the analysis.
Mayer persuasively claims that political opportunities are necessary but not sufficient for coalitions to emerge, and that the political context and framing interact to shape coalitions. However, the reader—especially a comparative political scientist—could benefit from more systematic treatment of the ways that political opportunities shape the coalitions' effectiveness. For example, the Massachusetts-based AHT, adopting the slogan “preventing harm, not progress” (p. 80), advocated an alternative regulatory framework for hazardous chemicals. The AHT appeared to have a favorable political environment with a state house dominated by Democrats. However, Mayer suggests that the AHT faces “a fairly limited political environment” in part because “there is a strongly party-based system in the government of Massachusetts that limits access to the system” (p. 166). How exactly do strong parties constrain a coalition? Is a weak party environment generally more amenable? For the SVTC, the state government in California is characterized as an opponent (p. 168), but the evidence seems to suggest that the state was not an actor opposed to SVTC but, instead, presented an unfavorable political opportunity structure due to the governor's party affiliation and influential high-tech lobbyists.
Ultimately, conclusions about the role of political opportunities may be a bit hard to tease out because the relative differences in the political environment across the coalitions are fairly small, as Mayer acknowledges in his methodological postscript (p. 215). A more minor point is that although he adopts an “integrative approach,” the role of resources in coalition dynamics is neglected despite that fact that “a joint pool of resources” features prominently in the definition of a coalition. We are introduced to the hypothesis that labor and environmentalists may be more willing to join coalitions when resources are scarce (pp. 14, 29), but ultimately it appears as though organizations require surplus resources to participate in a coalition (p. 171). In the end, whether and how shared resources shape coalitions remain somewhat unclear.
These are relatively small complaints in a book that is filled with provocative ideas that Mayer and other scholars are likely to explore in later works. Readers will learn a great deal from the author's innovative claims about such issues as the stages of coalition development, coalitions as avenues of social movement spillover, and organizational learning among coalition members.
As we engage in a national debate about green-collar jobs of the future, are we likely to see these blue–green coalitions continue to emerge? Ultimately, Mayer demonstrates that these coalitions rise and fall on the interests of labor. In the past, labor provided the most important “bridge brokers,” and state-level Committees on Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) served as institutional loci for early coalitions. American workers face numerous pressures, however. No matter how carefully the issue of environmental regulation is framed, union members frequently face job blackmail, or threats to move manufacturing elsewhere. The increasing globalization of manufacturing also challenges the inherently local character of these coalitions, dependent as they are on face-to-face contact to overcome stereotypes and build trust. In addition, the current level of unionization in the U.S. workforce was just over 12% in 2009, down from 20% in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and COSHes are in decline (p. 88).
The author concludes on an optimistic note, suggesting that labor has been most effective when it embraced progressive coalition partners (pp. 195–96) and that workers have the potential to initiate powerful blue–green coalitions. Whether or not the reader shares this optimism, Mayer's work is a welcome contribution to scholarship on social movements and to our understanding of contemporary labor and environmental mobilization.
