Few recent political movements have been as striking or as important as the coalitions that have brought environmentalists, solidarity activists, and trade unionists to protest corporate-oriented globalization. Seattle's turmoil in 1999, most notably, brought this coalition to international awareness, but the alliance itself remains little understood. While the main organizations involved in this movement have had a continuing impact on politics around the world, few have sought to explain how trade unions on the global level came to cooperate with these other groups and, moreover, to understand on just what basis they are able to work in alliance.²

This article examines the evolution of international trade unionists' thinking about nature and the environment in order to understand this new movement. It seeks ultimately to shed light on a series of interrelated questions. How strong is this coalition? Is it based on something more than opposition to a common enemy of free trade regimes, structural adjustment, and privatization? Are the constituents, ideas, and thinking of the movements too disparate to maintain the coalition for long? Or, on the other hand, do the members of the alliance have ideologies and political needs that have allowed them to overcome their conflicting interests, history of distrust, and their contrasting class, ethnic, and national make-up?

Rather than originating simply in a popular front against a common enemy, the labor-environmentalist alliance came about, in part, from a dual process of intellectual change and political experience. Labor thinking about the environment today grows from a profound, if halting, reorientation in trade union ideology about human beings' place in the natural world. At the same time, environmentalists within labor movements have been engaged in an essentially political process, one that involves compromise and modification of their ideas and programs, especially as they became increasingly involved in international institutions like the UN. The end result of these two intertwined evolutions has been the development of a labor version of sustainable development around which trade unionists in many countries are organizing their environmental activities.

The growth of labor environmentalism can be seen though the history of trade union activists in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Green actions by unions in particular nations are now the subject of a growing and important field of study (and practice), but almost no historical attention has been devoted to considering them in an international context. This absence may be due to the fact that the ICFTU seems an unlikely site for ecological innovation. The main purposes of the ICFTU and its allied organizations of specific industries, the International Trade Secretariats (ITS—now called Global Union Federations), have been to coordinate international acts of solidarity (e.g., boycotts and aid to struggling unions), to create a labor presence in international institutions, and to demand consistent international standards for workers. The Confederation originated in the early years of the Cold War as an anticommunist organization that joined liberal and Social Democratic national trade union centers from around the world. It sought to counter the appeal of Communist unions at the same time as it pushed labor interests against unbridled capitalism in the West. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of its main competitor, the more red World Federation of Trade Unions, the ICFTU moved farther to left. Although grand in conception and ideology, the ICFTU has little power in practice. Riven by internal ideological disputes for much of its history, the organization has had few accomplishments other than through lobbying and the distribution of information. Its most notable success came though the Confederation's coordination of the boycott against South African apartheid.³

While it came only slowly to adopt a green position, the Confederation has lobbied for labor's position on environmental issues in international conferences and meetings, in the tripartite International Labor Organization, and in the UN for more than thirty years.

Within the world of international environmental policy making, “Sustainable Development” has become the key organizing idea, a principle the labor movement has taken to heart. Popularized by the 1987 report of a UN Committee headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, sustainable development was defined as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”⁴

A series of international meetings from the 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on the Environment, culminating in the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, committed governments and international institutions to sustainability as a whole set of interrelated concepts and program. The Earth Summit established the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) to coordinate and further articulate efforts to achieve this goal. But the governments and environmentalists behind this diplomacy did not readily consider labor interests in creating their international instruments.

In response, the trade unions have pushed the international “community” since the early 1970s to integrate the “social pillar,” a consideration of basic social democratic principles, into its definition of sustainable development. While the early years were frustrating—the 1972 Stockholm environmental meeting, for instance, was long on rhetoric but short on substantive commitments—the evolution of sustainable development as a policy goal allowed an opening for labor. The ICFTU has been remarkably successful in its push to include labor concerns at the CSD and subsequent summit meetings such as the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. Agenda 21, the declaration of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, included section twenty-nine, “Strengthening The Role Of Workers And Their Trade Unions,” which recognized labor as a “major group,” giving the unions the ability to participate in formal discussion sessions. “Workers should be full participants in the implementation and evaluation of activities related to Agenda 21,” the meeting declared.⁵

According to the ICFTU's General Secretary at the time, this wording was “drafted by a small group of trade union health, safety, and environment specialists” and reflected “the general principles long campaigned for by free trade unions in the field of health, safety, and environment.”⁶ Despite this general agreement sustainable development is hardly a simple, obvious concept and the debates over what it means and how to create it have forced the unions to become clearer about their own position. It has not been an easy process to define just what labor wants from environmentally sustainable development. As Canadian trade unionist Winston Gereluk, one of that “small group” of labor environmental policy developers told me: “We are pushing the envelope with the UN and the CSD; the trade unions are behind us—but not strongly.”⁷

The evolution of ICFTU environmental policy from the 1960s to the present reveals a fundamental change in how trade unionists in many different countries view the natural world. In keeping with labor's basic purpose and ideology, trade unionists had long thought of the natural world as a place they could not enjoy because of their exclusion from forms of bourgeois leisure or as a site for resources that could enrich their members. These conceptions remained largely consistent until the later 1960s. Production, organization, and planning found strong support, but ecological harmony or even a hint of the later logic of sustainability were distinctly lacking. For instance, in 1965 the ICFTU/International Federation of Building and Woodworkers International Housing Committee, which just a few years later pioneered labor's environmentalist thinking, resolved “that the supreme purpose of all economic development and progress is to meet the basic human social needs of man and that therefore all genuine social needs . . . must find primary consideration in all plans for economic development, both in industrial and in developing countries.”⁸

The Housing Committee advanced a reasonable goal, to be sure, but hardly one recognizing the importance of ecological balance.

Given the unions' instrumental conceptions of nature, fears about loss of employment due to environmental regulation, and political divisions within the movement, how did international labor come to accept—if not embrace—environmentalism and to begin to reorient its stance on nature? In other words, what are the origins of labor ideas of sustainable development?

Most labor environmental activists today come from the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) side of the movement (of which, more below). Yet early ICFTU efforts to grapple with environmental issues did not originate from OHS concerns. Indeed, there was no discussion of the environment in the ICFTU's health and safety committees until the 1980s. Nuclear issues provide a key example. The ICFTU and its European Regional Organization (ERO), for instance, were deeply concerned with atomic energy in the 1950s and 1960s. They devoted extensive resources and time to promoting nuclear power as the solution to Europe's energy needs and to developing standards for protecting workers in the nuclear industry in cooperation with the International Labor Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet the only discussions in their meetings about dangers centered on the problem of radiation exposure for workers.⁹

While in the days before the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters such acceptance was more common than today, it is striking that environmental problems from uranium mining, or waste disposal—let alone disasters—were not a matter for discussion. This was in part a result of divisions within the ICFTU and the International Metalworkers Federation between pro- and anti-nuclear unions, but it also reflected a more general trend about environmental problems.

The ICFTU/European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) Committee on Atomic Energy continued to avoid discussing the environmental hazards of nuclear energy production for decades. (Of course, in this failing the unions were a typical international institution: the United Nations did not discuss pollution until 1968.¹⁰

) In its first major statement on environmental issues in 1971, “Free Trade Unions and the Challenge of the Human Environment,” the ICFTU made no mention of nuclear power.¹¹ Finally in 1986, that is after militant anti-nuclear activists had protested for more than a decade and a Soviet reactor at Chernobyl melted down in one of the worst disasters in human history, Occupational Health and Safety Working Party members began to talk openly about the larger problems of nuclear power. Even then, they disparaged opponents of nuclear power as people on “a moral crusade” who see “nuclear power or almost anything tampering with radioactivity as evil.” In contrast, were those (presumably at the ICFTU) who “see it as simply a potentially dangerous technology that is insufficiently understood.”¹² Clearly, the ICFTU and its constituents remained “sharply divided about the future role which nuclear energy should play.” As a result, the organization and could only recommend “stronger international regulation” in order to increase “control of risks to health, safety, and the environment”—hardly a powerful environmentalist response.¹³ The European Trade Union Confederation, which started as the ICFTU European Regional Organization, took a similar, but disingenuous stance. Although they had never protested nuclear power previously they complained “energy research has been focused deliberately on nuclear energy but neither workers nor the public have been consulted on this choice.”¹⁴ Initial ICFTU efforts to deal with environmental issues were intermittent and not fully thought through, perhaps because the political pressures of greens, militant environmentalists, and development problems were not yet clear themselves.

Instead of beginning with a concern for occupational health, ICFTU environmentalism actually arose from a labor commitment to community and society as a whole. A joint International Housing Committee of the ICFTU and the International Federation of Building and Woodworkers (IFBWW) provided the Confederation with its first focused documents on environmental problems.¹⁵

The Committee's secretary, Heinz Umrath of the Dutch trade union federation, wrote important position papers on the environment, though their arguments were not as clearly articulated as later ideas. Indeed, the reason that the Housing Committee rather than the Atomic Energy Committee or a specially convened environmental working group dealt with the issue had much to do with internal institutional limitations—how many staff were available, for instance—as with distrust on the part of member federations about environmental policies. But more important for this discussion, the choice of the Housing Committee reflected a central conception about the environment, one that played a significant part in the development of later ideas.

The Housing Committee dealt with the environment because its charge was to protect workers' community interests. Umrath emphasized the social aspect of trade union concern over the environment—a theme that in later years became very important. Still the Housing Committee itself did not come to environmentalism early in its development. The Committee had originally been part of the European Regional Organization of the ICFTU in the 1950s where it concentrated on problems involved in rebuilding the war torn continent.¹⁶

It emphasized a social democratic idea of “social housing” which could mean different things in different countries, but in all meant that markets alone could not be relied on to provide housing at reasonable prices. By 1968, the Committee and Umrath had left the ERO and were working with the larger ICFTU, conducting surveys, and writing well received analysis of housing issues. It was in 1968, the year of the barricades, that the Committee records first mention the words “environment” and “pollution,” though these are mentioned almost in passing as problems caused by unplanned development of cities.¹⁷ The Committee had just the previous year, however, referred to “financing housing and its environment” in a paper, clearly referring to the immediate surroundings of housing developments.¹⁸ The Housing Committee may have seemed the proper place to discuss the environment—beyond the grounds of apartment complexes—because the UN itself discussed such issues in its Division of Environment and Housing at least since 1969. By 1970 when the UN began full time planning for the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment, Umrath was well aware of the need to provide a trade union perspective on environmental issues. He wrote to Heribert Maier, who then headed the ICFTU Economic and Social Department: “This will become a hot issue! I suggest we discuss it soon.”¹⁹ They must have, for the trade unions participated actively in the Stockholm conference and began to articulate their particular form of environmentalism—one that stressed the social as equal to the natural.²⁰

One of the key ideas in early literature produced by Umrath and the Housing Committee expressed the dangers of pollution and unplanned growth for the “human environment,” (a term borrowed in late 1960s and early 1970s from environmentalists and later adopted by the UN). For the unions, the human environment was the whole of the workplace and the job. By doing their environmental work through the Housing Committee the unions were making—intentional or not—a connection between the home and the environment. The term links exposure to toxics on the job, pollutants' effects on families and communities with the destruction of the environment for production. “Human environment” provided the linkage between more traditional union concerns and the needs of ecological crises. Yet by emphasizing “human” in their definition, they signaled their concern with people's lives as the central issue of green politics—not preservation of animal, plant, or other ‘natural features.' In a 1967 report the Housing Committee warned that “air and water pollution add a new dimension to this question” of improving substandard housing. They wrote of an “urgent need of improving the residential environment” as people become more prosperous. Greater industrial and housing development in the current system means sacrifice of the environment; “ALL countries will suffer from the paradox.”²¹

By placing the human as part of the ecological system, the ICFTU staff and then the Confederation's Congress began to equate human beings with nature. It was not simply a paradox or unfortunate byproduct that the workers of the world would suffer along with nature. For the problems of the “total human environment,” i.e., the workplace, the home, communities, and larger systems, flow from two interrelated sources according to Umrath and his comrades:

In one 1971 article in Free Labour World, ICFTU official (later General Secretary) Enzo Friso critiqued “consumer society” as equally destructive of people and the environment. Incorporating what sounds like Herbert Marcuse's then popular analysis of one-dimensionality, Friso descried the alienating quality of industrial labor. Making a parallel between the use of human beings and the technological transformation of nature, he wrote: “The worker is more and more subordinate to the machine and to technological requirements.”²³

This idea reappears in later discussions equating workers with the environment. For instance, in its “Statement on the Human Environment,” the 1972 ICFTU Congress held that the Stockholm Conference, although a practical failure, had “focused world public opinion on the dangerous consequences of the unrestricted exploitation of modern technology.” What were these consequences? Among others the Congress complained of: “physical mental and social effects of stresses created by living and working conditions, notably of various kinds of pollution, which are primarily hazards of manpower in industry, but which later emerge as pollution in the external environment.”²⁴

If workers are placed in the same danger as nature, then industrial societies become increasingly problematic. In reporting on the ICFTU's activities in 1972, the new General Secretary, Otto Kersten, argued that “Right from the early days of the industrial revolution the trade unions have been fighting against the desecration of our living space for the purposes of private profit: against the kind of horror which the English poet William Blake, more than 150 years ago, symbolized as ‘these dark satanic mills.'”²⁵

That is, the workers' struggle is the same as that of the rest of society and of nature. Indeed, Georges Debunne, of the Belgian Fédération Générale des Travailleurs (FGTB), introduced the environment agenda item at the 1972 ICFTU Congress by agreeing with Kersten that labor's environmental concern was “not a new problem for trade unions. Since their beginnings they have fought for a better quality of life for workers in mines, factories, and workers' communities.” But he made an even more radical point: “it is a problem of the relationship between man and nature, of the future industry and therefore of the general organization of society. In fact, this could lead to a reconsideration of forms of industrial development and the distribution of resources from which a new humanism could emerge.”²⁶

The early international labor environmentalists further emphasized the connection between problems in the workplace and what would later be called unsustainable development. In a statement to the Stockholm UN Conference authored by Umrath's committee, the ICFTU explained, “it is within the working environment that conditions arise which later have repercussion on the external environment.” Bad workplace conditions first hurt workers then move outward to the community and to nature: “this applies to various kinds of pollution, which are primarily hazards for manpower working in industry, but which later emerge as pollution in the external environment.” But equally important, the ICFTU wanted the UN to consider the nature of alienated labor because the “psychological conditions created in industry as a result of the rigid organisation of work and production” have the “consequence that work no longer has a meaningful content and which also have secondary repercussions on the health and well being of citizens.”²⁷

In other words, exploitative alienated labor, the basic form of Fordist industrial production is equally dangerous to health, psychology, and ecology. That these thinkers believed the problem facing workers and the environment was the same does not necessarily mean that they also believed workers and nature were the same. Nonetheless, their ideas were moving toward a synthesis that was revealed in the solutions they proposed to the problems of exploitation, alienation, and pollution.

While worker-oriented sustainable development and the problems of unsustainable production and consumption were not yet used as organizing concepts, the ICFTU was already grappling with how to accomplish such a balanced policy. Some unionists pushed for a fairly radical understanding of environmental problems. Dennis Edwards of the Miners' International Federation, for instance, argued: “the present crisis is indeed a forceful reminder of the antisocial and environmentally catastrophic effects inherent to policies of limitless economic growth and indiscriminate technological development.”²⁸

On the whole though, the trade unionists did not oppose growth per se, but rather its “undesirable and undesired consequences,” as Umrath put it. Following the social-democratic model of the era, the ICFTU asked the Stockholm conference to develop ways to encourage “methods and techniques of national and regional policies of industrial decentralisation and to encourage the establishment of machinery to implement regional development policies.” They advocated “the most careful planning of human settlements and production facilities and efficient management of natural resources” while calling for “a permanent and regular flow of capital for social and collective investments.” The purpose of this investment, the Housing Committee argued, is “the satisfaction of basic needs, including a decent environment, of all human beings.” Social development was an equal to economic growth and ecological balance: “the long-term task must be to find a balance between growth and the establishment of an optimum environment taking into account a just distribution of costs and benefits between and within nations.” To accomplish this noble goal, “certain NGOs [i.e., the trade unions] should participate on an equal footing with governments' representatives similar to the long-established practice at the ILO.”²⁹ Kersten similarly explained the basic understanding of the unions: “We, free trade unionists, have a very big part to play in this campaign, not only to see that due attention is given to the protection of the living and working environment, but also to ensure that conservation is not used as a pretext to hold up economic growth and social progress, especially in developing countries.”³⁰

While the principle of balancing environmental health, economic growth, and social progress was simple to articulate for the trade unionists, the details of achieving this balance were not. Maier warned Umrath that his ideas were “far too general and too vague.” He wanted the Housing Committee chair to make “more precise claims and guidelines” to bring “more attention” to the unions' key issue, “improvement of the working environment as a major element for a better general environment.”³¹

The difficulty the unions faced was underlined by the resistance of most governments to including “favorable working environment” in the conference report, a phrase suggested by as a moderate a force as the tripartite International Labor Organization.³²

The unions spelled out more specific needs in “Free Trade Unions and the Human Environment,” the paper presented to the Stockholm Conference. They wanted “adequate planning of the increase and distribution of the increase of populations; of the exploitation of technological innovation.”³³

The ICFTU further called for “revising the concepts currently used to measure growth” which involved new studies incorporating “social goals and indicators,” an evaluation of “the allocation of resources,” and ways to interpret “options” about the “choice between productive investments and social investments.” Multinationals needed to be compelled to help the “the guest country towards this country's development.” It also wanted such practical changes as an international register of chemical compounds and ‘right to know' principles for people exposed to hazardous materials. The ICFTU recognized the need for greener ways of working, but did not want to sacrifice people's standard of living to someone else's determination of what was good for the environment. They further worried that the cost of the environmental protection in greener countries would be the loss of jobs or economic competitiveness. Thus costs had to be properly distributed—around the society and between countries.

Apparently the union position did not receive the support the veteran unionist had hoped: “Bro. Umrath expressed his disappointment over the rather negative attitude of several delegates from industrialized countries.”³⁴

This sort of opposition, verbal support but practical foot dragging by conservative governments continued to plague union efforts to bring labor issues into environmental discussions. Similarly, Umrath found relations with many other NGOs difficult. He remarked that “there seems to be a keen competition, as all the pollutionists, humanists, churches, etc., want to take part” in the Stockholm meeting. He worried that due to a limited number of places the unions might be shut out of discussions: “I am not sure how things will develop. So, I think we should be well prepared.”³⁵ Umrath had at first been inclined to participate in an ad hoc group sponsored by “a large number of NGOs.” But Maier warned him off: “You are, of course, aware that we have always been extremely reluctant to participate in any such ad hoc machineries established for NGOs since we do not feel that our position should be coordinated with the views of other NGOs before it reaches the UN.” In case this wasn't clear enough, Maier reminded him, “I remember, however, that I have already spoken to you about this,” though he did concede that they could cooperate with NGOs “where we think a common joint approach could yield better results.”³⁶ Umrath and Maier apparently worked out their differences, for by the time of the Stockholm Conference, Umrath was consistently avoiding cooperation with many NGOs. He told Maier: “Barbara Ward [a British Labour-connected environmentalist and journalist] drafted a joint statement of NGOs, which was submitted to the plenary by [anthropologist] Margaret Mead; full of common places and oddities; I did, of course, not sign it.”³⁷ The labor-environmentalist coalition was in 1972, indeed, a thing of future.

The differences and suspicions between the ICFTU and the other NGOs continued until the 1980s and 1990s when the unions and the other groups began to seek common ground. By the late 1980s, the Occupational Health and Safety Working Party, which then oversaw ICFTU environmental policy, worried “workers will be denied a voice in ‘environmental issues' if the trade unions do not develop a strategy to link workplace activities with broader environmental concerns.” They warned: “there is already developing a mistrust between trade unions and ‘green groups.'” The result so far, they explained, was “that the debate on environmental issues has been conducted without trade union involvement.”³⁸

It was also not until the late eighties that the concept of “sustainable development” offered a way for the world's diplomats to agree on a plan—however vague and as yet undeveloped—for dealing with the intertwined problems of environmental destruction and economic growth. It was this concept that gave the unions a way to participate in the environmental debate and to begin to cooperate with the distrustful greens. In contrast to Maier and Umrath's early suspicions, the OHS Working Party believed it important to “participate in the ‘parallel events' being organized for and by NGOs at the conference.”³⁹

From the mid-1970s until the late eighties, ICFTU environmental policymaking slowed dramatically. The Housing Committee no longer dealt directly with environmental issues during this period; responsibility shifted to the Occupational Health and Safety Working Group. Further research is needed to discover why ICFTU policy failed to develop during this time. It may be that a reaction among industrial and building trades unionists to what they saw—often correctly—as a threat to their jobs from environmentalists was what caused the Confederation to avoid tackling the controversial issue. For instance, even in the mid-1970s after the Stockholm Conference, the European trade unions only considered environmental problems in detail, according to Theo Rasschaert, General Secretary of the ETUC until 1976, “as the result of pressure from public opinion.”⁴⁰

Other European trade unionists were more supportive and by the late 1970s realized, according to François Staedelin, also of the ETUC, that “environmental problems are becoming more and more crucial.”⁴¹ Despite this support, the larger Confederation's environmental policy remained fixed in its early 1970s form.

The ETUC, in advance of the ICFTU as a whole, had established a working party on the environment and in 1978 issued a fairly radical report on labor environmental thinking. The ETUC Working Party held that the logic of production and consumption in “the pursuit of price and profit” was intrinsically damaging to human beings and nature. The development of industrial capitalism “is characterized by a concentration of efforts and a fantastic growth in production and employment” which made for a great “increase in goods production and consumption.” But, “this extremely rapid process upset the life style of numerous classes” and indeed “the workers who founded the trade union movement have been the principal victims of the deterioration in environment and general living conditions since the beginning of massive industrialization.” This was no call for redistribution ala Samuel Gompers of the “fullness of the earth,”⁴²

but rather an indictment of an instrumental use of nature and people, “It is up to us to look for a different logic,” they proclaimed. And indeed they did, proposing an ecological balance that would allow social democratic control over labor and production, maintain living standards, and cause “minimal damage to the environment.”⁴³

Nevertheless, as pointed out above, the ETUC remained equivocal about nuclear power—even in the wake of Chernobyl. Still the way the ETUC argued for labor environmentalism informed later green unionists. In explaining the basis for their environmental stance in 1986, the ETUC explained “the cornerstone” of the labor movement “is without doubt the struggle for better working conditions . . . The fight for better working conditions is directly related to environmental protection.” In others words, the ETUC maintained, “The trade unions regard the protection of the natural elements essential to life as an objective per se.” Given that the unions worried about the continent's high unemployment, the jobs versus environment debate remained an important one. Yet, the European trade unionists explained, “active environment policies would have helped to create the new jobs which are so urgently needed.” Despite the thorough discussion of environmental problems facing Europe's workers and the whole panoply of suggestions to address them, the ETUC in 1986 lacked a unifying idea to guide its program. Nonetheless, they echoed their 1978 critique of the political/economic cause of ecological crisis: “The ETUC and its member organisations are convinced that only a radical change of course to a policy of a qualitative growth can stop the destruction of the environment.”⁴⁴

But the ETUC program was in advance of the rest of the ICFTU. “Qualitative growth,” however admirable an idea, did not survive and, moreover, did not change the way the ICFTU thought about the environment. It was not until two years after the Brundtland report of 1987 that the Occupational Health And Safety Working Party had its first agenda item discussion about environmental issues.⁴⁵

The following year, the Working Party added Environment to its name.⁴⁶ This nominal change did not bring consensus. Lucien Royer, a staffer of the ICFTU Occupational Health Safety and Environment Working Party, acknowledges that even years after the expansion there are “persistent tendencies within the group to weaken the sustainable development focus or to change track completely.” One faction in the Working Party feared diluting scarce union resources in an ambitious expansion of occupational safety and health responsibilities.⁴⁷

The ICFTU did not thoroughly reorient its ideas of nature for many years. At meetings in the early 1990s the organization continued to use the term “outer environment,” apparently to distinguish from the earlier language of “work environment.”⁴⁸

While the ICFTU prepared to participate in the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” of the UN that established the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Confederation's position remained ambiguous—were environmental problems simply issues of management and planning or were they something more fundamental?

A rapid evolution in environmental ideas within international trade union organizations had come during the mid-to-late 1980s. First, the 1984 Bhopal chemical plant explosion brought the “labor movement into a new era of understanding about the links between production and community wellbeing.”⁴⁹

After the Chernobyl disaster in 1987 the ETUC and the ICFTU needed to grapple once again with the problem of nuclear power—but even so the organizations did not oppose its use. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe further pushed the unions to demand environmental accountability. After all, one of the criticisms the social-democratic ICFTU and ETUC had long made of communism was that its repressiveness made it possible for dangerous, dirty industries to operate without challenge. This politically-pointed environmentalism had fit with the ICFTU's fundamentally anticommunist origins and purpose and had given them another opportunity for criticism of the eastern regimes. Now the ICFTU's magazine warned capitalists hungering to operate in the former eastern bloc that “there is no such thing as a free market when it comes to occupational health and safety and environmental protection.”⁵⁰ In response to efforts to mobilize new eastern European unions to fight pollution, Mike Wright, chair of the OHSE Working Party and director of Occupational Health and Safety for the United Steelworkers of America, pointed out in 1990: “there is no fundamental difference between the working environment and the environment outside plant.”⁵¹ Wright's statement provided the fundamental connection between earlier and later conceptions of environment. Similarly, around the same time, ICFTU General Secretary John Vanderveken explained, “poverty is the greatest polluter of all.” He did, nonetheless, continue to talk about “a balance between the needs of people and the need to protect the environment,” seemingly implying that the two were in opposition.⁵²

Environmental issues were regular topics in the labor press from the late 1980s onward. Part of this new labor environmentalism was clearly opportunistic—there were allies out there, young militants ready to join in the fight against a common enemy. But more than that, for some in the labor movement an environmentalist synthesis had arrived. A front-page editorial in the ICFTU journal Free Labour World in 1992 demanded that the unions be included in any international body that oversaw world environmental policy or sustainable development. This was in keeping with the long term ICFTU purpose of influencing the UN. Revealing that environmentalism was intrinsic to the nature of labor, Free Labour World argued, was “the long hard slog of union campaigning for safer cleaner workplaces.”⁵³

But more importantly, the editorial continued, “trade unionists occupy a unique position in the environmental debate since we represent both producers and consumers.” This means, according to Free Labour World, that “Slash and burn economics will hurt us as much as the environment, and we want an end to it.”⁵⁴ This equation metaphorically ties workers with the environment and logically claims them victims of the same economic policies of exploitation. Exploitation of human beings is, in this rendering, then the same as exploitation of a natural world and comes from the same source: rampant, uncontrolled capitalism. The union magazine had erased a key boundary of the nature vs. humanity dichotomy thus making possible the ideas underlying union-based sustainable development.

By the early 1990s the international trade union environmentalists had a fully developed ideology that redefined nature and paved the way for environmentalist-labor cooperation on a global scale. The ICFTU devoted its March 1992 World Congress to environmental issues, demanded the use of Environmental Impact Assessments (which would include environmental costs in the price of production), expanded the Occupational, Health, Safety, and Environment Working Party, and coordinated regional meetings on green issues. The ICFTU chose “Environment and Development: The Trade Union Agenda” as one of the main themes for the its 1992 Congress meeting in Caracas. They even invited Gro Harlem Brundtland to be guest of honor.⁵⁵

Representatives of Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund attended the congress for the first time that year and called for “closer links” between the organizations. They “urged all those involved in the struggle to concentrate on the things that united them rather than divided them.”⁵⁶ The unionists responded positively because some had already rethought their position on the environment. The run up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio marked the founding moment of an international environmentalist-labor alliance.

This alliance had not been an easy one, as South African labor union official Bheki Ntshalintshali recently remarked, non-governmental organizations involved in the environment “often see trade unions as the opposition on a number of issues.”⁵⁷

Middle and upper-class environmentalists, for their part, have tried to claim a longer view of the difficulties involved in domination over nature and to call for a sacrifice of economic opportunity in pursuit of a universal good—a sacrifice that usually does not directly affect the middle and upper class as much it does workers. NGOs trying to support disenfranchised groups such as women or indigenous people have also been suspicious of trade unions in the past. These mutual suspicions have made cooperation often difficult, but the ICFTU sustainable development activists have now made cooperation with NGOs a key part of their strategy at the UN. In the first years of the Commission on Sustainable Development after its founding in 1992, the trade unions joined in NGO caucuses and deliberations. They separated from the other NGOS in the mid-90s, becoming what the UN calls a “Major Group” (a group from civil society that the Rio 92 agreement recognized as particularly important for implementing policy). Nonetheless, the unions and the NGOs have maintained close cooperation at the UN sessions. The unions at the UN were even able to have an effective dialogue with some business groups. It is this achievement that paved the way for the success of the unions in pushing through a labor plank at the Johannesburg World Summit in 2002.⁵⁸

The ICFTU's diplomatic success at the UN is due in large part to the skill of labor's diplomats, but it also reflects the politically efficacious nature of the idea of sustainable development in allowing for the perpetuation of this coalition. The change in attitude and relationship occurred not only because of the “direct and profound importance” of the UN discussions, but also because the unions had found a common language and interpretation with the other NGOs. The ICFTU Executive Committee credited the 1987 Brundtland report as “the reference point for all work on environment and development.” The idea of sustainability from the Brundtland report “is central to the work of the ICFTU and its affiliates.”⁵⁹

This revision about environmental issues had been years in the making. Previously, even the language of the ICFTU avoided the difficult concepts that changing environmental policy required. Thus up until 1989 the Occupational Health and Safety Working Party referred only to the “working environment.” While this term was not fully defined it appeared to refer to the immediate atmosphere and conditions on the job. This meant that the environment that needed regulation was the one that workers as workers were exposed to on the job: the pollutants, the radiation, and so on. This was certainly a reasonable goal, but not one that would work for generalizing to a larger movement.

The 1992 ICFTU World Congress affirmed labor's changed environmental position. The delegates based their stance on the idea “that in a world of finite resources there must be a reconciliation between growth and environmental protection.” This reconciliation could only exist because of a program of sustainable development that demanded “the creation and maintenance of socially useful, individually fulfilling and environmentally sound employment.” They insisted this was not only an issue of economics and environment, but also involved “broader social issues” such as “the struggle for democracy, human rights, equity and social justice.” The source of environmental problems, the ICFTU resolved, “come from the production and consumption patterns” of industrial society—the same source as the exploitation of workers. Moreover, these problems were worsened by the “market-oriented policy framework” of international institutions, multinationals, and governments. The Congress spelled out specific areas for action, including more international activities, research, and coordination of union efforts. In general, it committed the ICFTU to promote workers' involvement in dealing with environmental issues from the shop floor to the UN Assembly hall.⁶⁰

While the 1992 Earth Summit, had been “billed by some as the last big chance to save the planet from environmental catastrophe,” the result was disappointing. ICFTU General Secretary Enzo Friso, (who had been an early analyst of the connection of environmental and labor exploitation), wrote: “It was perhaps no surprise that the [Rio summit] did not ultimately live up to the wishes and expectations of many of the participants.” Friso maintained that the unions “always had a more realistic expectation of the outcome of the meeting.”⁶¹

That realism, however, came not from labor resistance to environmentalist thinking, but rather from labor's long experiences with fighting the sources of unsustainable development. Gereluk and Royer, two key participants in the ICFTU's current formulation of sustainable development policies explain the connection between core trade union issues and unsustainable development:

The main union activists, from Umrath to Royer, have developed a synthetic analysis based in trade unionism's core ideas. As Royer and Winston Gereluk write: “Union achievements in the field of occupational health and safety illustrate how the fight for sustainable forms of production have been central to workers' historical struggles against unjust and unsustainable conditions of work and community life; indeed, they may be described as the ‘life and death' aspect of this struggle.” Sustainable development and worker empowerment on environmental issues, they continue, go “beyond narrow, technical problems, and becomes part and parcel of the same struggle over work relations that has defined the history of trade unionism.”⁶³

Royer and Gereluk's work provides a useful reconceptualization of the core of labor's environmentalism. Green unionism has two important sources that make it an integral element of a labor viewpoint and thus part of the reason for the strength of the labor-environmentalist alliance. It is based in both the particularist purpose of unions to protect members and in their more universal purpose as class organizations based on solidarity. The concept of sustainable development, of balancing environmental with economic concerns, has provided a way for unionists to think differently about nature than has previously been done in the movement.

First, labor environmentalism is an outgrowth of occupational health and safety, a particularist goal to protect the members of the unions. To be fair, sources of nonlabor environmentalism are not simply disinterestedly objective or indicative of a higher ability to understand the needs of the world than the supposedly narrow, prosaic concerns of workers' representatives. Often, greens are equally as class- and interest-based as labor. Moreover, the unions can at least claim a certain representativeness; after all, which animals voted to be represented by the World Wildlife Fund? Labor environmentalism is an extension of labor's basic purpose—to protect and improve the lives of workers and their families. Efforts to combat long-term threats to health, to jobs, and to the environment became labor purposes—especially pressing has been the possibility that measures taken to combat environmental problems will be taken at the expense of workers' standards of living, their jobs, and way of life.

Second, labor environmentalism grows from the unions' social democratic and solidaristic impulse. Trade unionists—like environmentalists—know that the biggest danger to their interests is the unchecked growth of capitalist enterprises and free trade in the new era of neoliberal globalization. The power of this system is such that trade unions have had to use their coalition with sympathetic governments and other social groups to advance a people's vision of sustainable development. Environmentalism is a powerful political movement that often confronts the same enemies as labor—multinational corporations and neoliberal or repressive governments. Making an alliance with the greens makes good political sense.⁶⁴

While occupational safety and health seems to logically connect to environmental issues and the ICFTU environmentalists tend to come from OHS, why were ICFTU environmental ideas first grappled with by a committee on housing and only later by a committee on occupational health and safety? The conceptual move from occupational safety to environmental concerns seems a natural one, especially to confront the challenges of pollution. The same chemicals that are hazards to workers on the job, for instance, poison downstream communities and kill wildlife. Housing seems more distant—yet the way that housing connects to the environment reveals key aspects of the green thinking of the unions. Housing is about labor's larger ambitions, its social democratic side. It is not simply about wages and working conditions, but emphasizes a wider view that encompasses the families of workers, their communities, and the neighborhoods in which they live. This extension continues outward to encompass the whole of society, of other countries even (hence internationalism). This process similarly connects the “work environment” to the housing environment, to the local ecosystem, the watershed, and the entire natural world.

The unions' way of practicing solidarity with nature is often contradicted by labor's particularist impulse. Indeed, it is this latter drive of the movement that underlies racial and ethnic exclusion, or self-interested corruption. But particularism is also about the power to get something good for people who might not have a chance to get it otherwise. This internal contradiction along with the two-sides of the union movement, solidarity and exclusion, are expressed in the movement's almost schizophrenic politics as it weaves from fights to protect jobs at any price to advocacy of wholesale social democratic planning, universal standards, environmentalism, and so on. By understanding the domination and exploitation of workers and of nature as inextricable, labor environmentalists situate humans within the natural. Exploitation is the unifying term, which makes the common enemy common; both kinds of exploitation result from one process. For green unionists the separations between humans, the work environment, human environment, natural environment, and nature itself have become elided. This interconnection allows a unified approach to workers' problems and the environment's needs. It encourages a common solution and offers a profound basis for alliance with environmentalists around the world.