Can Push for Climate Bill Forge a Lasting Labor-Enviro Alliance?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/08/28/28climatewire-can-push-for-climate-bill-forge-a-lasting-la-70854.html

By BEN GEMAN of ClimateWire
Published: August 28, 2009

The push for climate legislation has bolstered an alliance of unions and environmentalists, raising the hopes of liberal activists who have long sought a lasting and influential relationship between green groups and labor.

The Blue Green Alliance -- a collaboration of six unions and two environmental groups -- arrives after decades of intermittent cooperation and some major disputes.

"Both of these movements have realized they really need each other to get what they want," said J. Timmons Roberts, a Brown University sociologist who has written on labor-environmental coalitions.

The Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers, after years of work together, formally launched the alliance in 2006. The effort expanded in 2008 and 2009, adding the Natural Resources Defense Council and several unions -- the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, Utility Workers Union of America, Laborers' International Union of North America, and the American Federation of Teachers.

The alliance has focused largely on supporting legislation that would impose national curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and boost deployment of low-carbon energy sources that both groups say will create scores of new "green jobs." But the alliance is also pushing for workplace-organizing legislation -- labor's top priority -- as well as changes in trade policy and curbs on industrial toxics.

Not everyone is convinced the effort has staying power.

FULL story at link.