Series:

Work, Health and Environment

6 total works

Cover of Labor-environmental Coalitions
In 1984, the oil, chemical and atomic workers began a 5-year campaign to win back the jobs of its members locked out by the BASF Corp. in Geismar, Louisiana. The multiscale campaign involved coalitions with local environmentalists as well as international solidarity from environmental and religious organizations. The local coalition which helped break the lockout was maintained and expanded in the 1990s. This alliance is one of numerous labor-community coalitions to emerge increasingly over the past 20 years.""Labor-Environmental Coalitions: Lessons from a Louisiana Petrochemical Region"" traces the development of the Louisiana Labor-Neighbor Project from 1985 to the present, within the context of a long history of divisions between labor and community in the U.S. The Project continued after the lockout, thriving during 1990s, expanding from one community to four counties to include 20 local member organizations, and broadening its agenda from the original jobs crisis and pollution problems to address a wide range of worker, environmental health, and economic justice issues."" Labor-Environmental Coalitions"" explores the dynamics of the Louisiana coalition to offer lessons for other coalition efforts. The book seeks to understand coalitions as a necessary strategy to counteract the dominant forces of capitalist development. The author contends that the Labor-Neighbor Project, like labor-community coalitions generally, created a unique blend of politics shaped by the geographic nature industry's politics; by the relative openness of government; and by the class experience of labor and community members.The Louisiana Project demonstrates that for labor-community coalitions to thrive they must broaden their agenda, strengthen their leadership and coalition-building skills, and develop access to multiscale resources. The author argues that for labor-community coalitions to have longer term political impact, they should adopt an explicitly progressive approach by building a broader class and cultural leadership, and by demanding state and corporate accountability on economic, public health, and environmental justice issues.

Cover of Environmental Unions
During the 1970s and 1980s, a hazardous waste management industry emerged in the U.S., driven by government and polluting industry responses to a hazardous waste crisis. In 1979, labor unions began to seek federal health and safety protections for workers in that industry and for firefighters responding to hazardous materials fires. Those efforts led to a worker health and safety section in the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986. The legislation mandated regulation of hazardous waste operations and emergency response worker protection, and establishment of a national health and safety training grant program - which became the Worker Education and Training Program (WETP).Craig Slatin provides a history of labor's success on the coattails of the environmental movement and in the middle of a rightward shift in American politics. He explores how the WETP established a national worker training effort across industrial sectors, with case studies on the health and safety training programs of two unions in the WETP - the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers and the Laborers' Union. Lessons can be learned from one of the last major worker health and safety/environmental protection victories of the 1960s-1980s reform era, coming at the end of the golden age of regulation and just before the new era of deregulation and market dominance. Slatin's analysis calls for a critical survey of the social and political tasks facing those concerned about worker and community health and environmental protection in order to make a transition toward just and sustainable production.

Cover of Metal Fatigue

On February 4, 1986, the lives of thousands of workers changed in ways they could only begin to imagine. On that day, United Technologies Corporation ordered the closure of the 76-year-old American Bosch manufacturing plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, capping a nearly 32-year history of job loss and work relocation from the sprawling factory. The author, a former Bosch worker and the business agent for the union representing nearly 1,200 Bosch employees when the plant closed, interjects his personal recollections into the story.For more than 150 years Springfield stood at the center of a prosperous 200-mile industrial corridor along the Connecticut River, between Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Springfield, Vermont, populated with hundreds of machine tool and metalworking plants and thousands of workers. This book is a historical account of the profound economic collapse of the Connecticut River Valley region, with a particular focus on Bosch, its workers, and its union. The shutdown is placed in the context of the wider region's deindustrialization. The closure marked the watershed for large-firm metalworking and metalworking unions in the Connecticut River Valley. The book also describes how the United States, in a ten-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, went from being the world's leading exporter of machine tools to its leading importer, and how that sharp decline affected the region's leading city, Springfield, Massachusetts, which by 2005 was in danger of bankruptcy.

Cover of Business, Environment, and Society
This book blends theory and practice to support courses in corporate social responsibility (CSR), business and society, and environmental management and sustainability. Based on her extensive work with companies, the author offers engaging readings and teaching cases that address key challenges for business today - measurement, supply chain management, public policy, and stakeholder pressures. Part I focuses on the macro-level and provides an overview of concepts such as the green economy, eco-industrial parks, corporate social responsibility (corporate citizenship), nanotechnology, and sustainable consumption. Part II provides specific frameworks and tools for sustainability management and measurement at the company level. Part III includes detailed teaching cases of several well-known firms. The main theme is that business is a key player in achieving a more sustainable development, yet its practices are often narrow in focus or shortsighted. The text provokes discussions around issues such as: Is business sustainability possible in a market economy focused on increasing consumption? Should a product or service be called "green" when it puts at risk the health and safety of workers? What can U.S. policymakers learn from their European counterparts when it comes to protecting human health and the environment? How can we ensure that the benefits of nanotechnology exceed its risks? How can sustainability indicators be used as a tool to advance sustainability by companies and policymakers? The book provides a flexible, up-to-date supplementary teaching tool for undergraduate and graduate students, executive education courses, and certificate programs. Intended Audience: Primarily undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in environmental management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, or business and society; as a supplementary text in professional education and certificate programs in environmental management, corporate citizenship, sustainability, and CSR.

Cover of Inside and Out

Inside and Out

by Robert Forrant and Linda Silka

Published 15 June 2006
Two overarching questions permeate the literature on universities and civic engagement: How does a university restructure its myriad activities, maintain its academic integrity, and have a transformative impact off campus? And, who ought to participate in the conversations that frame and guide both the internal restructuring process and the off-campus interactions? The perspective of this book, based on research and projects in the field, is that long-term, sustainable social and economic development requires strategies geared to the scientific, technical, cultural, and environmental aspects of development. Much of the work in this volume challenges traditional university practices. Universities tend to reproduce a culture that rejects direct interaction across traditional academic department boundaries and beyond the campus. Yet, interdisciplinary work is important because it more aptly mirrors what is taking place in the regional economy as firms collaborate across manufacturing boundaries and community organizations and neighbourhood groups work to solve common problems. What is distinctive within the range of scholarship and practice in this volume is the inclination on the part of increasing numbers of professors on more and more campuses to collaborate across disciplinary lines. Universities must persist in the advancement of cross-community, cross-firm, and cross-institutional learning. The learning dynamics and knowledge diffusion generated by collaborative activities and new approaches to teaching can invigorate all phases of learning at the university. In this way, the university advances its activities beyond an indiscriminate approach to development, maximizes the use of its resources, and performs an integrative and innovative role in the cultivation of equitable and sustainable regions. The chapters in this book illustrate the strikingly different and exciting ways in which universities pursue education for sustainability.

Cover of Nuclear Servitude

This book highlights the dangers of the disorganization of work through subcontracting practices, both for workers' health and for nuclear safety.