The United Auto Workers and the Emergence of Labor Environmentalism

Abstract

Recent collaboration between labor unions and environmental organizations has sparked significant interest in “blue‐green” coalitions. Drawing on archival research, this article explores the United Auto Workers' labor environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the union promoted a broad environmental agenda. Eventually the union went as far as incorporating environmental concerns in collective bargaining and calling for an end to the internal combustion engine. These actions are particularly noteworthy because they challenged the union's economic foundation: the automobile industry. However, as a closer examination of the record shows, there was a significant disjuncture between the union's international leadership, which pushed a broad vision of labor environmentalism, and its rank‐and‐file membership, which proved resistant to the issue. By the close of the 1970s, the conjunction of economic pressures and declining power in relation to management led the union to retreat from its environmental actions.