In Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, labor and envi­ron­men­tal activists have worked togeth­er to suc­cess­ful­ly stop — at least tem­porar­i­ly — a new coal export ter­mi­nal from being built on the city’s West Side. After res­i­dents learned in 2015 that the export site had been added onto a pro­posed water­front project by Bay Area devel­op­er Phil Taga­mi, they quick­ly orga­nized to con­vince Oak­land City Coun­cil to block the project. While a judge con­sid­ers whether or not to allow the plant to move for­ward, the sto­ry exem­pli­fies a grow­ing trend: Labor and envi­ron­men­tal move­ments are over­com­ing old antag­o­nisms and increas­ing­ly join­ing forces to pro­tect jobs and build a green­er, health­i­er future.

As Oak­land activists and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers wait for a deci­sion on the pro­posed coal project, cli­mate and labor activists in the Bay Area and beyond are work­ing to fos­ter crit­i­cal col­lab­o­ra­tions on mul­ti­ple fronts. Short-term projects, such as the Dako­ta Access Pipeline, are often jus­ti­fied on the grounds that they bring jobs to strug­gling com­mu­ni­ties. Yet, labor and envi­ron­men­tal groups point out that when that work is com­plet­ed, the jobs dry up — and what’s left is pol­lut­ed water, air and oth­er long-term dam­age to the environment.

In Oak­land, oil indus­try exec­u­tives are attempt­ing to use this faulty log­ic to ram the export ter­mi­nal through. Accord­ing to Jer­ry Bridges, CEO of Ter­mi­nal Logis­tics Solu­tions, one ratio­nale for allow­ing coal to be moved through Oak­land via rail­road cars is that peo­ple in the city des­per­ate­ly need the work. Unem­ploy­ment num­bers for Oak­land show that just over 5 per­cent of city res­i­dents lack full-time employ­ment, although these num­bers are notably high­er for peo­ple of col­or .

But orga­niz­ers like Brooke Ander­son of the Oak­land-based group Cli­mate Work­ers have not fall­en for the argu­ment that any job is a good job. Cli­mate Work­ers is a side ven­ture for the mem­ber and union-fund­ed group, Move­ment Gen­er­a­tion Jus­tice & Ecol­o­gy Project . Through Cli­mate Work­ers, Ander­son is help­ing pair work­ers’ inter­ests with what she says is the imme­di­ate need to build a green­er economy.

Along the way, she has worked close­ly with Oak­land-area com­mu­ni­ty activists to ban Tagami’s project on envi­ron­men­tal grounds. A major con­cern is that work­ing peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly work­ing peo­ple of col­or, stand to bear the brunt of any tox­ic impact from the coal export ter­mi­nal. ​“Coal is shipped on open cars,” Ander­son points out. ​“Coal dust flies off the trains and lands on the com­mu­ni­ties and into the lungs of those clos­est to the train tracks.”

Among the com­mu­ni­ties clos­est to the devel­op­ment are Chi­na­town and West Oak­land, whose res­i­dents have protest­ed vocif­er­ous­ly against the move to bring coal into the city.

Many Oak­land activists have fought the pro­posed coal project on broad­er envi­ron­men­tal grounds. If Tagami’s devel­op­ment goes through, it would facil­i­tate the ship­ping of coal from Oak­land to coal-burn­ing plants in Asia. But pro­test­ers and activist groups like the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists have point­ed out that burn­ing coal brings cli­mate change and threat­ens human and ani­mal pop­u­la­tions around the world.

It is encour­ag­ing, in Anderson’s view, that labor groups such as the Inter­na­tion­al Long­shore and Ware­house Union (ILWU) have also stood up to Tagami’s coal export plans. In a 2015 press release, the ILWU announced its oppo­si­tion to coal, say­ing ​“long­shore work­ers are stand­ing by com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who do not want the wor­ry and risks of nine mil­lion tons of coal pass­ing through their neigh­bor­hoods on trains each year.” The union also said it rejects the typ­i­cal pitch to labor inter­ests, not­ing that ​“coal is not the right way to bring jobs to Oakland.”

Accord­ing to the ILWU, coal is both an envi­ron­men­tal haz­ard and a ​“dirty, low-val­ue car­go.” Instead, the ILWU says it wants devel­op­ers like Taga­mi to invest in ​“clean­er, safer” products.

In response to pub­lic con­cerns, Taga­mi has report­ed­ly com­mis­sioned his own envi­ron­men­tal reviews of coal as part of an ongo­ing law­suit against the City of Oak­land and its ban on the coal export project. Envi­ron­men­tal sci­en­tist Lyle Chinkin, who was hired by Taga­mi, tes­ti­fied recent­ly that Oakland’s City Coun­cil over­looked new tech­nolo­gies that could help keep coal dust emis­sions down. City res­i­dents are cur­rent­ly await­ing the judge’s deci­sion in Tagami’s law­suit, which could deter­mine whether or not he will be allowed to move coal through Oakland.

Taga­mi did not reply to a request for an interview.

Turn­ing away from the fos­sil fuel industry

Mean­while, sim­i­lar cam­paigns to bring envi­ron­men­tal and labor move­ments togeth­er are being waged across the Unit­ed States. This grow­ing alliance is at the heart of Michael Leon Guerrero’s work with the Labor Net­work for Sus­tain­abil­i­ty (LNS). Leon Guer­rero has been an envi­ron­men­tal activist for years, hav­ing got­ten his start by help­ing low-income com­mu­ni­ties in New Mex­i­co push for equi­table cleanup of their land. Today, as direc­tor of the LNS, he is at the helm of efforts to change the nar­ra­tive around labor and its role in cli­mate justice.

The LNS was start­ed by Joseph Uehline, who rose up through union ranks as a steel­work­er and con­struc­tion crew mem­ber before even­tu­al­ly becom­ing the AFL-CIO’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the Unit­ed Nations’ first glob­al warm­ing com­mis­sion in the 1980s. His vision, accord­ing to Leon Guer­rero, was to see labor take on a key role in the move to ​“get off fos­sil fuels and oth­er extrac­tive industries.”

It hasn’t been easy. Leon Guer­rero acknowl­edges that labor has been noto­ri­ous­ly slow to embrace chang­ing eco­nom­ic real­i­ties. He also points to what he says are burned bridges in the eyes of unions, such as the North Amer­i­can Free Trade Agree­ment (NAF­TA), which Leon Guer­rero describes as a ​“grand scheme to basi­cal­ly use Mex­i­can labor for U.S. cor­po­ra­tions.” At the time, he says, labor unions fought against NAF­TA on the grounds that jobs would be lost in the push for cheap­er man­u­fac­tur­ing costs and high­er cor­po­rate profits.

In the end, NAF­TA ​“failed every­body,” Leon Guer­rero asserts, and left work­ers in rust-belt states with closed up fac­to­ries and dimin­ished future prospects. It also left traces of skep­ti­cism and dis­trust, since, he con­tends, ​“work­ers were not pro­tect­ed” in the rush to globalization.

“The con­se­quences were felt in the 2016 elec­tion,” he says, when ​“union mem­bers vot­ed against Clinton.”

Now, Leon Guer­rero says, ​“we need a real, com­pre­hen­sive, large-scale nation­al effort to tran­si­tion our econ­o­my to a clean ener­gy econ­o­my.” But, he cau­tions, labor unions must not only be at the fore­front of this effort, as he says they are in places like Wash­ing­ton state and New York, but there must be a real pay­off for work­ing peo­ple. Past green-jobs ini­tia­tives, Leon Guer­rero believes, have brought promis­es and train­ing but few, if any, liv­ing-wage jobs.

“Work­ers are mak­ing six-fig­ure salaries in refiner­ies, and they are proud of their skills and the train­ing they have received,” he points out. ​“So, what? They’re going to give up their job for solar instal­la­tion work, mak­ing min­i­mum wage?”

The way out still may come from labor join­ing forces with envi­ron­men­tal activists. In Wash­ing­ton, Jeff John­son is the pres­i­dent of the state’s AFL-CIO labor coun­cil. In 2017, Johnson’s labor orga­ni­za­tion passed a res­o­lu­tion in favor of a move towards renew­able ener­gy, as long as it includes a call to ​“pro­tect work­ers whose jobs were lost because of the tran­si­tion away from fos­sil fuels.”

Ander­son of Cli­mate Work­ers agrees with this stance. She has been involved in labor rights cam­paigns for more than a dozen years and has watched as many pol­i­cy-dri­ven shifts to bet­ter envi­ron­men­tal prac­tices have land­ed on the shoul­ders of work­ing peo­ple. Work­ers say the move to reduce water use in hotels, for exam­ple, has led to lay­offs among house­keep­ing staff , while truck­ers — who are often inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors — have strug­gled to keep up with the push to dri­ve expen­sive, new green­er vehi­cles, which they are often expect­ed to pay for themselves.

“Many truck­ers are real­ly low-wage, immi­grant work­ers mak­ing $20,000 per year. How can they afford $100,000 trucks?” Ander­son asked in a recent phone inter­view. (This issue came to a head in Oak­land in 2009, when new emis­sions stan­dards forced many truck­ers out of work.)

Accord­ing to Ander­son, the claim that work­ers can have either a good job or a healthy envi­ron­ment is a false dichoto­my: ​“More dol­lars in your pay­check doesn’t mean as much,” she says, “ when your kids have asth­ma or you devel­op cancer.”