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“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” Any right not mentioned in the Constitution must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

While the decision applies directly to abortion rights, the underlying principle could be applied to all rights – including worker rights and environmental rights.

No rights of workers are mentioned in the Constitution. Indeed, at the time the Constitution was written and for a long era afterward, workers were defined as “servants,” who had to obey their masters’ will. During their term of service a servant had to abide by the master’s rules and perform whatever tasks the master required. The servant could not quit, since their labor was considered the property of the master. In fact, masters could have servants arrested if they attempted to leave their service early. By the late 1800s the master/servant paradigm become the legal model for all employment relationships in the United States. Unions were defined as illegal “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” Strikes could be halted by arbitrary court injunctions enforced by police and even the military. The Supreme Court systematically declared minimum wage and maximum hour laws unconstitutional.

Similarly, there were no rights to protect people from pollution. Factories could – and did – simply dump their chemical wastes into the nearest river without any legal recourse for those they poisoned.

The Supreme Court is already at work curtailing worker and union rights; for example, the Janus case eliminated long-established rights of unions on the job. A case accepted for decision by the Supreme Court is poised to gut the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

The Supreme Court doesn’t have to eliminate all worker and environmental rights in one fell swoop. It can simply apply the principle that if such rights didn’t exist in 1789 they don’t exist today – and thereby extinguish all our rights case by case.

History bears out the adage that “courts follow the elections.” It is also true that major changes in the courts’ direction are often influenced by popular mobilizations. As legal historian James Gray Pope has pointed out, the Supreme Court’s reversal of precedent to declare the National Labor Relations Act (aka the Wagner Act – “Labor’s Magna Carta”) constitutional came as workers were occupying General Motors factories in Flint. Similarly, the Supreme Court’s decision banning segregated transportation, reversing its 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, came directly following the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

To paraphrase another old adage: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and the condition of vigilance is a strong heart – and, we might add, a strong movement.

As The Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) bids farewell to our outstanding outgoing Executive Director, we are excited to be underway with the recruitment of a new Executive Director who will join and lead our dedicated and talented team into the future. These are big shoes to fill, and we have high expectations. 

LNS has worked for the past 16 years as a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action, building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

The LNS Executive Director is the key public voice for LNS and oversees all of its operations. Here is a downloadable description of the position we will be filling and the characteristics we seek in our new Executive Director.

If you have thoughts about who could be the right choice for LNS, we are eager to hear them. Or, if you yourself are interested in being considered, please let us know.

Write to us at jobs@labor4sustainability.org and a member of our search team will reach out. 

In Solidarity,

The Labor Network for Sustainability Board of Directors

The Labor Network for Sustainability is holding a Young Worker Convergence in Los Angeles on September 15th-18th. Its purpose is to bring together young workers who feel that unions and union members have a crucial role to play in responding to the climate crisis. 

The call for the gathering says 

Young workers have never known a world without climate catastrophe. We can’t imagine any issue, whether it’s job security, equity, or safety in the workplace, that doesn’t intersect directly with the climate crisis. So much of what we do today in many industries needs to change, and that means we need a just transition for all in the process. 

The Young Worker Convergence will build on LNS’s Young Worker Listening Project, which has collected almost 400 surveys and conducted 70 in-depth interviews with young workers (ages 18-35). Interviewers for the Listening Project note that, “Every young worker we’ve spoken to has affirmed our belief that there is a real need for more spaces where folks can share strategies and experiences across industries and grapple with how to start difficult conversations around climate change within their unions.” 

The Young Worker Convergence will:

• Create a forum where young workers can share stories on how they entered the labor movement, how other young workers can be brought into the labor movement, and how young workers can be supported in their labor-climate organizing. 
• Build and strengthen relationships among the labor, climate and environmental justice movements by centering the perspectives of young workers to build deeper understanding of the environmental and social harm that comes from production processes, and the environmental and social gains to be achieved through a just transition. 

If you are a young worker 18-35 and are interested in joining the Young Worker Convergence, send a message to Maria at  maria@labor4sustainability.org

Support will be available to help cover participants’ travel, lodging, food, and childcare expenses.

Income inequality is the highest it has been in 100 years, and with that has come an all-out assault on the political and voting rights of working people. Add to that the devastating effects that Covid has had on workers lives and the economy, and the onrushing economic and health impacts climate change is unleashing on workers and their families. We must build a mass movement that fights for working people on all fronts. 

On June 18th, 2022, join poor and working class people, state leaders, faith communities, moral allies, unions and partnering organizations for the Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. Together we will rise to fight for an agenda that lifts all people by challenging the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism!

• RSVP for your attendance at the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington by visiting www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/june18. Buses from around the country will be headed to Washington D.C.-- RSVPs let organizers know where to create bus stops.
• Help spread the word with the social media toolkit!
• Use the organizing manual and sign up your union/organization as a mobilizing partner to help get more people in the streets!

The Center for Global Work and Employment, Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN) and Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University have recently sponsored a virtual discussion on the Just Transition Listening Project (JTLP)’s 2021 report Workers and Communities in Transition. You can watch the recording online on LEARN-TV.

Authors and JTLP Organizing Committee members J. Mijin Cha (Occidental College),Vivian Price (California State University Dominguez Hills), Dimitris Stevis (Colorado State) and Todd E. Vachon (Rutgers) introduce the JTLP’s work and present the report’s main findings and answer questions from the audience. The report, which was conducted in partnership with the Labor Network for Sustainability underscores a critical point in the shift to much needed climate policies: Workers and their communities must not be left behind in the transition to a green economy and in fact, their role in the process of developing a just transition is critical to making it work fairly.

The major findings of this report derive from more than 100 listening sessions, including qualitative interviews and focused discussion groups with workers and community members from across the United States conducted between May and October of 2020. Several themes emerged through these sessions, including a more complete picture of what transition entails, how coalitions come together, and what pathways to a just future exist. Among its main findings:

• Transitions are inevitable and constantly happening across the economy. Past transitions, driven by market forces, corporate entities, and public policies left workers and communities largely behind with little to no support.

• Workers and community members from all regions of the country are suffering from an historic decline and lack of access to opportunities. Many also face the threat of losing opportunities in the near future. The COVID-19 pandemic and persistent structural racism and wealth inequality have exacerbated these realities. People affected by past unjust transitions are reacting harshly to climate action and policy, creating tensions between labor, community and environmental movements that often erupt into open conflicts.

• In the inevitable energy transition some, but not all, fossil-fuel workers will be employed in the renewable energy sector. Proactive policies should create a wide variety of high-quality jobs that can take advantage of these workers’ considerable skills.

Read the Just Transition Listening Project report: Workers and Communities in Transition

Image Source: Oleksandra- stock.adobe.com

By Oren Kadosh, LNS Legal and Policy Researcher

Since truck deregulation, truck drivers are frequently misclassified as independent contractors rather than employees. That has turned much of truck driving from a well-paid, union-protected occupation to one with low wages, egregious working conditions, deprivation of benefits, and onerous costs that are shifted from the employer to the driver. How will new truck pollution regulations affect the workers who drive the trucks?

On May 16 LNS submitted public comments on the Proposed Final Rulemaking to set new heavy-duty engine and vehicle air pollution standards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Environmental justice and community organizations and experts like the more than 50-member Moving Forward Network have shown why the Proposed Rule lets down communities who need a rapid and just transition to zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) for the good of our public health and the environment. LNS enthusiastically supported this position along with a just transition for vehicle manufacturing workers whose livelihoods might be at risk in the shift toward 100% electrification. 

The focus of LNS’s comments was on EPA’s failure to take into account the Proposed Rule’s impacts on truck drivers. LNS warned that the Proposed Rule will likely result in increased cost burdens on these already devalued workers rather than on the logistics corporations who fundamentally control the operations of medium and heavy-duty fleets from seaport to consumer.

LNS said that EPA should take action under the Clean Air Act and Executive Order 14037 (E.O. 14037), Strengthening American Leadership in Clean Cars and Trucks, to counter the misclassification of drivers and make sure the employers bear the costs for leasing, operating, and maintaining vehicles. And it should work with other agencies to search for and remedy any violations of labor and employment laws and ensure that all trucking jobs are good union jobs.

Image Source: Ben Smith- @whereisbenjo on Twitter

On April 29, activists from the environmental group Greenpeace USA and oil workers and Steelworkers Local 5 deployed a “boat picket” at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, CA composed of three Greenpeace boats floating in formation near the oil tanker delivery dock, with striking refinery workers, banners and picket signs on board. 

According to Greenpeace Co-Executive Director Annie Leonard, “The boats intend to notify all incoming and outgoing tankers and tugs of their presence as a “picket line” and ask that they do not cross it by refusing to arrive at or leave the refinery’s dock.” 

Why were Greenpeace boats and activists, famous for blocking whale hunts, supporting a strike by oil refinery workers? Annie Leonard explains:

Fossil fuel executives and their lobbyists have maintained their dominance by pretending to have the best interest of workers and communities at heart. But while they are raking in record profits (just this morning Chevron announced they brought in $6.3 billion in just the first quarter this year), they are holding out on fair pay and safe working conditions.  That’s why we chose to show up for fossil fuel workers. The only way we can break these companies' stranglehold on our wallets, our communities, and the planet is by standing together in the call for a livable future.

 She adds,

Nearly 500 workers from Chevron’s Richmond refinery have been on strike for over a month as they demand a fair contract from Chevron’s greedy executives. Greenpeace believes that walking our walk in our commitment to a just economic future for all communities means that in the meantime, we must be dedicated to struggle alongside oil workers against the industry that is not giving them a fair shake. Today’s protest is the next step in displaying a powerful front of environmentalists and workers united against fossil fuel corporations. If we stand (or sometimes float) together, we can win.

Greenpeace activist Ben Smith tweeted from a floating picket boat, “We're also out here to walk the walk. It’s past time for the workers movement and the environmental movement to build bonds of solidarity because our fates are bound up together.”

Image Source: Featured on Capital and Main. Photo by Karl Nielsen / Greenpeace

When Greenpeace boats formed a “floating picket” to support striking Chevron workers in Richmond, CA, one of those aboard was Tefere Gebre, until February the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO and now chief program officer at Greenpeace USA. Gebre described Greenpeace’s support for refinery workers as “a genuine attempt to build a transformational relationship” with the striking workers.

In an interview published May 16 in Capital and Main, Gebre explains how he sees the relationship between the environmental movement and the labor movement:

In 2017, I had my first child, who’s now 5 years old, and she brought a lot of things into perspective for me. I’m worried sick that if things continue the way they are, I’m never going to see her graduate from high school or college. I just felt like she was going to hold me accountable.

I also know that the workers’ movement is going to be crucial in actually solving this problem. We have been fed wrong choices and wrong narratives for years. Either we have to take good paychecks, family-sustaining paychecks, or choose to breathe clean air. I don’t think that’s a choice.

Also, for ages, people like myself have imagined the environmental movement to be a movement for upper-middle-class white people. But I grew up in Los Angeles. I know the asthma corridor in Los Angeles — the 110 freeway which leads to the ports. Those are little Black and brown kids, who have nothing to do with polluting the environment. They are born with asthma. I want the environmental movement to actually be their movement, driven by them and led by them.

Eight years ago, 13% of Greenpeace’s staff was BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color]. Today, it’s 52%. It is by design. In a real way, they want to do equity and inclusiveness. I’m the first immigrant and Black man they ever had in a leadership position.

Gebre was asked “How are you going to build the partnership between labor and the environmental movement?”

I’m going to talk directly to fossil fuel workers, those who work at the refineries, and those who work to actually take the oil out of the ground. I want them to actually imagine a better life for themselves, and explain that the environmental movement — at least Greenpeace — is not against them. We’re with them. We’re against the people who take advantage of them at work and would take advantage of their community, and pollute our environment.

Here’s the core of it. There ain’t going to be any jobs on a dead planet. And I think the more workers understand that the more they are willing actually to look at the longer view of this.

For full interview: capitalandmain.com/why-labor-leader-tefere-gebre-has-brought-his-organizing-talents-to-greenpeace

On April 28 the United Auto Workers and the National Resources Defense Council sued the U.S. Postal Service over its plan to buy tens of thousands of polluting trucks for its fleet rather than cleaner electric vehicles.

The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York says that the Postal Service failed in its environmental review, including by relying on wrong or outdated assumptions about the emissions from gasoline-powered trucks and the relative costs of electric vehicles. NRDC and UAW are asking the court to halt the purchase plan while the USPS redoes its analysis.

According to a statement from the UAW, “The UAW and NRDC joint lawsuit bring together two major organizations united in their demand for public dollars to support a transition to cleaner, union-made vehicles and jobs that support families and communities in the long-term.” 

 Bob Lynk, president of United Auto Workers Local 578, told Wisconsin Public Radio in an interview broadcast May 5, the jobs that would have come from building electric postal vehicles in Wisconsin would have secured the union's future. "That's where the world's going right now. This is a big opportunity to get it started, get it right. To build cleaner air, better vehicles, make them (electric vehicles), and they should be union-made."

Read UAW's statement here and NRDC's statement here.

Image Source: afishman64- stock.adobe.com

The American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents 7,500 scientists, engineers, and other employees at the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is demanding a contract that insulates agency science from political interference.

According to Nicole Cantello, an EPA lawyer and union leader, “We are looking to be the first union in the nation to have a scientific integrity article in our contract.” The union plans to introduce its proposal at a bargaining session with management in June.

At the top of Council 238’s website is the banner “Protecting the Workers Who Protect the Planet.” Their mission statement:

EPA employees have committed our careers to protecting human health and the environment. Our fight for a fair workplace is a fight to continue our mission to protect all Americans and preserve the soul of the EPA. The health and future of our country and planet depend on it.

Protecting the health of our country and our planet depends on a fully functioning EPA, where all employees – from climate scientists to pollution analysts, lawyers, and enforcement personnel – are free from political interference to do their jobs.

EPA employees and their unions have a long history of fighting political interference with their duty to protect people and the planet. In 2007, leaders of 22 EPA unions petitioned Congress to “allow U.S. EPA’s scientists and engineers to speak frankly and directly with Congress and the public regarding climate change, without fear of reprisal.”

For more on this story: buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/epa-unions-trump-science-protections

For more on AFGE Council 238: afge238.org

For the 2007 petition by EPA workers and unions: www.jeremybrecher.org/a-clarion-call/

Image Source: Ina Gouveia- stock.adobe.com

While the Russian military continues to devastate Ukraine and the US sends billions for military aid to Ukraine, European countries continue to support the Russian war effort by purchasing Russian oil and gas. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies reap a bonanza on shortages that are impoverishing American consumers at the gasoline pump. And even as climate catastrophe is causing still more devastating heatwaves, droughts, and floods those companies are planning to expand fossil fuel production to exploit the Ukraine crisis still more.

Why not starve the Russian war machine by a crash program to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy? Among those asking that question is Lillian Fortuna, an 11-year-old activist who started this petition to President Joe Biden:

Dear President Biden:

Right now your administration is taking advice from big fossil fuel companies regarding what to do about Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas. These companies want to increase production of natural gas here and ship it to Europe as a replacement for Russian gas, which, surprise, happens to be enormously profitable for them. Sadly, your administration has granted more drilling leases than the Trump administration just as data has emerged showing the industry was undercounting its methane emissions by 70%. It is really surprising that you are choosing this solution instead of using this moment as an opportunity to help Europe switch to ever-cleaner electricity, which is what will really undercut Putin’s power. Environmentalist Bill McKibben has an amazing plan to do just that.

We are writing to ask you to immediately invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturers to start producing electric heat pumps in quantity, so we can ship them to Europe where they can be installed in time to dramatically lessen Putin’s power. 

Read and sign the full petition here.

Read Bill McKibben’s “Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom” here.

In August 2021, workers at three Starbucks stores in and around Buffalo, New York, filed union election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board. In the eight months since, close to 250 other Starbucks stores have filed similar petitions. More than 40 Starbucks stores have voted to unionize.

Starbucks workers are not alone. The NLRB reports that union election petitions were up 57% in the first half of the 2022 fiscal year, compared with the year before. Comments Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, "Organizing is contagious."

For more information see: www.npr.org/2022/05/01/1095477792/union-election-labor-starbucks-workers-food-service-representation

Image Source: small smiles- stock.adobe.com

On Earth Day, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced an executive order creating a new office of environmental justice. The new office will work with farmers and rural communities, communities of color, Tribal Nations, state and local partners, and low-income populations, among other key stakeholders, the governor's office said.

“Every Wisconsinite should have access to clean, safe drinking water, our state’s natural resources, and great places to live, learn, and work,” the Governor said.

Read the US News article here.

Read the Executive Order here.

I am a 32-year old Army veteran and military brat. While I've lived in 5 different states and Germany, I've spent the last 11 years living in Portland, OR. I am an Automation Clerk with the United States Postal Service and belong to the American Postal Workers Union, where I hold positions as a Union steward and the director of Organization within my local. I am married to my partner of 10 years and have a 1-year old daughter.

Our Mission

To be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

Making a Living on a Living Planet is published by the Labor Network for Sustainability: