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TAKING ACTION: Blue Green Alliance Executive Director David Foster joins other labor and environmental leaders for a press conference in St. Paul, Minnesota to promote a study showing that investment in clean energy can create thousands of new manufacturing jobs in Minnesota and across the country.

See Clean Energy and Jobs: A Comprehensive Approach to Climate Change and Energy Policy http://redefiningprogress.org/programs/sustainableeconomy/cleanenergy.htm

United Steelworkers of America is 1.2 million working and retired members throughout the United States and Canada, working together to improve our jobs; to build a better future for our families; and to promote fairness, justice and equality both on the job and in our societies.

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, the USW is the largest industrial union in North America. Members work in just about every sector of the North American economy, from metals and mining and manufacturing, to health care and various services in both the public and private sectors. Together, we make the USW one of the most diverse unions in the world.

USW has a long history of environmental support, beginning with its strong effort to pass the Clean Air Act. And through its merger with PACE, it inherits the strong environmental tradition of the former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, the union that helped pioneer blue-green partnerships—from the vindication of Karen Silkwood (the nuclear worker who was killed while fighting for safety); to the strike against the chemical company, BASF in the 1980s, which spawned a series of environmental groups in Louisiana.

In 2006, the union published an environmental policy statement called Securing Our Children’s World. It recognizes global warming as the number one environmental challenge facing the world and calls for massive investments in renewable energy and efficiency creating millions of new jobs. The USW policy also calls for protecting the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and winning real “chemical security” through the substitution of toxics. To download a copy of the report in PDF format, click here.

For more information about the United Steelworkers, click here to visit the union's web site.

LEO W. GERARD is the International President of the United Steelworkers. In his first full term as United Steelworkers International President, Leo W. Gerard has launched a wide range of new initiatives that have brought more than 350,000 workers into the union's ranks — a sixty-percent increase.

In addition, the union has utilized strategic bargaining to secure tens of thousands of jobs throughout North America, strengthened workers' bargaining leverage by forging strategic alliances with unions across the globe, and advanced the USW's historic leadership in coalitions committed to protecting the health, safety, and environment of workers, their families and their communities.

DAVID FOSTER is the Executive Director of the Blue Green Alliance. From 1989-2006, he served as Director of USW District 11, spanning from Minnesota to Washington State -- including Alaska. He recieved the 2003 Jane Bagley Lehman Award from the Tides Foundation for his innovative approach and commitment to building effective labor and environmental alliances.

"Foster Brings ‘Blues’ and ‘Greens’ Together," by Paul Lundgren, Business North, July 26, 2006. Read the article.

USW ASSOCIATE MEMBER PROGRAM

The Steelworkers have launched a bold, new Associate Membership program that opens up the union's membership to individual workers and activists no matter where they work or what they do -- even if they are unemployed or in college.

Associate Membership includes low-cost dental, vision and prescription drug benefits, legal assistance, training programs, mailings, meetings, and access to the union's Rapid Response alert system that communicates with members on key political issues. Members also join a powerful organization fighting for social and economic justice - and for a healthy environment.

Signing up is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Sign up online at www.uswa.org/am or call 1 (866) USWA YES to join by phone.
2. Pay your first month's dues.
3. Start receiving benefits and services - and join the fight for economic justice and a healthy environment.

The Nation magazine on the Associate Member Program

On November 29, 2004, The Nation magazine published "Take It to the Blue States," an article by Thomas Geoghegan that sings the praises of the Steelworkers' Associate Member Program. Here's a selection:

First, we need places for people to meet. Instead of unions that people can join only if a majority of workers at a workplace decide they want to be members, we should have organizations, or clubs, that could include associate members, people like you and me who never dreamed we might have a union card. Let people, individually, one by one, sign up as union members, and not only as part of a "bargaining unit." In Europe, that's how they do it … "

"But this kind of thing," said a friend, "would only appeal to a few." He's right. Very few. How about one in ten? That would double the size of labor ... "

"Take It to the Blue States"(http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=geoghegan)is available to subscribers on The Nation's web site.