Shared Goals, Common Opponents

Excerpted from “Green Growth: Agenda for a Just Transition to a Sustainable Economy,” written by Carl Pope, Executive Director of Sierra Club, and published in The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement (2001, Westview Press).

Tony Mazzocchi, who worked with the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers (now part of USW), was a mentor for many in both the labor and the environmental movements. He taught me a very powerful lesson. “Follow the jobs,” he said. “Most often, pollution results from the desire of management to eliminate work, particularly skilled work. Skilled work protects the environment—

but it weakens the power of management in the workplace.”

Tony’s favorite example was oil refineries. They are dirty. They are dangerous. And to some extent they are intrinsically dirty and dangerous because in them a toxic material, petroleum, is being put under tremendous pressure, heated up, and broken apart into fractions that are often far more toxic and dangerous.

But petroleum refineries are far more toxic and dangerous than they need to be because oil companies want to reduce the number of workers, reduce the skill level of those workers, and reduce the dependence of the plant on having those workers present. (If a refinery can run without its workers, it can run during a strike.)

A refinery is a maze of pipes, tanks, valves, drains, flanges, flues, flares, gauges, seals, and gaskets. If every one of those rather ordinary pieces of equipment is carefully and regularly maintained and monitored, the refinery will operate largely as the closed system it was designed to be. A closed system, even one full of toxic chemicals, doesn’t kill workers and doesn’t pollute neighborhoods. But gaskets age, valves develop leaks, pipes and flanges crack, gauges freeze, seals corrode, drains clog, and flues become caked with soot. The best way to ensure that these problems are caught and corrected before they can trigger toxic releases from the closed systems is to monitor them constantly, maintain them consistently, and replace them when necessary, before there is trouble.

These are all very labor-intensive activities. Paying for those workers cuts into refinery profits—and perhaps more important, a commitment to maintenance means a refinery must shut down in a strike—the last thing an oil company will tolerate.

It is not inevitable that an oil refinery must produce pollution—or create the occupational and safety risks that kill and injure so many workers. Pollution results from decisions that are designed, quite consciously, to destroy jobs and job security, and to undermine worker power in the workplace.