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http://www7.mercurycenter.com:80/premium/local/docs/alliance05.htm Published Tuesday, October 5, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News New alliance promotes jobs, environment Labor, preservation organizations say they'll battle corporate greed BY ANDREW QUINN Reuters SAN FRANCISCO -- Labor unions and environmental activists -- often bitter foes in the battle over natural resources -- announced a new alliance Monday to fight rogue corporations and "misguided" international trade pacts such as the World Trade Organization. The Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment brings together environmental heavyweights such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth with labor groups including the United Steelworkers of America, Teamsters and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. "Jobs vs. the environment is a false conflict," said David Brower, the pioneering environmentalist and longtime Sierra Club director who serves as co-chair of the new group. "The real issue is to create jobs for the environment." With a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Monday, the alliance began looking for allies in what it says is a fight to prevent corporate greed from hurting working families and the natural environment. "These corporations are treating the natural world as their smorgasbord and treating working people as their waiters at that buffet," said Karen Pickett, an organizer for the Earth First environmentalist group. "The bottom line is there are no jobs on a dead planet." Roots in Maxxam fight The alliance said it had one particular big corporation to thank for bringing it together: Houston-based Maxxam Inc., whose Pacific Lumber unit has fought environmentalists over its plans to fell ancient redwood trees and whose Kaiser Aluminum subsidiary has locked 3,000 union workers out of plants in Washington, Ohio and Louisiana. Dave Foster, Northwest district director for the United Steelworkers, said the lessons of labor's joint fight with environmentalists against Maxxam could be applied to different areas where the two groups have similar interests, noting that business plans must often be environmentally sustainable to make long-term economic sense. "The companies that are the most flagrant in their attack on the environment are often the most flagrant in their treatment of working people," Foster said. The alliance, which will be based in Eureka, near the towering redwood groves that Pacific Lumber planned to cut down, will also take on global free-trade advocates as well as corporate interests. Seattle protests planned It will spearhead a series of large protests next month at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, accusing the global trade body of seeking to subvert "U.S. laws protecting clean air standards, endangered species and worker safety as barriers to free trade." "According to the WTO, our democratically elected officials no longer have the right to protect the environment, worker safety and jobs," Foster said. "We will make sure that basic American standards of fair trade, environmental protection and workers' rights are on the table." With almost 200 labor and environmental organizations already aboard, the alliance is hoping to serve as a clearinghouse for information and a focal point for joint action, both in lobbying Washington and in protesting on the street. Brower, who at 87 is one of America's most respected environmental activists, said the alliance was aimed at establishing "new thinking" about how the working world and the natural world interact and interdepend. "The Earth is hurting, and we are hurting, too," Brower said. "Denial does not correct it, and that's what we're into now."
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