This article examines evaluates the strength of the Labor-Environmentalist alliance of the late twentieth century. It traces the evolution of trade unionists' thinking about nature and the human relationship to the environment by examining intellectual and political sources of labor involvement in United Nations' environmental policy making from the 1950s through the 1980s. The article explores the reasons trade union organizations, notably the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the International Trade Secretariats (Global Union Federations) and the European Trade Union Confederation, participated in a variety of international conferences and institutions such as the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. It finds that environmentally conscious trade unionists developed their own version of environmentalism and sustainable development based on a reworking of basic trade union principles, a reworking that emphasized solidarity with nature and made central the protection of the health and safety of workers, communities, and environments.

No abstract

International labor environmentalism, a significant innovation in global politics, centers on the role of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions at the United Nations'Commission on Sustainable Development and other bodies. Unions face multiple challenges in international institutions, for example, from partnerships that privatize government functions and from disagreements within unions. Nonetheless, this article finds that environmentalism arising from the character of trade unions and the ideology of leaders has great potential.L abor environmentalism is one of the most important global political developments of recent history. Behind this movement lie critical ideas about work, labor, and the environment. These ideas have animated union participation in powerful new political alignments that manifest in street-level mobilization against neo-liberal globalization, newly victorious electoral coalitions, and effective participation in world institutions. Labor has been particularly important in pushing international institutions, particularly the United Nations, to adopt prolabor and/or proenvironment positions. Green unionism holds the promise of a new political synthesis that can revitalize the international Left. Yet fulfilling this promise is not a simple thing. The contradictory impulses of the labor movement itself, the problems of maintaining coalitions with other progressive groups, the powerful sway capitalist market ideas and probusiness groups hold over international bureaucracies, and the nature of international institutions themselves all threaten to derail this transformation. Green unionism faces an intense challenge in a world political system where workplace issues are suppressed or ignored, trade unions split over basic goals and methods, and global institutions are designed to contain workers' power, not enable it.

at 02:16:53, subject to the Cambridge Popular Bases of the International Labor Movement303 ism-did not prevent workers from pressing their leaders to support the WFTU at first, but in the latter part of the forties substantially weakened their ability to affect the course of events.The WFTU grew from the conjunction of three major aspects of the mid-twentieth century. British and American workers' involvement in and reaction to these currents largely determined the role they played in world labor in mid-century. The three aspects were: cooperation with the USSR and Communists throughout the world; the bureaucratization of conflict in international institutions; and the inclusion of Third World people as equals in the process. 4 In the United States, the leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had few reservations about cooperating with the Soviets or other Communists after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. After all, the organization was based on a popular-front coalition of Communists, Socialists, liberals and bread-and-butter industrial unionists. It seemed logical enough to replicate this alliance world wide. The other American union center, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was not able to prevent the triumph of the popular front internationalism of the CIO. (The importance of the AFL in the mid-forties has been overestimated because it refused to have anything to do with the USSR. 5 ) Despite the CIO's consistent internationalism, a tremendous variety of American working class ideas about world affairs limited the commitment of American workers to international corporatism along the lines proposed by the organizers of the WFTU. The contradictory impulses of American working-class political thinking prevented the development of a unified working class voice on global issues. The one way of thinking which unified them, the ideology of Americanism, did not provide a strong basis for the kind of internationalism promoted by the CIO leadership.In Great Britain, most workers agreed on the shape of the international order they hoped to achieve. Among the great majority of British workers, the USSR occupied a very special position because it appeared to present a model for internal and international transformation. Although they could empathize with people seeking national liberation because British workers Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi

No abstract