Why the Environmental Justice Movement Should Support the UAW Organizing Drive

If this is an all hands-on-deck moment to protect our environment and our workers, support for the environmental justice (EJ) movement is crucial. After all, the EJ movement organizes primarily in working-class communities, often but not exclusively of color, throughout the United States. Those communities share a common interest in good jobs and in addressing the concerns of neighborhood residents who suffer most from fossil fuel extraction, refining, and transportation.

But to do this, the distance between labor and community must be closed. In discussing the future of EJ organizing, Ben Jealous, former head of the NAACP and now the first Black executive of the Sierra Club, recently commented, “What we’ve been doing wrong as a movement is failing to meet people where they are.” That’s exactly the challenge for alliance-building as well.

To meet people where they are, the UAW will need to prioritize organizing and persuade companies to hire Southern Black workers, who suffer the highest rates of poverty and unemployment (a task also being taken up by Jobs to Move America, a group that stems from a campaign for good jobs from transportation investments in Los Angeles, where both of us currently live).

Recognizing the corrosive impact of racism on both solidarity and public health, the UAW and labor allies should also support efforts by “fence-line” communities of color to reverse the damages wrought by a petroleum industry that we as a nation should be trying to leave behind.

And the EJ movement, often rightly fueled by immediate public health concerns, needs to take advantage of the new opportunities to go beyond the good work of resisting or remedying hazards and increasingly take on the complex tasks of working with labor to secure quality employment, particularly in what is slated to be such a vibrant new EV industry.

Of course, alliances are built, not born, patiently assembled not simply assumed. It will take communication and collaboration to make any coalition real. It will also take resources—and the UAW has announced that it is setting aside $40 million for organizing up and down the EV supply chain, more than it has ever committed to such an effort. Making sure that some of that money goes to forging ties with EJ groups could be helpful.

EJ organizations are not as flush and will likely need philanthropic help to strengthen their ability to step up fully to this historic opportunity. Funders are already helping to build capacity so that such groups can take full advantage of the Biden administration’s Justice40 effort to invest climate dollars in disadvantaged communities. This is another need and another opening for support.

With the current blip in EV demand, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture: This is a growing industry with billions of dollars already committed to a drivetrain conversion. Likewise, it can be easy to forget that it’s the same political forces who are squeezing labor that are also denying climate change and dismissing the realities of structural racism. The moment is now to build a movement linking labor and communities of color for a just transition to a healthier environment and economy.