Whose ‘Green’ UAW? Autoworker Environmentalism and Detroit’s Rank and File Rebellion, 1960 – 1977

Abstract

From 1967 to 1977 the United Auto Workers, the most powerful industrial union in the United States, struggled to contain a sustained membership insurgency located in Detroit that targeted both automakers and union leadership. This thesis, using oral history and theoretical contributions from labor-environmental and social movement studies, demonstrates that the rank-and-file rebellion was driven by a shop-floor autoworker environmentalism. This shared form of working-class environmentalism identified three root causes of environmental injustice on the factory floor: workplace hierarchy reinforced worker exposure to shop-floor hazard; health and safety threats in the industrial environment interlocked and mutually reinforced one another; and industrial workers were trapped in a reproductive contradiction, dependent on and harmed by laboring in an industrial environment. This autoworker environmentalism created a working-class social movement that used wildcat strikes, electoral campaigns, and the distribution of literature to further its three aims: the installation of a democratic structure in the union and on the shop-floor, a holistic approach to industrial hazards, and a reorientation of the UAW towards direct, militant action. Autoworker environmentalism conflicted with the environmental politics of the UAW. While the union was seriously committed to the fight against industrial pollution and for working-class access to nature, its environmental politics rejected the idea of using strike power to further its environmentalist aims. The union also categorically excluded shop-floor working conditions from its environmental politics, which resulted in a decade-long autoworker insurgency that upended Detroit, the UAW, and the auto industry.