Blue-collar union leaders—already furious over the Obama administration’s scuttling of the Keystone XL pipeline and Hillary Clinton’s vow to shut down the coal industry—took another hit earlier this month, when the Democratic Party announced the formation of For Our Future PAC, a voter-turnout initiative in partnership with billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has long waged war against projects that the trade and construction unions hoped would create jobs. The New York Times portrayed the reaction to Steyer’s involvement in the new $50 million super PAC as a “rift between labor and environmentalists” within the Democratic Party, but that’s nothing new: trade unions and environmentalists have long been at odds. The real news was that much of the rest of the labor movement—led by public-sector unions—had agreed to work with Steyer, highlighting the ever-widening divide between blue-collar labor groups and their public-union counterparts. That split has already driven some trade unions into the arms of Republican candidates, and may account for some of the support Donald Trump gets in polls from working-class voters.
Blue-collar unions have been fighting for decades against the anti-growth environmentalist regulatory agenda. In the late 1970s, autoworkers’ unions and environmentalists faced off over the Carter administration’s efforts to enact clean air standards. The unions worried that a rapid introduction of tighter emissions controls would raise car prices and cut sales, forcing layoffs. Construction unions battled in vain for more than a decade to gain approval for Westway, a giant highway along the West Side of Manhattan; environmental opposition snuffed out the project in 1985. In 1992, when current AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was president of the United Mine Workers, he implored the Green movement to stop killing jobs and instead work with unions toward a cleaner coal industry. “Our union’s first priority is not retraining laid off coal miners—it is saving those jobs,” he said.
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