American Postal Workers Union (APWU)

By Brian Wakamo - Inequality.Org, April 15, 2022

After nearly 30 years in the labor movement, Cindy Estrada is well familiar with the corporate playbook. “As soon as wages and benefits are decent, they want to move that work somewhere else.” That’s what happened, the United Autoworkers Vice President explained at a recent rally, after Oshkosh Defense secured a huge contract to build postal vehicles.

“The ink was still drying,” Estrada said, “when they announced they were moving the work to South Carolina.”

UAW members had fully expected to build the postal trucks in the existing Oshkosh Defense facility in Wisconsin. After all, the company had won the contract on the basis of their quality work. Instead, Oshkosh Defense plans to convert a vacant former Rite-Aid warehouse in notoriously anti-union South Carolina to fulfill the postal contract, circumventing the unionized workforce in Wisconsin.

Estrada and other UAW officials joined environmental groups and political leaders outside U.S. Postal Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. on April 6 to deliver 150,000 petitions demanding that the new postal vehicles be built with union labor.

“We have nothing against South Carolina workers,” Estrada said. “We believe every worker should have democracy in their workplace.”

By Caitlyn Clark - Labor Notes, July 12, 2023

On June 29, the air quality in Detroit was among the worst in the world.

“Outside it smelled like burnt plastic, almost like trash,” said UAW member Cody Zaremba, who works at a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan. He and his co-workers were experiencing coughing, runny noses, watery eyes, and trouble breathing.

But GM didn’t even acknowledge the smoke, Zaremba said, much less offer any protection.

“Everybody just had to go about it their own way,” he said. “We can all see it and smell it. But what are we going to do about it?”

As wildfires, drought, floods, and scorching heat disrupt the supply chain, the logistics industry is starting to worry about the impact of climate change…on profits.

But workers are the ones bearing the brunt—forced to work through extreme weather events, induced by climate change, that are getting more frequent and more severe.

Wildfires in Canada this summer have spread hazardous smoke through the U.S. East Coast and Midwest. Semi-regular wildfires throughout the West Coast have produced what are now known as “fire seasons.”

Outdoor workers like those in delivery, construction, and farming are among the hardest hit. On the frontlines of the climate crisis, some workers are standing up to their employers’ negligence.

Images and words by David Bacon - Sierra, August 31, 2022

In 2020, Washington State passed the Climate Commitment Act, and when it went into effect on January 1, 2022, Rosalinda Guillen was appointed to its Environmental Justice Council. The appointment recognized her role as one of Washington's leading advocates for farmworkers and rural communities.

Guillen directs Community2Community Development, a women-led group encouraging farmworker cooperatives and defending labor rights. She has a long history as a farm labor organizer and in 2013 helped form a new independent union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Guillen agreed to serve on the council but with reservations. She feared that the law's implementation would be dominated by some of the state's most powerful industries: fossil fuels and agriculture. 

"Its market-based approach focuses too much on offsets,” she says. “Allowing polluting corporations to pay to continue to pollute is a backward step in achieving equity for rural people living in poverty for generations." Just as important to her, however, is that while the law provides funding for projects in pollution-impacted communities, it doesn't look at the needs of workers displaced by the changes that will occur as the production and use of fossil fuels is reduced.

The impact of that reduction won't affect just workers in oil refineries but farmworkers as well. "The ag industry is part of the problem, not just the fossil fuel industry," Guillen says. "They're tied together. Ag's monocrop system impacts the ecological balance through the use of pesticides, the pollution of rivers and clearing forests. As farmworkers, this law has everything to do with our miserable wages, our insecure jobs, and even how long we'll live. The average farmworker only lives to 49 years old, and displacement will make peoples' lives even shorter." 

The key to building working-class support for reducing carbon emissions, she believes, is a commitment from political leaders and the environmental and labor movements that working-class communities will not be made to pay for the transition to a carbon-free economy with job losses and increased poverty. But the difficulties in building that alliance and gaining such a commitment were evident in the defeat of an earlier Washington State initiative, and the fact that the Climate Commitment Act lacked the protections that initiative sought to put in place. 

In Washington State fields, at California oil refineries, and amid local campaigns around the country, this is the big strategic question in coalition building between the labor and environmental movements: Who will pay the cost of transitioning to a green economy? 

Some workers and unions see the danger of climate change as a remote problem, compared with the immediate loss of jobs and wages. Others believe that climate change is an urgent crisis and that government policy should protect jobs and wages as a transition to a fossil-fuel-free economy takes place. Many environmental justice groups also believe that working-class communities, especially communities of color, should not have to shoulder the cost of a crisis they did not create. And in the background, always, are efforts by industry to minimize the danger of climate change and avoid paying the cost of stopping it. 

By Peter Knowlton and John Braxton - Labor Notes, September 21, 2021

Today’s existential crisis for humanity is the immediate need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. All of us have to. Everywhere. For workers and for our communities there is no more pressing matter than this.

We need to begin a discussion among co-workers, creating demands and acting on them at the workplace and bargaining table. We need to show up at local union meetings, central labor councils, and town halls supporting demands that move us toward a fossil fuel-free future.

At the same time, we need to protect the incomes and benefits of workers affected by the transition off of fossil fuels and to make sure they have real training opportunities. And we need to restore and elevate those communities that have been sacrificed for fossil fuel extraction, production, and distribution. We should promote candidates for elected office who support legislation which puts those aspirations into practice, such as the Green New Deal.

If the labor movement does not take the lead in pushing for a fair and just transition, one of these futures awaits us: (1) the world will either fail to make the transition to renewable energy and scorch us all, or (2) the working class will once again be forced to make all of the sacrifices in the transition.

The time is long past ripe for U.S. unions and our leaders to step up and use our collective power in our workplaces, in our communities, and in the streets to deal with these crises. That means we need to break out of the false choice between good union jobs and a livable environment.

There are no jobs on a dead planet. Social, economic, and environmental justice movements can provide some pressure to mitigate the crises, but how can we succeed if the labor movement and the environmental movement continue to allow the fossil fuel industry to pit us against each other? Rather than defending industries that need to be transformed, labor needs to insist that the transition to a renewable energy economy include income protection, investment in new jobs in communities that now depend on fossil fuels, retraining for those new jobs, and funds to give older workers a bridge to retirement.

Like any change of technology or work practice in a shop, if the workers affected don’t receive sufficient guarantees of income, benefits, and protections their support for it, regardless of the urgency, will suffer.

By David Yao - Labor Notes, April 28, 2021

The question of whether the Postal Service acts as a business or as a public service is playing out once again—this time in the discussion over fighting climate change.

The Postal Service has more than 200,000 delivery vehicles, many of which are 30 years old and overdue for replacement. They expose workers to exhaust fumes that are a rarity elsewhere in 2021. Hundreds have caught fire, in part due to age. The question of what to replace them with has become a topic of debate.

The Postal Service has a large carbon footprint, starting with its vehicles. While it set ambitious “goals,” such as decreasing petroleum use by 20 percent from 2005 to 2015, in fact it increased petroleum use by nearly 20 percent during that period, and another 10 percent by 2018. Then there’s the contract fleet of over-the-road truckers who haul mail long distances—these trucks used three times as much gas or diesel as the Postal Service’s own fleet did.

The Biden administration’s January Executive Order on the Climate Crisis called for a transition to zero-emission vehicles for all government vehicles, including the postal fleet. But in February the Postal Service made its long-awaited decision to award the contract for replacement vehicles—accepting the proposal of military contractor Oshkosh Truck for a 90 percent gas-powered fleet, rather than the competing all-electric vehicle proposal from Workhorse Group.

The decision to stick with mainly fossil fuel-powered vans would be a missed opportunity to reduce the Postal Service’s output of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Thirteen Congressional representatives have called on the Postal Board of Governors to delay implementation of the contract until there is a full review, citing in part Biden’s call for zero-emission vehicles.

The Postal Service’s 10-year plan, released in March, states that it would need $8 billion in Congressional funding to enable the Postal Service to transition to a completely electric fleet by 2035. The Biden administration’s newly released infrastructure proposal does provide funding to electrify government vehicles, but at this point it is unclear whether a divided Congress would approve that proposal, or in what form.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2021

Anyone interested in how to address the concerns of both labor and environmentalists in upcoming legislation should take a look at the new Sierra Club report “How to Build Back Better: A 10-year Plan for Economic Renewal.” Although the Sierra Club is an environmental organization – in fact, the country’s largest–this “blueprint for economic renewal” has been designed with the needs of workers and discriminated-against groups front and center.

The plan is based on the THRIVE Agenda, which has been endorsed by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, American Federation of Teachers, American Postal Workers Union, Amalgamated Transit Union, Communications Workers of America, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and Service Employees International Union.

• By investing $1 trillion per year, an economic renewal plan based on the THRIVE Agenda would create over 15 million good jobs–enough to end the unemployment crisis–while countering systemic racism, supporting public health, and cutting climate pollution nearly in half by 2030.

• These investments must come with ironclad labor and equity standards to curb racial, economic, and gender inequity instead of reinforcing the unjust status quo.

By Ted Franklin - No Coal in Oakland, April 7, 2017; image by Brooke Anderson

On Saturday, April 8, the Alameda Labor Council will sponsor a Labor, Climate & Jobs Forum with plenary and workshop sessions devoted to how Unions are addressing climate and environmental challenges by organizing workers and communities.  Speakers will include Josie Camacho, executive secretary-treasurer, Alameda Labor Council; Kathyrn Lybarger, president, California State Federation of Labor; Cesar Diaz, State Building and Construction Trades Council; and Carol Zabin, UC Berkeley Labor Center Green Economy Program.

The Forum follows the Labor Council’s pathbreaking support for the No Coal in Oakland campaign.  In September 2015, in one of the first actions by any labor council in the United States to oppose a developer’s plans on environmental grounds, the Alameda Labor Council passed a resolution calling on Mayor Libby Schaaf, the Oakland City Council, and the project developers “to reject the export of coal through the Oakland Global project, to not take funds from Utah to secure use of the terminals for coal, and to execute a binding agreement or adopt an ordinance that will bar export of coal from this public land.”

With strong support from Labor, faith, environmental, and community organizations, the Oakland City Council banned the storage and handling of coal in the City of Oakland by adopting an ordinance prohibiting bulk storage and handling of coal within Oakland’s city limits.

The City supported its decision by reviewing extensive evidence of serious local health and safety impacts that would result from locating a large coal export facility in West Oakland as well as disastrous effects on global climate that would result from burning the vast quantities of coal that would be shipped overseas.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, September 20, 2016

The following unions have issued statements in solidarity with those opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline; we will add additional unions to this list as we become aware of their having taken a similar stand:

1. New York State Nurses Association - September 1, 2016
2. IWW - September 3, 2016
3. Border Agricultural Workers - September 7, 2016
4. Amalgamated Transport Union - September 9, 2016
5. Communications Workers of America - September 9, 2016
6. National Nurses United - September 9, 2016
7. ILWU Local 19 - September 12, 2016
8. Oregon Public Employees Union (SEIU Local 503) - September 12, 2016
9. United Electrical Workers - September 12, 2016
10. ILWU Pacific Coast Pensioners Association - September 13, 2016
11. National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) - September 16, 2016
12. California Faculty Association - ca. September 17, 2016
13. AFL-CIO Labor Coalition for Community Action, (includes the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and Pride at Work) - September 19, 2016

(This may not be a complete list, but we will endeavor to correct any oversights as we find them. If you know of additional unions who have joined this list, please contact us at euc@iww.org.)

On the other hand, some unions insist on staying on the wrong side of history:

• AFL-CIO to Planet Earth: Drop Dead! - By Norman Solomon, CounterPunch, September 19, 2016
• AFL- CIO Bucks Progressive Allies, Backs Dakota Access Pipeline - By Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post, September 16, 2016
• Unions want governor to ensure safety - By Lauren Donovan, Bismark Tribune, September 7, 2016
• Hoffa Calls on N.D. Governor to Help Pipeline Workers - By staff, Teamsters, August 31, 2016

In Response, union members are encouraged to sign this appeal (instructions included within).

Dakota Access Pipeline Halted Again!:

• Federal judge cancels restraining order - By Caroline Grueskin, Bismarck Tribune, September 16, 2016
• Dakota Access Lake Oahe Work Stopped Pending Standing Rock Sioux Appeal - By staff, Indian Country Today, September 17, 2016; [related]: Dakota Access Pipeline construction temporarily halted - By Natasha Geiling, Think Progress, September 17, 2016 | Federal Appeals Court Halts Dakota Access Segment as Solidarity Protests Spread Nationwide - By staff, Unicorn Riot, September 17, 2016 | Appeals court halts Dakota Access Pipeline work pending hearing - By staff, Indianz.Com, September 16, 2016 | Judge drops injunction against tribal leaders - By Associated Press, Bismarck Tribune, September 16, 2016
• Heavy machinery removed from DAPL work site, former protest site, in Morton County - By Max Grossfeld, NBC KFYR TV 5, September 13, 2016
• In Dramatic Reversal, White House Halts Dakota Access Pipeline Construction Under Missouri River - Jan Hasselman and Dave Archambault II interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, September 12, 2016; [related]: Water Protectors at Standing Rock React to Obama's Intervention in Dakota Access Pipeline Battle - By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, September 12, 2016 | Native American Activist Winona LaDuke at Standing Rock: It's Time to Move On from Fossil Fuels - Winona LaDuke interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, September 12, 2016 | Lakota Activist Debra White Plume from Pine Ridge: Why I am a Water Protector at Standing Rock - Debra White Plume interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, September 12, 2016  | Did Obama Just Avoid War with Great Sioux Nation? - By Anne Meador, DC Media Group, September 10, 2016 |

Direct Actions against the Pipeline Construction Continue:

• Sacred Stone Camp prepares for winter weather - By Sara Berlinger, NBC KFYR TV 5, September 16, 2016
• We delivered 33K petitions today! - By staff, Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition, September 14, 2016
• Protests shift along pipeline route - By Lauren Donovan, Bismarck Tribune, September 14, 2016
• Standoff at Vermont Rising Tide #NoDAP Blockade - By staff, Earth First! Newswire, September 13, 2016
• N.D. Pipeline Protester: 'It's About Our Rights As Native People' - By Jeff Brady, NPR, September 12, 2016

And Solidarity Actions Take Place All Over:

• Hundreds Protest Dakota Access Pipeline - By staff, American Postal Workers Union, September 19, 2016
• 400 March, Seven Arrested While Disrupting Philly TD Bank Locations over Pipeline Financing - By Jed Laucharoen, Rising Tide North America, September 18, 2016
• Citibank Occupied to Protest Dakota Access Funding - By Angie Viands, Rising Tide Chicago, September 17, 2016
• Dakota pipeline protesters march downtown Seattle streets - By staff, KIRO TV 7, September 16, 2016
• On Solidarity with Standing Rock, Executive Clemency and the International Indigenous Struggle - By Leonard Peltier, CounterPunch, September 16, 2016
• Pittsburghers Stand with Standing Rock, Say No to the Dakota Access Pipeline - By C Raphael, Three Rivers Rising Tide, September 16, 2016
• Santa Fe Water Protectors Stand With Standing Rock Against the Risky Business of Dakota Access Pipeline - By Frances Madeson, CounterPunch, September 16, 2016
• Stand Up for Rural Communities: Say NO to the Dakota Access Pipeline & Extreme Energy Extraction on Sept. 22 - By Katie Doody, Land Stewardship Project, September 16, 2016
• Utah Land Defenders support Standing Rock and Red Warrior Camp! - By C Raphael, Utah Tar Sands Resistance, September 16, 2016
• 200+ #StandWithStandingRock Actions This Week - By Emily J, 350.org, September 15, 2016
• Solidarity with Standing Rock - By staff, Socialist Worker, September 15, 2016
• Solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux Warriors - By Doug Barnes and Anne Slater, Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, September 15, 2016
• Anti-pipeline protesters across America stand with Standing Rock - By Katie Herzog, Grist, September 14, 2016
• Deepwater Horizon premiere in Toronto hit by Dakota pipeline protest - By Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, September 14, 2016
• 'Dreamers and Warriors' Unite For Global Day of Protest Against Dakota Access - By Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams, September 14, 2016
• Indigenous resistance grows as Standing Rock solidarity actions continue - By Sophia Reuss, Rabble.Ca, September 14, 2016
• Maine Students Sit-In Solidarity With DAPL & Protest Maine Pipeline - By Maine Students for Climate Justice, Popular Resistance, September 14, 2016
• #NoDAPL Protesters Shut Down 2 TD Bank Branches In DC - By staff, Beyond Extreme Energy, September 14, 2016
• Solidarity from the Amazon to Standing Rock - By Leo Cerda, Dallas Goldtooth, and Moira Birss, Amazon Watch, September 14, 2016
• How You Can Support the #NoDAPL Fight No Matter Where You Are - By Cristina, Go Fossil Free, September 12, 2016
• No Dakota Access Pipeline - By Jennifer Krill, Earth Works, September 12, 2016
• #NoDAPL & Holding Sacred Spaces Sacred - By May Boeve, 350.org, September 12, 2016
• Standing Rock protests: this is only the beginning - By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, September 12, 2016
• Vancouver TD bank occupied to protest ties with Dakota Access Pipeline - By Derrick O'Keefe, Ricochet, September 12, 2016
• Asheville: 8 Arrested After Throwing Down Against Pipelines and Prisons - By staff, It's Going Down, September 8, 2016