Connections, both real and hoped for, between the labor movement and environmentalists have been news for at least fifteen years now. The possibility of such a connection came into wider view at the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999, when alliances between trade unionists and other protest groups made headlines with catchy phrases like “Teamsters for Turtles”—or, more prosaically, the “blue-green alliance,” in reference to blue-collar workers joining with green ecological activists. Despite the once-exciting and novel possibility being now institutionalized in such organizations as the Labor Network for Sustainability, the Blue-Green Alliance, and SustainLabour, the thrill seems to be gone for mainstream environmentalist discourse, and labor has largely faded from view.

Eva Swidler is a member of the Goddard faculty bargaining unit (former VP of the Goddard unit, current UGP1 program union rep). She recently got an article about the connections between the labor movement and environmentalism published and it is online to be read free. To read the whole story visit http://monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/.