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That was the response from many activists in the labour and environmental movement when they came together at a series of monthly forums in the early part of 1998. They wanted to talk about how they could work together instead of finding themselves on opposites sides of a blockade.
Just a few months later, they decided to take it one step further and form an organization that embodied that new approach – the Labour Environmental Alliance Society.
That’s the short version of the story. But it was long road from the "jobs versus environment" conflicts of 1997 to the innovative labour-environmental cooperation that is the strength of LEAS today.
As environmental and wilderness groups pushed for preservation of old growth forests amidst layoffs in the forest industry, the conflict between jobs and trees reached fever-pitch in the summer of 1997. Unions and environmental organizations confronted and blockaded one another. Women environmentalists received sexually explicit hate mail and bullets were left on the seats of environmentalists’ cars. In one case, Lyle Fenton, a member of the Canadian Auto Workers and a Squamish municipal councillor, faced death threats to his family because of an incorrect perception that he was siding with environmentalists.
That same year the CAW held its constitutional convention in Vancouver where delegates adopted a unique resolution entitled: "The Environment: Basic Principles for Struggling with Conflicts." It was written by CAW research director Sam Gindin and was strongly supported by environmental activists in the CAW, including Mae Burrows, Christine Hayvice, Roger Crowther, Denise Kellahan, Cathy Walker and Loretta Woodcock.
Burrows, then the executive director of the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, and Crowther, a national CAW representative, were also co-chairs of the Vancouver and District Labour Council’s Environment Committee. Many of the council’s affiliates, including the Communications Energy, Paperworkers, the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union and the Canadian Union of Public Employees were also on the front lines. Pulp companies threatened to cut jobs if environmental regulations weren’t relaxed and governments were undermining environmental standards through privatization and cutbacks.
Under the labour council’s sponsorship, the Environment Committee decided to call a meeting of prominent unionists and environmentalists to see if they could find some common ground and common areas for strategic action.
They did. That first meeting, chaired by Burnaby NDP MP Svend Robinson, saw frank discussion and some forthright exchanges. But it also showed that trade unionists and environmentalist could break new ground if they worked together on issues such as government de-regulation, health and safety and trade policies
More forums followed, including a special session held in the spring of 1998 under the auspices of the B.C. Environmental Network and the labour council’s environment committee. Appropriately, it was entitled Environmental and Labour Activists: Strengthening Alliances.
Many of the environmental and labour activists at those forums became the founding members and directors when they formally established the Labour Environmental Alliance Society in 1998 and set out their aims and objectives.
LEAS is a unique environmental organization, based on an alliance model that brings together workers and environmentalists, unions and environmental groups to find solutions to environmental problems based on social justice. LEAS projects are particularly effective because of that alliance – they mobilize workers around environmental issues, often by demonstrating the link between human health and the environment.
As one LEAS activist noted, there can be no jobs on a dead planet. And neither can there be a healthy environment if there are no environmental standards and workers have no rights or protections.
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