Labor And The Environment: No Contradiction

I moved from Madison to Milwaukee in 1983 for the job of Labor Reporter at The Milwaukee Journal.

Those were hard times for organized labor.

It was early in Ronald Reagan's presidency. He set the tone nationally for labor relations by busting the air traffic controller's union (PATCO), declaring its strike illegal and firing the entire membership.

Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin were still feeling the effects of a recession that had cost the region thousands of factory jobs, especially damaging the central city.

There were walkouts at Briggs & Stratton, Kohler, and Miller Brewing Co., to name a few: Production would decline at other manufacturers as capital fled to cheaper labor markets. Schiltz had already closed.

Some of these trends have continued, and even accelerated with post-NAFTA outsourcing, so the issue of jobs and economic growth should always be at the top of the political agenda in Wisconsin.

And policy-makers at the regional and state levels have done their part, too, endorsing 120 new miles of economy-shifting highway lanes to expand the reach of urban sprawl and beginning to greenlight water diversions from Milwaukee to communities on the other side of the subcontinental divide.

Additionally, politicians and business leaders have misused the need for expansion in the job market to run roughshod over the environment we all have a right to enjoy, and an obligation to pass down unharmed to our children, as if there were only one way to create jobs - - and environmental considerations were irrelevant.

The Wisconsin Jobs Creation Act, shoved into law in 2003 in a matter of hours, opened too many loopholes for construction close to rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands. The law turned the already-diminished Wisconsin DNR into an arm of the Department of Commerce.

It was a bad bill - - this explanation by Melissa Scanlan, then executive director of the public interest law firm Midwest Environmental Advocates hit the nail on the head - - that has since been expanded: it should be drastically reformed with the environment being a respected factor in jobs creation, not a rhetorical afterthought.

The possible expansion of Murphy Oil's Superior, WI refinery is already being framed as a jobs-creator - - even though refineries are known to damage the environment and Murphy specifically has had a horrendous pollution record at its Lake Superior facility.

Let's recognize that there is a bigger picture.

And let's look at it, much as people across the Great Lakes recently took a look at the planned expansion of the British Petroleum refinery on Lake Michigan near Chicago, didn't like the plan to dump tons of new pollutants into the lake as the price of development and jobs, and forced the company to redo its plan without adding more toxins and sludge to Lake Michigan.

Melissa Malott, a staff attorney at Clean Wisconsin, has begun to lay out these issues in a recent op-ed in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Lake Superior supports vast, existing, integrated economies, with workforces built around shipping, recreation, fishing, and clean drinking water.

We should remember on Labor Day that working men and women have just as much right to enjoy clean air and water as their white-collar neighbors.

Furthermore, emerging green technologies offer tremendous employment opportunities, ranging from alternative energy production to research and development to the construction and supply of building and housing materials that meet energy-efficiency standards.

There's a lot of green in green business. And nothing to hold us back in going for it.

That's where Wisconsin, a strong agricultural, manufacturing and graduate education state - - with abundant water in the Great Lakes - - has an unprecedented opportunity to prosper without harming landscape that makes the state attractive.

That's where the jobs of the future lie - - created harmoniously with the environment - - and using the Great Lakes without abusing them