>URL: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/04/18/blue_green
>
>Labor meets the granola crunchers
>
>"These are very beautiful, idealistic kids," says United Steelworkers
>boss George Becker.
>
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>By Daryl Lindsey
><skip>
>Just after he finishes a taping for MTV, I approach Mike Roselle,
>founder of the Berkeley, Calif., Ruckus Society and co-founder of
>Earth First and Rainforest Action Network. "We approached it with a
>little bit of skepticism at first," Roselle explains. "We know they
>have their main message and in the past when we've tried to work
>together, it's been very difficult to get our message high enough in
>their priorities. We support them in their quest for justice and
>equality, but in the past they haven't been concerned enough about the
>environmental issues that really motivate us."
>
>He continues, "Now, there's a certain number of the [labor] rank and
>file that are very concerned about this. They know that they've got to
>retool U.S. industry to make it competitive and they know that part of
>that competitiveness will be in how clean and how sustainable they
>are. They're actually looking to us for answers. In the past, they
>just wanted recruits ... In the past, we'd get all these animal rights
>people in a room with all these union people and these union people
>take opening day of the deer hunting season off."
>
>But, Roselle says, times have changed. "[Together,] we've gotten more
>attention to the World Bank in the last 10 days than all these wankers
>in Washington in the last 10 years. We're walking down the street with
>labor people, brothers and sisters, arm-in-arm, and you can see that
>the kindred spirit, the kinship, the camaraderie is real, not
>imagined. They may not like our dress, may not like our diet, but by
>God, they care about the same issues we care about and we know that
>the clock is ticking and we're running out of time. "
"Competitiveness," I think, shouldn't be part of our concern. As soon as we accept the necessity for "competitiveness," our demands will be very circumscribed indeed.
Yoshie