First coined in the early 1990s by Tommy Mazzocchi, a leader with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), just transition emerged from Mazzocchi’s work in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s. As a nuclear worker himself, Mazzocchi identified the inherent contradiction in advocating for the abolition of an industry that currently employed him and his colleagues, and came up with a solution drawing from both the GI bill that he benefited from in the 1940s and 50s, as well as the recently passed Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (known as CERCLA or Superfund). Mazzocchi described a “Superfund for workers,” in which federal funds went to pay for financial support and higher education for workers displaced by a changing society. The concept was initially focused narrowly on the need for disarmament and the resulting impacts on employees of OCAW. As time went on, this broadened to include all workers in extractive industries, as concerns about environmental degradation and climate change gained traction and created economic uncertainty for millions of Americans, and the “just transition” was born.
Mazzocchi is far from the only individual to have promoted the role of organized labor in conservation, however. The International Woodworkers of America (IWA) fought for and won the Redwood Employee Protection Program (REPP) in response to the expansion of the Redwood National Park, and its subsequent impacts on the timber industry in Northern California during the late 1970s. Despite the Reagan administration’s attacks on the legislation in the early 1980s, the Program brought over $40 million dollars in benefits into Humboldt County before its termination in 1984.
The REPP offers a clear blueprint for just transition, as the IWA both led the fight to increase environmental regulations through supporting the Park’s expansion and the fight to provide an economic lifeline to workers economically impacted by the loss of harvestable timber. Flying in the face of the dominant narrative of “jobs vs. the environment” and the AFL-CIO’s complicated history with reactionary politics, Mazzocchi’s just transition and the IWA’s REPP provide a window into not only what a global economic transformation could look like today in the face of increasingly dire environmental and climate issues, but also the role that unions have in catalyzing huge paradigmatic shifts in society and building the kinds of alliances that are necessary to steer us away from the crises ahead.
