What do unions and environmental groups have to gain by working together and how do they overcome their differences? In Blue-Green Coalitions, Brian Mayer answers these questions by focusing on the role that health-related issues have played in creating a common ground between the two groups. By recognizing that the same toxics that cause workplace hazards escape into surrounding communities and the environment, workers and environmentalists are able to collaborate for the protection of all. Mayer examines three contemporary cases of successful labor-environmental alliances to demonstrate how health and safety issues are used to create durable and politically influential social movement coalitions: o Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, a coalition of environmental, labor, community, and public health organizations in Massachusetts that has developed a successful prevention-based approach to safe workplaces and a clean environment. o The Work Environment Council in New Jersey, which succeeded in passing the first statewide right-to-know law and concentrates on protecting citizens from the dangerous toxics generated by the state's chemical industries. o The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an organization that began in the 1980s fighting hazardous high-tech practices that were affecting the Valley residents and the high-tech industry's largely immigrant workforce. In Mayer's ethnographic accounts of the challenging work of bringing these blue-green coalitions together, it becomes clear that stereotypes about environmentalists and workers are largely irrelevant when thinking about who is at risk of exposure to dangerous toxic substances. Both movements share a common concern for protecting their members' health from toxic hazards that are by-products of the modern industrial economy.

In the past decade unions and community groups have come together around a wide range of campaigns for economic justice - from fighting for living wages, to electing progressive champions, to questioning market-oriented economic development, to promoting anti-sprawl/smart growth efforts. Partnering for Change brings together activists and intellectuals on the forefront of these organizing efforts. They discuss general patterns of labor-community coalitions in terms of alliances between unions and such community players as environmentalists, religious groups, low-income organizations, and local employers. The contributors also offer a wealth of case studies such as the successful campaign for corporate subsidy accountability in Minnesota, Vermont's Livable Wage Campaign, The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, and the model regional power building projects of the South Bay AFL-CIO. The volume's editor, David Reynolds, combines a broad overview of labor-community coalitions, practical examples applicable to diverse communities, and an appreciation of the challenges as well as the opportunities for building the movement for economic change.

This innovative Handbook provides a comprehensive treatment of the complex relationship between inequality and the environment and illustrates the myriad ways in which they intersect. Featuring over 30 contributions from leading experts in the field, it explores the ways in which inequality impacts three of the most pressing contemporary environmental issues: climate change, natural resource extraction, and food insecurity.

An examination of the politics of green jobs that foresees a potential ideological shift away from neoliberalism toward “developmentalism.” Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy is the first book to explore the broad implications of the convergence of industrial and environnmental policy in the United States. Under the banner of “green jobs,” clean energy industries and labor, environmental, and antipoverty organizations have forged “blue-green” alliances and achieved some policy victories, most notably at the state and local levels. In this book, David Hess explores the politics of green energy and green jobs, linking the prospect of a green transition to tectonic shifts in the global economy. He argues that the relative decline in U.S. economic power sets the stage for an ideological shift, away from neoliberalism and toward “developmentalism,” an ideology characterized by a more defensive posture with respect to trade and a more active industrial policy. After describing federal green energy initiatives in the first two years of the Obama administration, Hess turns his attention to the state and local levels, examining demand-side and supply-side support for green industry and local small business. He analyzes the successes and failures of green coalitions and the partisan patterns of support for green energy reform. This new piecemeal green industrial policy, Hess argues, signals a fundamental challenge to anti-interventionist beliefs about the relationship between the government and the economy.

The Next Economics focuses on how the field of economics must change and incorporate environment, energy, health and new technologies that are called externalities for stopping and reversing climate change. The field of economics needs to become a science. Economics in this book for the Green Industrial Revolution which goes beyond the third industrial revolution since it covers cases, examples and specific economic analyses that both scientific and global. The book concerns climate change and how the Economics for Externalities, needs to range from energy and national security to infrastructure and communities. Solutions and cases of the “Next Economics” are based in western philosophical economic paradigms and how that is changing due to the significance of current global economic and societal concerns. Finally practical applications for economics are explored using global environmental and energy issues. Areas that need a fresh look at and be integrated with economics, include the environment, social and political issues, energy, health climate change and their infrastructures, as they are major components of the macroeconomics for the future. Based on past economic models, these subjects have been lost or ill fitted into modern economic theory. The challenge is to explore and to look deeply into economics in order to provide it a new direction with the possibility for understanding, changing and saving the planet from climate change. This book presents to economists and policy-makers alike areas of environmental economics, energy policy, health and social issues which are needed to stop and reverse climate change.