Patrick Brown

Coalitions between labor unions and environmental organizations often dissolve in class tensions that appear to force unions to choose between job security and occupational or environmental health. This article examines a successful blue-green coalition that worked to substitute cleaning products used in Boston public schools with safer alternatives. The coalition succeeded in part through the role of bridge builders, who unified a diverse group of stakeholders, including community and environmental health advocates, labor activists and labor unionists, and school administrators, to discuss their individual and common interests in eliminating toxic chemicals from the school environment. This article also explores the framing strategies used by the coalition partners, especially the logic of the precautionary principle in bridging the concerns of the environmental activists with the safety and health concerns of the union. This case raises questions of how coalition strategies and tactics may bear on the success of blue-green coalitions. © 2007 Sage Publications.

It has been said of Pound’s great work, the Cantos, that it was not “a poem written from within modern civilization, but a poem about a break with modern civilization and a search for a new basis.” Perhaps the same can be said of Lonergan’s great works, and McShane’s. To use McShane’s phrase, they are great pastmodern works. They attempt to move past the massive impasses of self-neglect so thoroughly and pervasively concretized in the historic flow. They involve a search for a new basis beyond the centuries-long and brutal colonization of the life-world by a warped conceptualism which daily denies that “man by nature is oriented into mystery."