This Day in Labor History: August 7, 1978. President Carter declares Love Canal a federal emergency. Let's talk about how the working class has to bear the brunt of pollution and the era where worker organizing led to environmental legislation. 
William T. Love wanted to build a small canal intended to connect the Upper and Lower Niagara Rivers around 1900 to generate power for the community he hoped would grow there. It failed and by 1910, the partially built canal was abandoned.
Industry began turning it into a waste dump. Hooker Chemical Company purchased the land in 1942 and continued using it for toxic waste. In 1953, Hooker capped the land and looked to sell it.
By this time, there was 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals in the canal, including at least 12 carcinogens. The company buried the waste in barrels 20-25 feet deep and capped it with dirt, allowing grass to quickly cover it up.
Hooker sold it to the school board of Niagara Falls to build the public school for a growing suburban neighborhood near the canal site. It included a caveat in the contract about what was buried there and felt itself absolved from legal liability.
This was the postwar housing boom. The New Deal state had already led to positive changes for the now upwardly mobile white working class: good union contracts, the 8-hour day, the minimum wage, and then a variety of new benefits after World War II.
Not everyone shared in these: the postwar state provided programs such as federally insured home loans through the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill, but in practice were mostly restricted to white people.
And for all the New Deal state had accomplished, little progress had been made to protect the working class from the environmental impact of industrialization.
At Love Canal, housing developments for working class people–both some public housing and single-family housing–began filling some of the housing need of the period in the Buffalo area.
Most of the early conservation movement was predicated on efficient resource use. The New Deal did take working people into account in its planning, but primarily on the farms with the creation of the Soil Conservation Service and other responses to the Dust Bowl.
The giant dam projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority also sought to improve working people’s lives through large-scale regional planning, but pollution issues were an afterthought here as well.
During the 50s, the proto-environmental movement worked on pressing for more conservation of natural resources and more public planning, while building support for new national parks and trying to bring some limits onto the dam building mania, winning at Dinosaur.
Organized labor was involved in all of this, much more so than is usually acknowledged. The CIO had a full time staffer working specifically on conservation issues through the 1955 merger with the AFL and the UAW had a full-time atomic energy staffer.
But pollution, that just wasn’t really on the radar in the 1950s. In fact, as the nation geared up for the Cold War, pollution was often seen not as a problem, but an acceptable sacrifice for preparedness and economic growth.
What this all meant is that new housing developments and schools could be built upon toxic waste dumps and no one would bat an eye. But by the 1970s, the working class, building on environmentalism, began demanding accountability from corporations over their suffering.
Some of that was in famous cases like the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969 or the Santa Barbara oil spill of the same year. In the latter case, oil workers’ unions were deeply involved in demanding the companies be held accountable for pollution.
The growing emphasis on thinking about the relationship between pollution and personal health by the late 1960s helped fuel this. The Black Lung Associations within the United Mine Workers of America was a rejection of bad union leadership as well as coal's impact on their bodies
Everyday people, union members or not, began trying to understand the science behind the chemicals transforming the world and how they impacted their own bodies, such as in the anti-pesticide movement.
This popular epidemiology would play a major role in Love Canal, as residents began to notice the horrible cancers, birth defects and other diseases that affected them, especially their children.
No one really knew what was happening until heavy rains led to erosion that began uncovering the barrels of toxic waste in 1976.
Lois Gibbs was the leader at Love Canal. Her son suffered from a variety of healthy problems. After reporters began reporting on what was in the barrels in 1976, the New York State Health Department declared the site an emergency on August 2, 1978, leading to Carter’s decision.
But what would happen to the residents? Gibbs took the lead here against a state not wanting to do much of anything. She continued investigating, discovering the canal itself was the site of the contamination.
The growing investigations discovered dioxin among many other hazardous chemicals in the soil and drinking water of the housing. The government finally relocated 800 of the 900 families nearby and compensated them for their homes.
While the center of the pollution is closed off, some people refused to sell and still live on the edges of the zone, surrounded by driveways that lead to no houses. You can go out there and see. I did. It's pretty spooky.
Carter then responded by pushing for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. Popularly known as Superfund, this law mandated the cleanup of the nation’s most toxic sites. One of the best laws ever in this country.
At first, a polluter tax paid for the program, creating a $3.8 billion surplus for the program by 1996 and creating a very successful agency. Unfortunately, in 1995 Congress did not extend that tax, meaning the rapid depletion of that surplus and an underfunded agency.
Organized labor strongly supported the creation of Superfund, both for the jobs it could create and for the protection of working people from industrial hazards.
Ultimately, Superfund and the outrage Love Canal caused did help protect Americans from these hazards.
Yet disparities in toxic exposure between rich and poor still exist today, and as these things go in America, they tend to fall on racial lines, with African-American and Latino communities exposed to toxicity at much higher rates than wealthier or whiter communities.
A couple of lessons for today. 1) There is no natural opposition between workers and environmentalists. But for many reasons, that division has been created. Some of it is about economic structures, but some of it is that enviro organizations moved away from pollution.
As environmental organizations realized that the money for lawsuits was in the pockets of rich white people, issues such as the pollution the working class suffered took a backseat to pictures of polar bears and other charismatic fauna to raise big $$$.
By the late 80s, environmentalism was basically a white movement. Moreover, as the economy shifted, enviros didn't have any answers to what a working class economy would look like. This really hurt them politically and they still suffer today for it.
If environmentalism wants to be a politically powerful movement again, it needs to mobilize popular support by dealing with the issues of toxicity that affect people today. But it's largely not set up to do that anymore.
The second major lesson is that environmental injustice is still a gigantic problem but Love Canal became prominent in part because these were mostly white families. So there's absolutely a racial side to how Americans get outraged.
Both the labor and environmental movements need to do more to organize around these issues of environment, poverty, and justice where people live. Of course, there are enviro justice organizations doing this. They need our support.
Back on Thursday to discuss the invention of the electric washing machine and the impact on unpaid women's labor in the household.
