Environmental Justice and Work

Abstract

Meaningful work enhances individual health; access to good jobs creates successful communities. The inequitable distribution of both the benefits and the hazards generated by manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and other forms of work lies at the heart of the environmental justice movement. Occupational safety and health disciplines have developed over the past several centuries to address concerns about hazardous exposures in the workplace. In recent decades these have been joined by concerns about the dignity of work (or lack thereof), job control and security, unemployment, job availability, fair promotion ladders, and the unfair distribution of hazardous exposures, leading to the formal examination of occupational or workplace justice/fairness measures as predictors of health disparities. Both environmental and occupational exposures generate adverse human health outcomes through a variety of similar mechanisms. The emergence of the formal environmental justice movement has coincided with growth in the globalization of both capital and labor, with increases in precarious working arrangements and the decline of organized labor. New approaches in the workplace recognize the integration of work, home, and community. While the community-based participatory action interventions developed through the environmental justice movement find their counterparts in labor history and the present-day worker movement, communication challenges persist. Opportunities to re-establish the importance of environmental and workplace protections may arise as the international community begins to step back from an almost exclusive emphasis on the primacy of free trade agreements to the exclusion of safety and health regulatory activities. In collaboration with community and worker movements, this may provide the framework needed to promote occupational and environmental justice.