What Our Country Wants

"The country wants leadership." That's what former House Leader Richard Gephardt told me in the hall yesterday after he addressed the swearing-in ceremony for the newly elected officers of the United Steelworkers Union, now merged with PACE and representing not only steel and aluminum workers but also hard rock miners; rubber, chemical, oil, and nuclear workers; lumber workers in Canada; and pulp and paper workers in the U.S. At 850,000 members, it is now the giant among America's industrial unions.

And leadership was on ample display here. In addition to Gephardt choosing his swearing-in to announce USW's formal alliance with the Sierra Club, the union also adopted, unanimously, a bold new environmental policy. It calls for ending logging in the Tongass, protecting the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and moving forward with massive investments in energy efficiency and renewables in sectors as diverse as transportation and construction.

Throughout the day, this new policy and the alliance with the Club were being fleshed out in conversations between Sierra Club representatives and union leaders. Was this the opportune moment to launch an effort for long needed investments by US Steel to clean up pollution and modernize its coke ovens upriver from Pittsburgh? Could western Pennsylvania build on the state's renewable portfolio standard, and Pittsburgh's site as the first U.S. wind turbine factory, to remake itself economically as a Mecca of green efficiency technologies? What are the next steps in the effort to make the DuPont Corporation take seriously its obligations to protect workers, communities and consumers from toxic chemicals like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which the Steelworkers and the Sierra Club just sued to have California list on its toxic chemical registry as a carcinogen. (For more on DuPont and its duplicity, watch the next episode of Sierra Club Chronicles.)

Gephardt told the delegates that their leadership was working. He now serves on the Board of US Steel -- the Steelworkers chose him to represent them -- and he said that he was stunned when he attended his first meeting and discovered that the first item on the US Steel Board Agenda was the firm's safety record, the second its environmental performance, and the third the security of its pensions. "We have changed the conversation in America," Gephardt said. "We just haven't changed the conversation in Washington, DC." In the hallway, he reminded me that "the Board of US Steel is not a bunch of US Steel guys. It's people who run dozens of other companies -- and they know that the country is ahead of its leaders."

Amen.