ABSTRACT
Workers labored in dangerous factories full of environmental hazards and many lived in working-class neighborhoods close to the air and water pollution created by their workplaces. The United Auto Workers union and the Michigan United Conservation Clubs were two institutions that supported workers’ rights to live, work, and play in healthful environs. The working-class environmentalism they envisioned promoted a middle ground between strict environmental protection and unmitigated abuse of the environment by industry. They insisted that it was possible to have both industrial prosperity and a healthy environment. Workers and their allies helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of environmentalism as a national political cause in the 1960s.
