Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice

It is to this confluence of climate and labor that Todd E. Vachon's 2023 book, Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice is addressed. As the book's subtitle suggests, Vachon, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, tackles the role of labor in organizing for climate justice, with a particular focus on U.S. labor unions and labor-focused climate justice 2014 and 2018) and qualitative interviews taken on as a participant observer in these initiatives and a unionist himself. Out of this research, he argues for the role of progressive, ecologically-minded labor activists in the larger climate and labor movements in challenging traditional narratives that pit the concerns ensuring that a transition in the U.S. to a sustainable, decarbonized economy does not leave workers in the dust but instead includes fair provisions, education, and sound union jobs for those otherwise facing the prospects of job loss due to industry restructuring. Vachon's specific object of study is what he calls the "labor-climate movement" (LCM) or those in the labor movement pushing for greater attention to and organizing around issues of climate justice. This movement, he notes, has had to swim upstream amidst a larger U.S. labor movement that has frequently been at odds with environmentalism, suspicious of what it sees as environmentalism's middle-class attack on jobs and the lifeways of working-class people around the country. Reinforced by mainstream media reporting and political rhetoric in the context of the neoliberal narrowing of U.S. political opportunity and many decades of legislative attacks on workers' rights, jobs, and well-being, a significant, vocal, and influential portion of the