This dissertation project examines how labor and environmental movement organizations discover and socially construct health risks in the workplace and the general environment. Through examining the similarities and differences in the social construction of health risks, this research will demonstrate the likelihood of successful coalition formation between the two movements by jointly considering occupational health and environmental health science, which have historically been discrete areas. The research project poses several research questions to explore the social construction of occupational health and environmental health: 1) How does the social construction of disease etiology differ between labor and environmental organizations? 2) How do differences in the social discovery process lead to the framing of health risks within social movement organizations and within professional bodies of knowledge? 3) How are differences in the social construction of environmental health problems between labor and environmental organizations negotiated in the coalition-building processes? 4) How can concepts like "just transition" and the precautionary principle be used to create a collaborative approach for occupational and environmental health that appeals both to labor and environmental groups? This project will seek to address these questions through two stages of data collection and analysis. Both successful and unsuccessful attempts at labor-environment coalitions will be identified through an extensive search of academic and popular publications, as well as through the polling of leaders in the environmental and labor movements. Professional groups that support labor efforts, such as Committees on Occupational Safety and Health, will also be interviewed. Once this descriptive task is complete, four detailed case studies, two of successful coalitions and two of unsuccessful coalitions, will be examined in further detail. These four cases will be examined and compared in order to better understand the context and strategies that lead to successful blue-green coalitions. This project has several broader impacts: The project brings together medical sociology, environmental sociology, social studies of science, social movement theory, and labor studies. The project provides a new way to look at two key social movements that are concerned with science, technology, health, and the environment. For medical sociology, the offers new insights into the experience of illness, including the way that individual experiences can become transformed into collective illness experience. For environmental sociology and for STS scholars, the project can broaden the understanding of how various social groups understand and act on environmental issues and the scientific issues behind them. Also, the project can help social movement scholars to expand their inquiries to include social movements in science, technology, health, the environment, and labor unions. By examining the difficult-to-attain blue-green alliances, this work can help us to better understand other social movement alliances, which are increasingly a focus of social movement research. Further, because the ethics and values of the blue and green components are often divergent, we can learn about how ethics and values affect social movement mobilization. Finally, this project can help labor studies scholars better understand the obstacles to environmental awareness on the part of labor organizations.
