THE FIRST BREATH THAT David Courtney Coates ever took was tinged with poison. The world he entered on that summer day in 1868 was gray and gloomy, dominated by the collieries that caused a hard life and early death for so many of his neighbors in County Durham. Coal dust saturated the workers’ lives. It dirtied their houses, coated their shoes and skin, sickened their children, and nestled into their lungs. Clean air was a luxury reserved for those who had better things to do than sacrifice their lives to the “dark Satanic” pits that kept England humming. Then as now, those with the least had the most to lose.

When David was around eleven, his parents decided to try their chances elsewhere. The family moved to the United States and briefly settled in Pennsylvania coal country (you’ve heard what they say about the devil you know) before heading west to Colorado. Beneath clear blue skies, freed from the mental strain of basic survival, his world expanded far beyond the coal pits. He began to dream of something more. Now, Coates is best remembered as a labor leader, publisher, and socialist politician, but his participation in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) left his most enduring imprint on history. According to “Big Bill” Haywood, another former miner and impossibly charismatic nineteenth-century labor leader, the pithy Coates coined the union’s now iconic slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Once a rallying cry for its most radical dreamers, this stirring maxim has since been embraced by the movement writ large (including the more milquetoast business-minded unions the IWW has always railed against). It’s an echo of organized labor’s most sacred promises to the working class: that together, we are strong enough to win; that none of us, particularly the most vulnerable, shall be left behind; that solidarity is not only our strength, it’s our greatest weapon. The phrase resonates across time for a reason. Whether we’re trying to stanch the flow of Gilded Age excess, bargain a sterling new union contract, or learn to survive on a rapidly warming planet, we need one another.

In one short sentence, Coates laid out the ideal vision of what organized labor could and should be. Whether the movement itself has lived up to those promises is a matter for lively debate, but this idea of shared injury and shared responsibility is bigger than just one workplace, or one union, or one nation. It’s also a fitting encapsulation of the very qualities we need to survive the climate crisis together. As many rank-and-file organizers and activists already know, the labor and climate movements share a great deal of common ground. They also often face the same enemies—oil executives and coal barons are as fond of labor organizers about as much as they appreciate environmental justice activists.

Workers’ rights and climate justice are parts of the same grand struggle: for survival, for clean air and water, for a fair wage, for dignity and respect, for bread and roses too. There are very real opportunities to connect and encourage solidarity between them, but so far, we have failed to create a strong enough foundation upon which to build it. It’s time to drill down and form a coalition. As my own time in the organizing trenches and then on the ground as a labor reporter have reminded me time and time again, you really do need to walk a mile in someone else’s work boots or slip-resistant sneakers if you ever want to get anything done—and there is so very much to be done.

Workers’ rights and climate justice are parts of the same grand struggle.

IN COATES’S DAY, workers in the U.S. had few rights to speak of. There were no labor laws. There was no legal right to unionize, no eight-hour workday, no weekend, and no Occupational Safety and Health Administration to keep an eye on workplace hazards. From coal mines to cotton mills, textile factories to stockyards, rank exploitation and inhumane working conditions were a feature, not a bug, of working in America. The year after the IWW’s founding convention, a hard-boiled journalist named Upton Sinclair published a book exposing the horrors of the meatpacking industry. He wanted to force the public and the political class to confront the apocalyptic conditions of the largely immigrant workforce who made their living in Chicago’s sprawling stockyards. The Jungle made enough of a stink to speed the passage of much-needed food safety laws, but the workers themselves were left to rot. Meatpackers are still among the lowest paid and least safe workforces in the country, their neighborhoods beset by toxins and blight, and the industry is still largely powered by immigrant labor.

These days, the problem extends beyond those bloodstained walls. The natural environment outside them would be nearly unrecognizable to Coates, Sinclair, or any of their craven Gilded Age foils. Once surrounded by small towns and farmland, the Chicago area is now ringed with data centers, its air burdened by industrial pollution and ozone buildup. There is more rain, more flooding, and much, much hotter weather. At the turn of the century, those who held power were able to dismiss the workers’ plight as something that didn’t affect them (until it did, in the form of massive strikes, labor unrest, and uprisings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Their modern-day counterparts in Silicon Valley and Washington DC have unsuccessfully tried to do the same—act as though climate is a problem for the workers to bear alone, and assume that their own wealth can insulate them from what’s coming. Certainly, as the climate crisis punctuates the globe with increasingly regular cataclysms, the people who bear the brunt of nature’s fury are the same as they ever were: the poor, the marginalized, the working class. But even Elon Musk can’t block out the sun, much as he might like to try.

David Courtney Coates is buried in Hollywood Forever, a star-studded cemetery in the heart of Los Angeles. When he first moved to California in the 1920s, the state was in the midst of a period of roaring growth, rife with the promise that anyone (or some people, anyway) could become rich and famous by working in one of its attractive new industries like radio, automobiles, or real estate. California, the land of so many frontier dreams, was built on gold and confidently grew into its glamour. Its serene blue skies and heavenly weather inspired songs like Al Jolson’s poppy jazz hit, “California, Here I Come,” in which we hear the famed vaudevillian culture vulture (perhaps sporting his trademark blackface) praise the place “where bowers of flowers bloom in the spring.”

A century later, springtime in California looks different. Over the past decade, thousands upon thousands of acres of the state’s storied landscape have gone up in smoke, devoured by voracious wildfires that race with high winds and chase after the rich and poor alike. Their fury is stoked by the rising temperatures, prolonged dry spells, and severe droughts brought on by the climate crisis, which is itself exacerbated by humanity’s refusal to consume fewer resources, waste less water, and assign greater value to the lives of those who face the most risk. Every blaze is a man-made tragedy, and the question of who is sent in to face the flames is a life-or-death labor issue. In California, up to 30 percent of the wildland firefighting force is made up of incarcerated workers, some of them as young as eighteen, who volunteer to save people’s lives in exchange for a chance to better their own. These firefighters are paid rock-bottom wages compared to their free-world counterparts and have no union to represent them. Demand for their services is growing even as the state legislature hems and haws over proposals to increase their pay or dismantle post-incarceration employment barriers. After all, fire season is year-round now, and these workers’ vulnerability makes them so much easier to exploit.

California firefighters aren’t the only incarcerated workers who have been thrust into frontline service when the earth revolts. Consider the importance of movement during a disaster scenario. When a tornado alarm sounds, you leave the area or take cover; when torrential rains threaten flooding, you move to higher ground; when you smell smoke, you run. But, when natural disasters hit, the nearly 2 million incarcerated people held in the nation’s more than six thousand state and federal prisons are at a much higher risk level than those who can evacuate at will. Their labor as barely paid cafeteria workers, janitorial staff, groundskeepers, barbers, gravediggers, and more keeps these facilities running and fuels a billion-dollar for-profit industry, but incarcerated workers are denied basic humanity when it counts. Just ask the thousands of people who were left in their cells as hurricane season bore down on Florida in 2024, or those suffering from extreme heat—and outdated ventilation and cooling infrastructure—in disaster-prone Gulf states like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Workers who do have freedom of movement can still find themselves in the midst of an apocalypse, or be called upon to deal with its aftermath. Last February, when catastrophic floods destroyed small towns and rural communities throughout West Virginia, survivors and their neighbors were left to shoulder the Herculean task of cleaning and rebuilding things themselves. Almost a year later, they’re still trying, aided by local organizations, mutual aid groups, and volunteers. Floodwaters are ruinous to manmade infrastructure, leaving behind debris and mold as well as bacteria, sewage, chemicals, and toxic substances, and cleanup is dangerous even for those with professional training.

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has traditionally been relied upon to provide this kind of relief (with varying degrees of success), but the Trump administration’s quest to weaken the agency and politicize its work has rendered it alarmingly impotent. In 2025, the agency denied pleas for federal assistance after hurricanes in North Carolina, a bomb cyclone in Washington State, and floods in Arkansas, Maryland—and West Virginia. Trump refused FEMA aid to the flood-damaged Chicago area amid his feuds with the city’s mayor, along with Illinois governor JB Pritzker, and continues to ignore California’s request for help recovering from its latest round of wildfires. Meanwhile, disaster recovery workers, construction workers, linemen, medical professionals, social workers, and survivors themselves have picked up the slack. When people are left to navigate disasters on their own, with little or no support from the state or federal government, their only hope is to band together and share resources. The work of recovery cannot be done alone. Solidarity saves lives.

One of the great tragedies of American labor is that too many of our victories lie tucked away in the past.

AT ITS PEAK, American union membership hovered around 35 percent. Now, fewer than one in ten workers in the U.S. belong to a labor union, though 71 percent of Americans approve of unions. Perhaps the rate of joining would be higher if antiworker politicians and elected officials hadn’t made it so difficult to do by pushing antilabor legislation and spewing antiunion propaganda. They have made it easy for employers to surveil and intimidate workers who try to organize and allowed corporations to run roughshod over the paltry federal labor laws we do have in place.

Seen in this light, the aforementioned numbers make sense: unions offer valuable protections and benefits for their members, and the labor movement itself has been one of the greatest engines for social and economic progress in American history. Unfortunately, the movement has not yet been fully able to harness its collective power to combat the climate crisis, and after enjoying a period of growth and energy during the Biden years, it’s been forced into a defensive crouch by the Trump administration. One of the great tragedies of American labor is that too many of our victories lie tucked away in the past; meanwhile, the world around us is changing so quickly that we can barely catch a breath. Even those who manage to steal a gulp of air can’t be sure it won’t kill them.

Encouraged by the climate deniers in power, a perceived lack of political consensus around the crisis continues to plague the U.S. at a state and federal level. This apathy trickles downward. Dying industries like oil, gas, and coal continue to lose their appeal for consumers and investors alike as natural gas and renewable energy sources have become more accessible. By 2024, coal consumption declined by 64 percent since its peak in the early 2000s and there are fewer than 41,000 coal miners left, down from 215,000 in 1980. But the domestic decline in these industries hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from pushing a fossils-first energy policy, which complicates matters for workers left holding the bag. As fossil fuel industries shrink, the people who depend on them for work are too often left behind, their livelihoods—and their lungs—dismissed as collateral damage. (A black lung epidemic is stalking a new generation of coal miners in Central Appalachia—including in the parts of West Virginia smothered by floodwaters, and abandoned by Trump.) Organized labor has long been calling for a “just transition” away from fossil fuels and toward a greener economy that puts workers first, but labor’s most influential unions have yet to coalesce around a plan of action. Even the United Mine Workers of America, who represent thousands of the nation’s active and retired coal miners and are far more invested than most in seeing the coal industry stay afloat, released their own call for an energy transition with a focus on preserving coal communities and jobs.

With the death of the Green New Deal, which included a just transition among its primary planks, there’s been very little movement at the federal level—though in typical American fashion, statewide initiatives in more worker-friendly states like California and Maine have seen more success. Meanwhile, countries like Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, and Canada have worked closely with labor unions to create workable models for their own transition away from fossil fuel economies.

But in the U.S., those kinds of pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-community solutions remain elusive. In areas where economic opportunity is scarce and good-paying jobs are even scarcer, it’s difficult to tell a worker to quit theirs for the sake of the planet. I’ve had that exact conversation with my father, a lifelong construction worker and union man who spent forty years as a heavy equipment operator in and around New Jersey. Most of his work took him to building sites and highways; one of his more exotic jobs came in 2012, when he was called in to dig out the streets of Atlantic City after Hurricane Sandy flooded the city with debris. But being in the city, any city, felt like a punishment to him. Whenever he wasn’t wrangling heavy machinery, he was out in the woods; ours is a family of hunters, trappers, and woodsfolk. Nature, in all of its glory and grotesqueries, was a visceral presence in our lives.

That said, when news broke that the state was considering running a natural gas pipeline through the nature preserve where I was born and raised, and where he and my mother still reside, I assumed my dad would be furious. I certainly didn’t expect him to see it as a job opportunity. As far as he was concerned, though, the woods were already ruined by out-of-towners and encroaching development, and he still had to take care of my medically fragile mother. The pipeline never came to pass, but I still think about how much it would have hurt him to break ground in the woods we all called home—and how he would have done it anyway. What choice did he have?

Coal miners and oil field workers know that the planet is in crisis—it’s impossible to ignore—but the immediate need to survive takes precedence. With the people in power actively working to sabotage any moves toward cleaner energy, workers in these industries understandably bristle at being blamed for what truly is a global, structural problem of extractive capitalism. In the meantime, they’re kept busy in the mines, oil fields, and refineries, breathing in toxins while politicians in well-ventilated offices squabble over tax incentives.

In areas where economic opportunity is scarce and good-paying jobs are even scarcer, it’s difficult to tell a worker to quit theirs for the sake of the planet.

ORGANIZED LABOR’S DECLINE has made many of its old guard reluctant to make any political moves that may weaken their already precarious position—after all, climate deniers can hold union cards too. But the younger generation of rank-and-file workers have no interest in playing dead. Some labor organizations, like the BlueGreen Alliance, already recognize the need to explicitly connect environmental issues with workers’ rights. Founded by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers union in 2006, the organization aims to bridge the gaps between unions and environmentalist groups, and advocate for legislation and policies that benefit and protect everyone. The UAW has thrown its considerable weight behind a push to bring electric vehicles under their umbrella and organize battery plants; even the leadership of the United Mine Workers union has spoken about the need to organize renewable energy workers.

A consortium of Northeastern states, backed by building trades unions, are fighting against the Trump administration to build offshore wind farms. Indigenous activists in rural Kentucky have brought together a coalition of folks, including land-back activists, environmentalists, and coal miners, who are fighting to preserve their ancestral land. There’s a growing movement against the AI data centers poisoning poor communities and sucking up fresh water we can’t afford to lose, and against AI in general from workers in a variety of fields who can already see the (stolen) writing on the wall. Time is running out for our world and its workers, and it’s imperative to connect the dots between these interconnected struggles.

The faster the planet warms, the more urgent this task becomes. One of the simplest examples of why labor needs to embrace the climate movement, and vice versa, is the ongoing fight for a federal heat standard. This country’s lack of workplace safety rules around heat exposure has already caused illness and death among those who are most at risk. That designation—“at risk”—may call to mind the image of a farmworker, swathed in a bandanna, hat, and long sleeves to shield their skin from the sun’s punishing rays. Or it might evoke someone on a construction crew, their boots sticking to hot asphalt; maybe a roofer, a landscaper, a parking attendant, an air traffic controller, a mechanic, or a dogwalker. But the hotter it gets outside, the hotter it gets inside—think of the cooks and dishwashers and servers sweating in a boiling-hot kitchen, bakers at their ovens, baristas and fast-food workers rushing for your orders. Warehouses are notoriously hard to heat or cool effectively. Manufacturing, utilities, refineries, mines, heavy industry like the steel mill that eventually killed my granddad—without proper cooling and ventilation systems, any one of these workplaces could become a deathtrap if the temperature climbs too high. Right now, there’s no federal rule in place to ensure that employers keep that from happening.

Workers’ rights advocates and public health experts have been fighting to change this embarrassing state of affairs for years. A new federal heat standard nearly made it to the finish line before the Trump administration slithered back into power and indefinitely suspended the whole thing in 2025. A similar fight unfolded over a much-needed silica exposure limit in coal mines, which is now stuck in limbo as a thousand coal miners die annually from black lung, and over increased protections for farmworkers (which have since been rolled back). The government will clearly not save us from climate disasters, or even offer much help; at this point, it seems as though they’re trying to speed along the opposite. But, as inconvenient as reality may be to an authoritarian regime, a wildfire does not care how you voted.

We’re on our own—but if we’re smart, we’ll be on our own, together. An injury to one is an injury to all. The labor movement cannot afford to ignore the climate movement or the crisis itself; there are no jobs on a dead planet, and transitioning away from deadly industries can save livelihoods as well as lives. Climate activists need labor too. More specifically, the climate movements need the collective organizing power of unions and of working-class people from a panoply of backgrounds, with a wide array of identities, work experience, and political orientations. If we must, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. But only through real solidarity can we protect one another from the flames.