Labor a Leader in Cleaning Up Michigan's Environment

As Michigan began the job of cleaning up gross air and water pollution in the 1960s, one of the most influential voices in the public chorus was the labor movement, led by United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter P. Reuther.

Reuther, elected UAW President in 1946, had wide-ranging interests that included social justice and international peace as well as improved pay and working conditions for his union members. His work broadened in the last several decades of his life to include the environment. A lover of the water, Reuther had taken his family to a cabin on Higgins Lake in the northern Lower Peninsula each summer before moving them to a house on a five-acre plot on Paint Creek, a tributary of the Clinton River in Oakland County, in the 1950s. His daughter remembered him explaining to her at the age of 12 that man was destroying nature's balance, and years later said his "concern for the earth was the ripened fruit of his humanity."

At the same time he was helping organize Boy Scout cleanups of the Paint Creek and seeking money for sewage treatment on the Clinton River, Reuther was establishing a Conservation Department within the UAW structure and beginning a public campaign for laws to stop water pollution as well as government acquisition of recreation lands to provide recreation for hard-pressed working families. He appointed Olga Madar to head the new recreation department, the first woman to hold such a high-level post in the union, and unleashed the staff to work for progressive federal and state legislation.

By the mid-1960s the deterioration of Lake Erie had concentrated national attention on the problem of water pollution. Fed by enormous amounts of phosphorus and other nutrients from cities and farms, massive algal blooms discouraged swimmers and boaters from using the Lake. Conservationists and water users protested the Lake's decline. Although the federal government had limited powers under pollution laws in effect at the time, it had responsibility for convening interstate conferences on pollution of shared waters, which it did in August of 1965 for Lake Erie.

A report issued by the U.S. Public Health Service before the meeting called the City of Detroit a major source of the pollution of the Detroit River and Lake Erie, pointing out that the Detroit River contributed 78 per cent of the total suspended solids, 70 per cent of controllable phosphates and more than half of the nitrogen compounds entering the Lake from tributaries.

Reuther sent Madar to Cleveland to represent the UAW at the interstate conference. Noting that the lake basin was inhabited by 500,000 UAW members, she said the UAW was "appalled at the rate of deterioration and the extent of the pollution of Lake Erie" in the federal report. She outlined a six-point plan for addressing the pollution, including secondary treatment of sewage by Detroit and other cities, federal assistance for pollution control projects, and a national policy requiring industry to show it could treat wastes resulting from production of any new products. A federal official wrote Reuther to thank him for the strong UAW statement, saying it had "stood out prominently in its plea to deal boldly and dramatically with the Detroit area water pollution problem."

Reuther planned a "United Action for Clear Water Conference" later that year in Detroit, attended by a thousand UAW members and conservationists. His keynote speech revealed the personal roots of his concern about water pollution.

"How bad do things have to get before you do something?" he said. "Things are much worse than we realize…I haven't been around so long, but I can remember the fishing and swimming holes that I enjoyed when I was a kid in West Virginia - Wheeling Creek that emptied into the Ohio River, and the Ohio River where I swam and fished as a kid. They are all open sewers now, and the kid who grows up in the neighborhood that I grew up in can't swim in those swimming holes, and can't catch fish there any more. I think every kid growing up in our kind of free society ought to have access to nature with all of its beauties - the same as I had."

Calling pollution "a national crisis," Reuther said Lake Erie was dying and the other Great Lakes were troubled. He called for national pollution control standards and a $50 billion, five-year commitment to clean up the environment, the same amount the nation spent every year on the military. "If we don't move aggressively, Michigan will be the wasted wonderland - not the Water Wonderland - and this is true of other states," he added.

Soon after the conference Reuther turned his sights to Michigan's role in combating water pollution. In March 1966 he wrote Governor George Romney and legislators that the state needed $3 billion to achieve clean water by 1980 and urged the governor to call for funding a state share of 30 per cent, or almost $1 billion, at a rate of $65 million per year.

The proposal received a cool response initially. Legislative leaders interviewed by the Detroit News agreed only that something should be done. "Every one of us wants to do something about water pollution, but $65 million! Just because we have a surplus doesn't mean we can commit the state to a program that will get us into trouble," said State Rep. Einar Erlandsen, chairperson of the Ways and Means Committee. Romney urged Reuther to support his request for just $1 million for aid to communities to build waste treatment facilities.

But a new federal report issued in 1968 further detailed the problems of Lake Erie. It noted that more than 1.5 billion gallons a day of wastes from cities and industries entered the Detroit River. The report prompted Romney to defend the state's water pollution efforts and the Ford Motor Company argued that the Rouge River, feeding the Detroit River, "had never looked so good." Madar, writing to congratulate U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall on the report, blistered Michigan's program. "These agencies often proceed not with the ardent dedication necessary to clean the waters but instead appear more cognizant of the needs and desires of industry than of the public at large. The usual result of such agencies' work is the concealment of industrial polluters behind a dual smokescreen of focus on municipal pollution and disguising scientific terminology discernible only to the experts."

The state was forced to acknowledge ugly conditions on many of its lakes and streams. In a report prepared for a conference on Lake Michigan pollution convened by the Secretary of the Interior, the water resources commission admitted that 32 miles of shoreline from south of Muskegon to Benona had "nuisance accumulations" of algae and that 36 of 47 monitoring locations in the Lower Peninsula had bacteriological counts of 1,000 organisms per 100 milliliters of water, above recommended standards for swimming. But the state blamed much of this on dead and decaying alewives.

The drumbeat of negative publicity and increasing concern expressed by the UAW and conservationists helped advance Reuther's proposal for a major state funding program to clean up rivers. Romney supported a $335 million clean water bond proposal that the Legislature put on the November 1968 ballot. Approved by a two-to-one margin, the bond program predated significant federal funding, which wouldn't come until passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.

Reuther and the UAW would continue pressing business and government to do more. In a 1968 speech to the Water Pollution Control Federation, he said industry needed to make pollution control "a top office project," not something relegated to junior officials, the way companies had handled labor problems "in the old days." In 1970, just months before the labor leader's death in a plane crash, the UAW organized a demonstration outside a Detroit meeting of the state water resources commission, protesting "kid glove treatment" of polluters, including Ford Motor Company.

Reuther's conservation ethic and Madar's stalwart defense of a clean environment never wavered. Reuther had made it possible for workers to challenge their employers to clean up industrial processes - rejecting the choice between jobs and a healthy environment that businesses had offered for years.