
          Labor, Environmental Coalition Wins Bill Passage
          By Acuff, StewartStewart Acuff
          Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, p. 16
          
          It's not often that the environmental movement and the labor
movement can find enough common ground to work together in a mutually
beneficial effort. It is difficult for any coalition to hold itself
together long enough to make an impact, and that difficulty is even
greater without a history of cooperation.
          The labor movement and environmental movement wrote a little
history curing the 1988 Georgia legislative session.
          Led by the Georgia State Employees Union (Local 1985 of the Service
Employees International Union) and the Georgia Environmental Project,
the two often disparate movements joined forces in a dramatic and
exciting fight that led to the passage of HB 503, the Public Employees
Hazardous Protection and Right to Know Act of 1988.
          HB 503 requires that state employees be informed about chemicals on
the job, be trained in the safe use of those chemicals, that an
advisory council be formed to administer the bill, and that no state
employee be forced to work with any chemical she or he is not familiar
with.
          HB 503 was drafted four years ago by State Rep. George Brown of
Augusta, who is himself in a high risk category for bladder cancer
because of exposure to carcinogens at an Augusta chemical plant where
he worked as a teenager.
          Brown's original bill covered all Georgia workers and included
citizens' right to know. But that bill was made obsolete by federal
legislation designed to protect private sector manufacturing workers
and residents of neighborhoods close to chemical plants.
          A new proposal did not make it out of the House in 1987; its most
active and vocal opponent was the Georgia Department of
Transportation, whose maintenance workers and lab employees are
subject to the bill's provisions.
          Labor and environmentalists fought hard; more than 400 GSEU members
came to the Capitol on "State Employees Lobby Day." The Georgia
Environmental Project helped build support by making the effort "a
public policy fight rather than a wrestling match about working
conditions."
          When Gov. Joe Frank Harris signed HB 503 in an April ceremony
attended by union members, environmentalists, and legislators, it wee
the first time in his two terms that any AFL-CIO union had been in the
governor's office for a bill signing.
        
