Blue–Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities. By Brian Mayer. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press and Cornell University Press, 2009. 240p. $57.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

When do labor-environmental coalitions emerge and endure? In a period when headlines are dominated by economic recession, unemployment, and oil spills, the focus of Brian Mayer's book takes on practical urgency. The question is theoretically intriguing as well. Labor unions are often characterized as archetypical interest-based organizations, representing industrial workers' concerns for their own material well-being. Environmental mobilization, in contrast, is seen as a quality-of-life movement most commonly associated with members of the postindustrial middle class who possess leisure time and resources sufficient to enable their activism. When the question of how to regulate industries that employ toxic chemicals arises, these two groups can become locked in an acrimonious jobs versus the environment debate, making them more likely antagonists than allies. This sense of latent opposition is captured by one worker's assertion that greens want to “save the whales and kill the workers” (p. 2). How can these divisions be overcome? In his clearly written and compelling book, Blue–Green Coalitions, Mayer argues that concern over the effects of hazardous materials on human health offers one avenue for generating powerful and enduring coalitions.