Join Joe Uehlein, PSARA, and Friends!

Wednesday, September 30, 4:00 p.m.
WSLC Offices, 321 16th Avenue S, Seattle

Wednesday, September 30, 4:00 p.m.

WSLC Offices, 321 16th Avenue S, Seattle

After decades organizing from within the labor establishment, Joe Uehlein realized that winning real climate and economic justice meant moving beyond the limits of traditional labor and environmentalism.

As former secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Division and director of the AFL-CIO’s Center for Strategic Campaigns, Joe fought from the inside. But in 2005, he stepped away from the AFL-CIO to found the Labor Network for Sustainability, forging deep alliances between labor, climate, and environmental movements. His vision: transform the labor movement to embrace ecological responsibility—and environmentalism to uplift working-class solidarity.

Joe’s work has never been confined to boardrooms or picket lines. With a guitar in hand, he’s shared stages with Pete Seeger and Tom Morello, turning songs into rallying cries and stories into tools for resistance.

His book, Three Roads weaves strategy, memoir, and music into a powerful call to action. Through compelling personal narrative and frontline insight, Joe offers an urgently needed blueprint for bridging movements and pushing boundaries. This is a book for anyone who dreams of a world where working people and the planet thrive together. Because the road to justice runs in more than one direction—and we need all of them.

This is a compelling story of how a mid-western white working-class industrial heartland kid grew up to advocate not only for working people, but for environmental justice, climate justice, racial justice, and to help build a future that allows people to make a living on a living planet, with music as the common thread tying these three passions together.

From Lake Erie as a lost paradise, to constructing the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, to the famous Ravenswood strategic campaign, to being elected Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Division, to marching with climate activist Bill McKibben and getting arrested protesting the Keystone pipeline; finding the courage not to back down when many in his beloved family in the trade union movement considered him a traitor for shifting his focus to global warming and climate change, a shunning that broke his heart and continues to this day. Joe includes important organizing lessons for young organizers, musicians and artists. This memoir is for everyone who is willing to fight for what they believe in.